Robert Mighall on the confines of Castle FreudRobert Mighall provides an alternative 'passport' to fictional Gothic realms
Confined in Castle Freud
Criticism of Gothic fiction, and even popular conceptions of this literary mode, has for some time assumed that its appeal is psychological. Indeed, the rise in Freudian and post-Freudian criticism rescued this literature from the rather patronizing, scornful or downright eccentric responses to it that had hitherto prevailed. The paraphernalia of the Gothic, its rugged cliff-tops, ruined abbeys, and secret passages, coupled with its sometimes formulaic scenarios and its depictions of intense emotions, appeared to indicate that if there was something to this literature, then it must be hidden below the surface, these absurd trappings are really symbols of something else. They point to the realm of the psyche, to the hidden forces and urges that, we are told, are hidden below everyday life but erupt in dreams and imaginative literature. This psychological focus rescued the Gothic from oblivion, and has confined it in its attic for the last thirty years. A recent ‘Handbook’ to Gothic Literature declares its purpose to provide ‘a passport … to the “hag-ridden realm of [the] unconscious”’. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction attempts to challenge this emphasis, providing an alternative ‘passport’ to Gothic fictional regions.
Why Geography?
The term is used in a broad sense, and refers to this study’s exploration of the various 'locations’ or spaces which Gothic phenomena inhabit – be these topographical, institutional, environmental or even discursive (documents or modes of writing can be 'haunted’ by the Gothic past). One of the consequences of the psychological/symbolic dominance in this area is the almost wholesale refusal to consider the importance of setting in this literary tradition. Just where and when a text is set is not given much space in surveys of the Gothic. Indeed, these concerns are often explicitly rejected. As one critic puts it, the Gothic 'looks away from the here and now, into past times or distant lands (or to put it more accurately, into a fantasy world which was both timeless and placeless'. Thus an emphasis on 'fantasy’ transforms an author’s efforts to place a story in a distant time or place (as the early Gothicists from Walpole to Radcliffe and Lewis generally did) into indications of the exact opposite: indifference to time or place. This allows historical or geographical setting to be relegated to 'surface details' and the grand task of decoding psychological symbols to get underway. The fact that the early novelists’ use of exotic settings was no longer prevalent in Victorian Gothic fiction (which tended to place the action in more contemporary or domestic locales) has been taken to indicate that these later writers merely owned up, and revealed what the Gothic had been about from the start: emotions, psychology, and subjectivity, irrespective of time or place.
But the typical settings of Gothic fiction did change in the nineteenth century, and these developments are significant and interesting in themselves. They indicate the important role played by history and historical understandings of place in shaping this mode, in its early form, during the Victorian age, and even beyond. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction charts these developments by exploring the various locations of Gothic writing in the nineteenth century.
Some co-ordinates on a Gothic map of the period
The Gothic, at its emergence and as it developed, was acutely aware of the importance of setting. Walter Scott noticed this when he remarked on Mrs Radcliffe’s novels, observing how she had
'Uniformly selected the south of Europe for her place of action, where the human passions, like the weeds of the climate, are supposed to attain portentous growths under the fostering sun; … where feudal tyranny and Catholic superstition still continue to exercise their sway over the slave and bigot ... These circumstances are skilfully selected, to give probability to events which could not, without great violation of truth, be represented as having taken place in England.'
Jane Austen’s Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey makes similar points when he objects to the deluded Catherine locating Udolpho 'in the central part of England'. The point is, the early Gothic (where the term signifies outmoded, tyrannical, and barbaric), endorsed the view that the Catholic continent was 'still' feudal, frozen in the barbarous middle ages, from which polite, Protestant England had thankfully emancipated itself. (One need only peruse a handful of travelogues from the period to find the factual counterpart of this view repeated again and again.) That is why it had a dangerous appeal for the consumers of romance. The important element in this equation is the suggestion of anachronism, of vestigial traces of barbarism in an enlightened era. This, rather than 'psychology', is the defining characteristic of the Gothic mode. It is identifiable in the various locations of the Gothic explored in this book, and explained in Chapter One: 'History as Nightmare'.
One of the most extraordinary 're-locations' of the Gothic in the Victorian period can be found in what can be termed the 'Urban Gothic' fictions of G. W. M. Reynolds and Charles Dickens. In Reynolds' The Mysteries of London and its sequel The Mysteries of the Court of London; and in Dickens' Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit , contemporary London, or at least its dark criminalized districts, become the urban counterparts of the castles and abbeys of the Radcliffian tradition. In these fictions, and in the many journalistic and (proto)-sociological exposes of the 'rookeries' of London, are found similar emphases on the outmoded, the distant, the dark, irrational topographies of fear that characterize the descriptions of Gothic locales in the earlier fictional tradition. Chapter Two, 'From Udolpho to Spitalfields: Mapping Gothic London' explores this development.
From the Catholic South of Europe, to the Rookeries of outcast London, to the bodies and the memories of the middle classes. Chapter Three, 'Haunted Houses' explores how the theme of the family curse develops in the Victorian period. It charts how unwelcome ancestral legacies (once the province of supernatural lore or local legend), are adapted to contemporary concerns when authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Hooper, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon replace the supernatural with the pathological and legalistic, showing how the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children in the form of hereditary diseases, buried documents or imaginary wrongs. This emphasis gave rise to the 'Suburban Gothic' of the Sensation school.
A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction sets out to challenge a number of received views about this fictional mode. The final chapters concentrate on the so-called fin de siècle, a period which supposedly witnessed a 'return' of the Gothic in the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Machen. As recent critics have pointed out, late-Victorian horror fiction is obsessed with bodies and their gruesome metamorphoses. These developments have been seen to offer insights into the widespread and deeply-felt 'anxiety' that supposedly beset the middle classes at the end of the century, pointing to bourgeois fears about sexuality, gender, race, and class. And yet by stressing the transformation of the Gothic mode when it 'returned' at this time, readings of these texts have tended to overlook a thematic and conceptual continuity between the late Victorian Gothic and its earlier forms. Chapter Four: Atavism: A Darwinian Nightmare explores contemporary developments in historiography, anthropology, and criminology to account for these continuities, explaining how ancestral returns – the staple theme of Gothic fiction – were refigured as frightening atavisms in late-Victorian Gothic fiction.
Chapter Six: Making a Case: Vampirism, Sexuality, and Interpretation enters the sexological archive, exploring largely neglected pre-Freudian representations of 'vampirism' in psychiatric discourse. An understanding of the role played by the vampire in forming the concept of sexual 'sadism' lays the foundations for a revisionist reading of Dracula offered in this chapter. This challenges the widely held belief that in Stoker’s novel it is the vampire’s sexuality that is the source of its threat, and that this indicates 'Victorian' sexual standards and anxieties. The works of contemporary psychiatrists and sexologists, however, invite a very different view of this text.
By tracing the development of the Gothic mode – from an emphasis on the distant to the proximate, from the exotic to the domestic, from the geographical to the physiological and thence, finally, to the psychological – A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction challenges the 'inevitability' of psychological readings of this fiction. A 'Postscript' to the book addresses the issue of Gothic criticism and the problems of psychological readings. It completes the historical focus of the study by explaining how criticism of the Gothic often enacts versions of the very attitudes and mechanisms which define the mode. The final pages attempt to break the ahistorical loop of psychological readings, explaining why these still predominate, and why many observations on the Gothic can be considered 'Gothic' in their own right.
The Gothic is a process, not an essence; a rhetoric rather than a store of universal symbols; an attitude to the past and its hold on the present, not a free-floating fantasy realm. Epochs, institutions, places, and people are Gothicized, have the Gothic thrust upon them. That which is Gothicized depends on history and the stories it needs to tell itself. Some of these are mapped out in this book.
Robert Mighall
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