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Overview
Originally published in 1980.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691615721 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #535 |
| Pages: | 326 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Ghosts of the Gothic
Austen, Eliot, & Lawrence
By Judith Wilt
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1980 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06439-0
CHAPTER 1
GOTHIC FATHERS: THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, THE ITALIAN, THE MONK, MELMOTH THE WANDERER
Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) is a rather gormless tale for which Walpole claimed little, and even the claim he did make — "Terror, the author's principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing" — is not entirely true. Its merits are not in character, plot, or prose, nor as he had thought, in the dramatic structure, but in half a dozen memorable tableaux, frozen moments of action, which are almost certainly lifted from Walpole's dreams, and maybe yours and mine too.
The narrative proper begins, like a primer in Gothic plot, with the father: "Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son and one daughter." A page later, on young Conrad's wedding day, the cry "Oh! the helmetl the helmet!" brings the family to the courtyard, where "— but what a sight for a father's eyes! — he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers." Manfred's stupefied gazing at this portent establishes the first tableau; and the second comes pat a few pages later as, trying to become his own son, Manfred offers himself to the bereft bride, Isabella: "Heaven nor hell shall impede my designs, said Manfred, advancing again to seize the princess. At that instant the portrait of his grandfather ... quit its panel and [descended] on the floor with a grave and melancholy air" (p. 24). The third tableau, Isabella escaping through the lower vaults of the castle, became the subject of numerous sketches and paintings in the late eighteenth century, for as Walpole says only too truly of his own prose: "Words cannot paint the horror of the princess' situation" (p. 27).
Wanting no daughter, "raving" for more sons, and intending to put away his infertile wife and beget more sons upon Isabella, Manfred meets his match, another father, in the priest Jerome. "I am sovereign here, and will allow no meddling priest to interfere," he says (p. 47), but Jerome refuses to hand over the bride: "she is where orphans and virgins are safest from the wiles and snares of this world, and nothing but a parent's authority shall take her thence." "I am her parent, and demand her," returns Manfred, leaving himself open to Jerome's unanswerable riposte: "By me art thou warned not to pursue the incestuous design on thy contracted daughter" (pp. 49-50). The property of Otranto at stake, Manfred and the real father of Isabella compromise, each to his own best advantage: each will marry the other's daughter, each hopes that his own daughter will bear no sons to his enemy and thus secure the property to him. "Thou art no lawful prince," thunders the substitute father Jerome. "It is done," responds the separated Manfred, and "as he spoke these words three drops of blood fell from the nose of Alfonso's statue" (p. 98).
This serio-comic tableau marks the third ponderous intervention of Alfonso the Good, the true prince, foully done to death by Manfred's grandfather for the lordship of Otranto, but not before he had secretly married and begotten a daughter, who married the Count of Falconara, who fathered the true heir Theodore and then became Father Jerome after Theodore's disappearance. This young "lost heir" appears at Otranto in time to be fallen in love with by both of the girlchildren, Matilda and Isabella, who are coveted as property by the middle-aged fathers. Thus in this first of the classic Gothic tales the male ingenue has almost no active role, not even as an object of persecution. He is simply the convenient receptacle of the least interesting, most conventional sentiments; he loses his own beloved, marries her friend as an afterthought, and after an odyssey as sentimentally banal as Charles II's, he is only a spectator at his own restoration, which provides the last spectacular tableau of the tale:
The moment Theodore appeared, the walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down by a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the centre of the ruins. "Behold in Theodore the true heir of Alfonso!" said the vision; and having pronounced those words, accompanied by a clap of thunder, it ascended solemnly towards heaven, where the clouds parting asunder, the face of St. Nicholas was seen; and receiving Alfonso's shade, they were soon swept from mortal eyes in a blaze of glory. (P. 113)
One feels impelled to start a round of applause, though Walpole's priest-narrator informs us instead that the beholders fell on their faces, "acknowledging the divine will."
This narrator, it is important to note, is the first of the holy fathers in the tale, and he may indeed have devious clerkly motives in telling the story. In a reflex absolutely central to English Gothic, Walpole affects to find the manuscript of this story "in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England" — that is, to the comfortable home-counties' Anglican mind, at the edge of the civilized world, where the minions of the great old religion might still dwell. Now, to the enlightened eighteenth-century mind of course, says Walpole in his "translators preface," marvelous visitations, dreams and portents, priestly tyranny, have been "exploded ... even from romances." Two hundred and fifty years ago it was different, and "an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times" to omit them (p. 4).
On the other hand, Walpole offers a singular explanation for the telling of the story. Carefully deducing from stylistic evidence that the manuscript he has found dates from early sixteenth-century Italy, he theorizes:
Letters were then in their flourishing state ... and contributed to dispel the empire of superstition, at that time so forcibly attacked by the reformers. It is not unlikely that an artful priest might endeavor to turn their own arms on the innovators; and might avail himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions.
"Such a work as the following," Walpole adds solemnly, "would enslave a hundred vulgar minds beyond half the books of controversy that have been written from the days of Luther to the present hour" (pp. 3-4).
Thus in Walpole's crucial narrative conceit, the Gothic arises in "the days of Luther" as a tool of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the priests of the old dispensation striking from beyond the grave at the new. In the 1760s, as an embattled Catholic Church suppresses the Jesuit Order under pressure from the "rational" despots of the continent, Walpole's "modern" romance restores the Jesuits to the English reader's mind.
Pursuing his scheme for material power, Isabella's father approaches a figure that, "turning slowly round, discovered to him the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit's cowl" (p. 107). In a "conflict of penitence and passion" he is recalled to his errand, which is to work the dead Jesuit's will upon the house of Manfred according to the story's governing moral. "Yet I could wish," says the "translator" airily of that other living/dead priest, the writer of the manuscript, that "he had grounded his plan on a more useful moral than this: that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation. I doubt whether in his time, any more than at present, ambition curbed its appetite of dominion from the dread of so remote a punishment" (p. 5).
The secret sin that works itself poisonously out into the open, destroying at a distance of years or even generations, is a staple of Gothic plot; it is prime evidence for a theological universe, one in which any human act, occasionally a selfless one like Christ's sacrifice but more often a selfish one, may call to itself a power that will magnify the act far beyond the human scale. Time and distance supply some of the magnification; the Gothic portrays exactly that special dread which arises from the anticipation of remote, therefore magnified, punishment.
In terms of narrative, however, immediate punishment is what the Gothic delivers; from the death that opens The Castle of Otranto to the death that opens the novel Jaws, punishment comes first — not, certainly, before the sin, but before the revelation of the sin. In the Gothic, then, a world that first seems rational and calm is shattered by an irrational or random punishment, which is then rerationalized by the revelation of the generating, the original sin. And punishment in the Gothic, we will note, is most often for the young, while sin, the ambition for dominion, is the province of the old. This is one hidden reason why Manfred is "mad for sons" — not only will a son secure the domain but a son will receive the promised doom. The son must die so that the old man may live.
Or, in the last resort, the daughter must die. Manfred and Matilda are a curious pair. As Walpole rather casually creates her, Manfred's daughter is as mysterious an object of hatred to Manfred as Isabella is an object of lust. In the "conduct of the passions ... according to probability" that Walpole feels is the central interest of his "new" kind of romance, these two passions are clearly linked. "I do not want a daughter" rages Manfred to his daughter; "I will be her parent" he insists of Isabella, his son's contracted wife. In the last pages of the book the two women and the two passions link together in a kind of murder/rape: hated by Isabella and haplessly loved by Matilda, Manfred in a fury plunges his dagger into the object of his lust and finds that he has killed the object of his hatred, his daughter. Attempting to shed "Alfonso's blood," he had "shed his own." Alfonso's revenge is complete, and his monk-substitutes are triumphant. Matilda forgives Manfred and thus locks him forever into guilt; he takes the cowl and goes into eternal penitence; woman and priest meet victorious beyond the grave, clouds parting asunder. Isabella and Theodore survive, like Shakespeare's Edgar, never to see so much nor live so intensely again. Manfred and Frederick, two mighty old ones, are defeated by the still older ones, priests of the old empire of superstition. Like Marlowe's Faustus, Manfred believed hell was a fable and learns his mistake: hell is a truth, and it is wherever the sinner is. The artful priest, whom Walpole's "translator" suggests cynically contrived the whole story, has had his sadistic will with the Gothic antihero, the separated one, the "man of sorrows" as Manfred calls himself in echo of that ambiguous model Separated Son.
Manfred is also the skeptic, who "doubts whether Heaven notifies its will through friars" (p. 65). Here we locate the real and empathetic terror of the Gothic antihero: in the midst of his power he doubts. Heretic and would-be atheist, he yet wonders whether in fact there is not, somewhere, if not in friars, the face, the portent, the pattern of events in which he should be reading the writing of heaven. No simple savage, Manfred is usually, in the easy eighteenth-century formula Walpole uses, humane and virtuous "when his passions did not obscure his reason" (p. 31). He bears the guilty burden of the tale and shares in the secret sin, but in the midst of his obsession that his house not fall, his mortality not end, he is at least partly drawn to propagate sons on Isabella because she is distantly of Alfonso's blood. So a son of theirs might both preserve his house and restore Alfonso's: a reasonable compromise, it would seem, in any universe but the Gothic, where the powers of evil and good, "dilated to an immense magnitude," pursue their own passionate symmetries, powers made even more dreadful in their abstract emptiness by an eerie familiarity. "This can be no evil spirit," says Matilda in the most Gothic moment of all, "it is undoubtedly one of the family" (p. 41).
Again, one hardly knows how to restrain a laugh. Walpole made no serious claims to aesthetic precision in his composition but simply hoped to "[pave] a road for men of brighter talents" (p. 10). First among those talents was Ann Radcliffe, in whose novel The Italian (1797) we find what I take to be the richest, clearest, most morally intense evocation of the classic Gothic universe. Here we find the subtlest working out of that doubly fathered father, the sinful monk, here a family full of evil spirits, here the most elegantly crafted atmosphere of Gothic time and space. Here too is the most detailed exposition of that Gothic dynamic that Walpole saw but never reached: "terror, the author's principal engine" does its job of keeping the mind "up in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions" because Radcliffe has so beautifully orchestrated the two very different but linked terrors of the persecuted and of the persecutor.
And here, since Radcliffe has chosen the spaces of church, convent, and Inquisitorial prison to hold and increase her terrors (moated castles could never be quite as credible a domain of dilated power, not even Udolpho), here is the clearest indication of that special Gothic dichotomy, fundamentally Protestant as Porte noted, between God and the Church. Here the old institution, its ministers and appurtenances, are voluptuously painted, seen, abhorred, fought, thrown down. Religion itself remains untouched, even strengthened. And the great God rules, even as His Church is purged of its villains, its evil fathers. Yet the reader will find it difficult to distinguish the evil father from the good, since they are both — Gothic antihero and Enlightenment God — distinguished primarily for an obsessive, hidden, tyrannous, ambiguous will. Radcliffe's opening lyric about her hero, Father Schedoni, innocently exposes the terrible dilemma in terms of a simile:
He, wrapt in clouds of mystery and silence,
Broods o'er his passions, bodies them in deeds,
And sends them forth on wings of Fate to others:
Like the invisible Will that guides us,
Unheard, unknown, unsearchable!
Mrs. Radcliffe is distinguished in the history of the Gothic for the invisibility of her God, the inaudibility of heaven's vengeful, signalizing thunder. No "machinery" for her except that which human passion "bodies forth in deeds," creates or imagines for itself.
Take the first encounter with the Gothic in The Italian. Going with his friend Bonarmo to visit his new love Ellena, the young sentimental hero, Vivaldi, is warned two nights running not to go or he will meet his fate — warned by a person in the habit of a monk who "disappears" after the warning. In his rage Vivaldi may stigmatize the monk as a "demon [who] haunts me," but what he really believes is that the man is a rival for Ellena, and in anticipation of a flesh and blood fight he drags Bonarmo to the gloomy exposed arch that was the scene of the encounter. The scenery works mightily on the friend's sensibility; he admits that in that place and time "there is scarcely a superstition too dark for my credulity," and he proposes that the mysterious figure was "more than human" (p. 19). Vivaldi only smiles. At the same time the friend takes aim at Vivaldi's romantic superstition about a rival for the entirely chaste Ellena — "This surmise of yours is in the highest degree improbable" — and argues Vivaldi out of it.
In Chapter Two (initial exposure in Gothic is quick, though the labyrinthine penetration to the secret sins is long), the reader meets the mysterious figure and receives hints of the way in which he is both "more than human" and Vivaldi's rival. The monk Schedoni is of an unknown, in fact unsearchable, past; he eludes every inquiry. His qualities of person and mind alike exceed the human norm, rather like Frankenstein's creature's; he is too tall, too thin, his eyes too large and piercing, the lines on his face too deep and awful, and his passions, both of reserve and conciliation, of silence and argument, are extended, dilated artificially: "The elder brothers of the convent said that he had talents, but denied him learning; they applauded him for the profound subtlety which he occasionally discovered in argument, but observed that he seldom perceived truth when it lay on the surface; he could follow it through all the labyrinths of disquisition, but overlooked it, when it was undisguised before him." The narrator, in a George-Eliot-like reflex, adds austerely: "In fact he cared not for truth nor sought it by bold and broad argument, but loved to exert the wily cunning of his nature in hunting it through artificial perplexities. At length, from a habit of intricacy and suspicion, his vitiated mind could receive nothing for truth, which was simple and easily comprehended" (p. 34).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ghosts of the Gothic by Judith Wilt. Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- List of Illustrations, pg. ix
- Preface, pg. xi
- Introduction: "This Heretic Narrative": Approaches To A Gothic Theoretic, pg. 3
- Chapter One: Gothic Fathers: The Castle Of Otranto, The Italian, The Monk, Melmoth The Wanderer, pg. 25
- Chapter Two: Gothic Brothers: Frankenstein, The Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, pg. 62
- Introduction: The Gothic Heritage, pg. 99
- Chapter Three: Jane Austen: The Anxieties Of Common Life, pg. 121
- Chapter Four: George Eliot: The Garment Of Fear, pg. 173
- Chapter Five: D. H. Lawrence: Ghosts In The Daylight, pg. 231
- Conclusion: A High, Vibrating Place, pg. 293
- Index, pg. 305