Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles
272
Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles
272Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786832337 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2018 |
| Series: | Gothic Literary Studies |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
'Dark, and cold, and rugged is the North': Regionalism, Folklore and Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Northern' Gothic
Catherine Spooner
Gothic regionalism
'Dark, and cold, and rugged is the North', Gaskell writes in her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), misquoting Tennyson's line from The Princess (1847), 'dark and true and tender is the North'. The mock quotation gives the line the force of received wisdom – a stereotype that Charlotte Brontë, for Gaskell, partly confirms but also partly confounds. Throughout the Life, Gaskell is keen to emphasise that southerners' rejection of Brontë's depiction of over-exaggerated northern manners is contradicted by her Yorkshire readers' warm recognition of their own lives and landscapes. Gaskell implicitly defends what is regarded as overblown and grotesque by the cultured south as realistic by local standards. In doing so, she constructs the north as a fictional space that is simultaneously Gothic and realist. Gothic, she implies, is the natural idiom of Haworth and its surrounds.
Gaskell is, of course, primarily known for her realist portrayal of the industrial north in novels such as Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854–5) as well as her light-hearted portrayal of a provincial community in Cranford (1851–3). She also, however, contributed ghost stories to Household Words and wrote a variety of short fiction that could be described as Gothic, collected in one volume for Penguin Classics by Laura Kranzler in 2000. Like her novels, Gaskell's short stories are often set in clearly specified northern landscapes, although their focus is rural rather than urban. Nevertheless the identification of these tales as Gothic is far from secure and could be regarded as an opportunistic exercise: with the exception of 'The Old Nurse's Story' (1852) and 'The Poor Clare' (1856), Gaskell's stories often depart significantly from the characteristic atmosphere or aesthetic of 'classic' Gothic through their deployment of a comic or realist register. Reviewing the volume in Gothic Studies, Lisa Hopkins suggests:
A whole collection of Gothic tales by Elizabeth Gaskell would be a marvellous thing, which one would love to have. Unfortunately, however, the present volume ... doesn't really fit the bill. [Only three of the stories] could reasonably find shelter under a Gothic umbrella.
With a flounce, she concludes, 'I think I'll go off and read something Gothic'.
Part of the problem in defining Gaskell as Gothic lies in the tendency of Gothic studies as an academic field to value non-realist literary forms. Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall's excoriating attack on 'Gothic Criticism' in David Punter's A Companion to the Gothic argues that the positioning of Gothic as radical other within the literary tradition often flagrantly disregards historical evidence in the service of what they call 'the mainstream modernist, postmodernist, and left-formalist campaign against nineteenth-century literary realism and its alleged ideological backwardness'. Gaskell, as a prime proponent of that realism, remains uncomfortably positioned in relation to the Gothic canon. And yet, Gaskell remains reliant on Gothic narrative conventions even in the work that might be reasonably supposed to be most 'realist' of all: Nicola J. Watson argues that her biography of Brontë, beginning with a tombstone and ending with a funeral, inaugurates its subject as the typical heroine of feminine Gothic, shut up in a restrictive domestic space, and scripts the traveller's experience of Haworth as a Gothic one.
This chapter argues that Gaskell attempts to establish a specifically northern Gothic, a Gothic which engages closely with other forms of Gothic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but which also has a specifically regional focus. Given that Gothic was not Gaskell's primary fictional mode, although she continued to experiment with it throughout her career, the chapter also will ask what is at stake in her construction of northern Gothic, how it reflects or refracts the apparently more 'serious' concerns of her realist fiction. I suggest that through 'northern Gothic', Gaskell effects a kind of reconciliation between Gothic and realism. The first part of the chapter reflects in general terms on the construction of a Gothic north, both in Gaskell's own textual strategies and in the wider literary context. I propose that Gaskell positions herself as a kind of antecedent to the modern psychogeographer in the form of a worldly female traveller who becomes a conduit for the colourful local stories that inhere in the places that she visits. In Gaskell's northern Gothic, therefore, place is constructed not just through landscape, but also through the accumulation of legends and folklore that inform local identity. The second part of the chapter provides a close reading of 'The Poor Clare', arguing that in this story Gaskell constructs a regional Gothic that we might define not just as 'northern' but as specifically 'Lancashire'.
Gaskell's Gothic tales are almost always rooted in a specific locality, whether Heidelberg and the Vosges in 'The Grey Woman' (1861) or Cardigan Bay in 'The Doom of the Griffiths' (1858). However, the rural north of England looms large, whether the Cumberland Fells in 'The Old Nurse's Story', the Trough of Bowland in 'The Poor Clare', or the North Riding of Yorkshire in 'The Crooked Branch' (1859). As such, they evoke the American literary critical concern with regionalism. Mary Austin, in her 1932 essay 'Regionalism in American Fiction', argued that 'There is no sort of experience that works so constantly and subtly upon man as his regional environment', and suggested that attention to the 'many subtle and significant characterizations' found in regional literature could reveal 'several Americas', problematising the nation as mythic monolith. Regional writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, commonly celebrated for its mixture of the strange and remote with realistic local detail, has proved a rich source of American Gothic, encompassing writers as diverse as George Washington Cable, Bret Harte and Ellen Glasgow. However, critics generally locate British Gothic fiction in the Orient, in Mediterranean Europe, in Scotland or Ireland, in London – anywhere but in provincial England, the literal space which Gothic authors and readers were supposed to inhabit. In contrast, the strong sense of place conveyed in Gaskell's writing indicates the existence of a regional English Gothic – a complex fictional geography that may reveal 'several Englands', or indeed, 'several Gothics'.
Folklore, travel and Victorian Gothic
Since Henry James's review of Mary Braddon's Aurora Floyd in 1865, critics have repeatedly noted that the exotic European locations of earlier Gothic fiction are replaced in the Victorian period by locations closer to home. A critical preoccupation with the Freudian 'Unheimlich', however, or with London and the urban environment, has resulted in a surprising neglect of the wide range of actual places depicted in the texts. The fictional shift from exotic locations to homely ones over the course of the nineteenth century matched a corresponding movement to collect and preserve British folklore, in the wake of industrialisation and urban migration. The term 'folklore' was in fact introduced by the antiquarian William John Thoms in 1846, and marked a shift from the leisurely pursuit of a handful of amateur antiquarians and gentleman tourists, to an increasingly professionalised endeavour to catalogue and document the disappearing traditions of the British Isles. In the second half of the nineteenth century, then, oral narratives concerning the supernatural were crystallised into written form, fashioning a kind of supernatural map of Britain that still persists today. In their book The Lore of the Land, Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson literally draw up these maps, constructing a supernatural cartography of England.
While most parts of England are revealed as rich in supernatural tradition, Westwood and Simpson discover that some areas are particularly dense sources of local legend. They attribute this in large part to the presumptions of those gathering the data:
In particular, it was taken for granted ... that the counties closest to London would have lost much of their traditional lore because of industrialisation and the movement of population, whereas remote rural communities would be more rewarding. Hence the predominance of the west and north in Victorian regional studies, and their striking lack of material from large towns.
Westwood and Simpson's maps are not compiled according to strict scientific principles and necessarily reflect the priorities of the mainly nineteenth-century folklore recorders who provide their sources, as well as a degree of authorial selectivity. Nevertheless, they provide a rough guide to regional variations in the folkloric landscape of England. Lancashire is plagued by witches, although there are none in neighbouring Cheshire. Yorkshire is distinguished by a preponderance of fairies. Northern Derbyshire is particularly interesting for its density of ghost stories and haunted mansions. This is worth noting in relation to a Victorian novel like Uncle Silas (1864): J. Sheridan Le Fanu was instructed by his publishers not to set his fiction in Ireland for commercial purposes, so set it in the Peak District instead. Westwood and Simpson's map indicates that this is the 'right sort' of landscape for a Gothic novel: in terms of authorial choice, not so different to the Romanian setting of Le Fanu's vampire tale 'Carmilla' (1872).
The supernatural evidence that emerges through folkloric mapping is in striking contrast with the critical emphasis on nineteenth-century 'urban' – and latterly 'suburban' – Gothic. In A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, Robert Mighall describes how in Victorian Gothic, the city became Gothicised, riddled with anachronistic vestiges that expose the horrors of a former time. In much nineteenth-century fiction, however, it is frequently the countryside that is positioned as the site of anachronism. Franco Moretti demonstrates by means of mapping the location of the crimes in Sherlock Holmes stories that it is not the city where the most awful crimes take place, but the countryside: 'As Holmes moves away from London,' he shows, 'crimes have a marked tendency to become bloodier. In the city, less than half his cases have to do with violent death; in the countryside, the percentage of murders (or attempted murders) rises to three-quarters'. In 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches' (1892), Holmes lectures Watson on the deceptive beauty of the rural landscape, which by virtue of its isolation and neglect conceals 'a more dreadful record of sin' than 'the lowest and vilest alleys in London'. The city is presented as possessing the advantages of the modern 'machinery of justice', where the density of population, speed of communication and efficient judicial system will ensure that crimes are swiftly apprehended and punished. The countryside, however, lags behind London not only in terms of these paraphernalia of modernity, but also in terms of the education and mental advancements of its inhabitants, who are implicitly 'backward' in relation to their urban counterparts. Thus 'deeds of hellish cruelty' and 'hidden wickedness ... may go on, year in, year out ... and none the wiser'. Here Conan Doyle echoes Gaskell's own comments in the Life of Charlotte Brontë that the isolation of the moorland region breeds crime: 'in lonely houses on the distant hill-side, or by the small magnates of secluded hamlets, crimes might be committed almost unknown, certainly without any great uprising of popular indignation calculated to bring down the strong arm of the law. It must be remembered that in those days there was no rural constabulary'.
Just as the folklorists assumed that the regions most remote from London would be richest in ancient tradition, in ghost stories the journey into remote rural areas is equated with travelling into the past. As Robert Mighall explains, 'The past has often been referred to as a foreign country, but ... in the early Gothic novels certain foreign countries become the past'. In Victorian Gothic fiction the geographical focus contracts so that it is no longer the further reaches of Italy and Spain that represent the past, but rather the rural outposts of Britain. Regional Britain comes to stand in for the exotic Mediterranean locations favoured in early Gothic novels. To return to the passage I quoted above from Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, it is notable that Gaskell is constructing this dark history of crime as already in the past, 'in those days', but a past which nevertheless seems to press inescapably on the region, shaping its present-day character and indeed the position of Charlotte Brontë within it. In 'The Poor Clare', the protagonist's uncle's declaration that 'I myself will go down into the north ... I am too old to be daunted by man or demon' suggests, through conventional nineteenth-century idiom, that the journey to the north is a descent, a decline – in the context of the story, a journey from urban enlightenment to rural superstition, from modernity to the quasi-medieval – even, possibly, a descent into the infernal regions.
The urban traveller experiencing displacement in an unfamiliar environment is a stock motif of these Gothic narratives, enabling articulation of the tension between the modernity of the city and the archaic rural landscape. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights (1847) is a particularly prominent example, but the same figure can be identified across a range of Victorian texts, including the unnamed narrator of 'The Poor Clare'. These narrators usually have a compelling personal or professional reason for travel, but their response to their unfamiliar surroundings has some of the attributes of the emerging discourse of tourism. Nancy Armstrong considers that 'Lockwood encounters the regional landscape as a tourist, converting that landscape and its occupants into a private aesthetic experience'. Gaskell was herself, of course, an avid tourist and her own travels provided the raw materials for many of her narratives – Jenny Uglow suggests, for example, that 'The Doom of the Griffiths' was inspired by Gaskell's stays in north Wales. In 'The Grey Woman', the narrator of the frame narrative is explicitly constructed as a tourist visiting Heidelberg and happening upon a fantastic story while visiting a popular local spot for coffee and kuchen.
Similarly, the most overtly Gothic passage in the Life is an interpolated letter from some of Gaskell's neighbours describing their own quasi-tourist visit to Haworth. They provide an account of their atmospheric journey as 'The country got wilder and wilder', culminating in Charlotte herself, a 'little creature entombed ... moving about herself like a spirit'. This journey recalls the drawn-out, portentous approach to the castle or house ubiquitous in Gothic narrative from Ann Radcliffe onwards. Gaskell's lengthy quotation of this letter both signals her appreciation of its effects, and, crucially, distances her from it, making her own more measured descriptions appear more 'realist' in comparison. She repeats this strategy in relation to all the other most Gothic incidents in the Life, positioning herself as the worldly urban traveller, whose rational perspective lends credence to the Gothic encounter. As such she recreates the Gothic convention of the 'frame' narrative, once again importing Gothic conventions into the 'realist' text. But even in those tales where the frame narrative does not exist, Gaskell's narratorial persona is almost always positioned in similar terms: as a modern, rationalist visitor who attempts to capture as authentically as possible what she observes of local events and customs.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on contributors xi
Introduction: The Uncanny Space of Regionality: Gothic Beyond the Metropolis William Hughes 1
Part I Re-imagined Gothic Landscapes: Folklore, Nostalgia and History
1 'Dark, and cold, and rugged is the North': Regionalism, Folklore and Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Northern Gothic Catherine Spooner 27
2 The Gothic Child and the West Yorkshire Moors: The Deconstruction of Space in Jeremy Dyson's The Haunted Book Chloé Germaine Buckley 44
3 'Spook Business': Hall Caine and the Moment of Manx Gothic Richard Storer 63
4 'All those ancient stories that had their dark souls located in woods': Rural Gothic, Scottish Folklore and Postmodern Conundrums in James Robertson's: The Testament of Gideon Mack Gioia Angeletti 81
Part II Unnatural Gothic Spaces
5 Entering the Darkness: Robert Aickman and the Regions Timothy Jones 101
6 University Gothic, c.1880-1910 Minna Vuohelainen 118
7 Vampiristic Museums and Library Gothic Holly-Gale Millette 137
Part III Border Crossings and the Threat of invasion
8 Lifting the Veil: Ambivalence, Allegory and the Scottish Gothic in Walter Scott's Union Fiction Jamil Mustafa 161
9 Cosmopolis Fever: Regionalism and Disease Ecology in Mary Shelley's The Last Man Ben Richardson 179
10 The Hammer House of Cornish Horror: The Inversion of Imperial Gothic in The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile Ruth Heholt 195
11 Gothic Immigration: Kentish Gothic and the Borders of Britishness Sarah Ilott 211
Bibliography 233
Index 249