Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism
344
Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism
344eBook
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Overview
Following the golden age of British Gothic in the late eighteenth century, the American Gothic’s pinnacle is often recognized as having taken place during the decades of American Romanticism. However, Haunting Realities explores the period of American Realism—the end of the nineteenth century—to discover evidence of fertile ground for another age of Gothic proliferation.
At first glance, “Naturalist Gothic” seems to be a contradiction in terms. While the Gothic is known for its sensational effects, with its emphasis on horror and the supernatural, the doctrines of late nineteenth-century Naturalism attempted to move away from the aesthetics of sentimentality and stressed sobering, mechanistic views of reality steeped in scientific thought and the determinism of market values and biology. Nonetheless, what binds Gothicism and Naturalism together is a vision of shared pessimism and the perception of a fearful, lingering presence that ominously haunts an impending modernity. Indeed, it seems that in many Naturalist works reality is so horrific that it can only be depicted through Gothic tropes that prefigure the alienation and despair of modernism.
In recent years, research on the Gothic has flourished, yet there has been no extensive study of the links between the Gothic and Naturalism, particularly those which stem from the early American Realist tradition. Haunting Realities is a timely volume that addresses this gap and is an important addition to scholarly work on both the Gothic and Naturalism in the American literary tradition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817390532 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2022 |
| Series: | Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Wendy Ryden is an associate professor of English at Long Island University Post and coauthor of Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Seeing Gothically
Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons
Stephen Arch
In 1865 a young Henry James wrote a negative review of Elizabeth Stoddard's second novel, Two Men, for the North American Review. The editors chose not to publish James's review, even though they did publish six other reviews by him that year. Perhaps they did not agree with James's assessment; despite the relatively poor sales of her first two novels, Stoddard had her defenders among the literary elite. James, however, was unsparing in his criticism of Stoddard's artistry, and he was particularly savage in his estimation of her first novel, The Morgesons (1862). James gave it minimal praise, admitting that Stoddard's sketches of "seaside scenery" in that novel were well done. He acknowledged that Stoddard could induce a sense of dreaming in the reader but reported that those dreams were all unfortunately "disagreeable." The Morgesons "was a thoroughly bad novel," he wrote. It "possessed not even the slightest mechanical coherency. It was a long tedious record of incoherent dialogue between persons irresponsible in their sayings and doings even to the verge of insanity. Of narrative, of exposition, of statement, there was not a page in the book. ... She had perhaps wished us to study [her characters] exclusively in their utterances, as we study the characters of a play" (270). In a comment that might seem ironic to readers of James's later work, he concluded the review by stating that "Mrs. Stoddard's notion is to get all the work done by the reader while she amuses herself in talking what we feel bound to call nonsense" (273).
Though I think James's overall assessment is entirely mistaken, his criticisms are nevertheless insightful. Stoddard's first novel is short on exposition and long on elliptical dialogue between persons who do not understand each other. Stoddard does demand that readers do a lot of work. She sees her characters like the characters in a play, not the melodrama of the antebellum stage but the stage Realism of Ibsen, a nearly exact contemporary of hers. In effect, James understood what Stoddard was doing in The Morgesons, but he could not comprehend it. In this chapter, I wish to reframe the kinds of insights that James articulated through the lens of Naturalism and in particular through several themes also taken up by Ibsen, including the powerful and repressive hold of culture upon human behavior, the disintegration of the family, and changing conceptions of women/femininity.
One particular mistake James made was to attribute the "mechanical" incoherence of The Morgesons to the author's lack of artistry. He read the narrative's ellipticism, sparseness of detail, and abrupt shifts in focus as symptoms of the author's poor execution rather than as the strategic choices of a protagonist/narrator constrained by gender expectations and traditional narrative strategies. He is not alone in equating the author and the narrator. For example, in a more positive light, Jessica Feldman argues that Stoddard's prose tracks by analogy the author's own position and journey as a writer. In effect, Feldman reads the novel as Stoddard's autobiography. In contrast, my view is that we should think of Cassandra as the writer/narrator of her experiences and thus of the formal problems that she might face in trying to comprehend those experiences. In this way we can consider the logic of a first-person narrator who is writing her story for "us" in something of a confessional mode, but doing so as a woman who can see the world only through the lenses available to her and as a woman writer who can only articulate those experiences through narrative devices that may not be entirely accommodating to those experiences.
In my extended reading of the novel, the Gothic plays an important role precisely because, Stoddard tells us, it was one of the narrative devices available to nineteenth-century women like Cassandra Morgeson to both imagine and write about experiences. Emily Dickinson, another of Stoddard's contemporaries, also sometimes imagines her protagonists as female characters for whom the Gothic is a means of comprehending a stifling or constricting reality. Memory for the narrator in Dickinson's #1234 is a house with a garret ("For Refuse and the Mouse") and a deep, dark cellar into which you hope you are not pursued. In #1529, the narrator imagines her fiancé as an "eye" that "Where e'er I ply Is pushing close behind," like the male villain pursuing a heroine through the haunted spaces of a house. Her "I do" in the first line of that poem ("All that I do") ironically recognizes that there is no "Port" in marriage where she can hide nor "flight" she can take to escape his "enamored mind." Very much like Dickinson, however, Stoddard understands that the Gothic cannot ultimately be a freeing strategy for a protagonist. As the lesson of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892) would later demonstrate, to inhabit the Gothic entirely is perhaps to disappear into its darkness. For Stoddard and Dickinson, the female Gothic is an effective strategy for negotiating reality, but to be successful within prevailing norms the narrator must also write beyond the Gothic. For Stoddard, this means creating a narrator who takes possession of the house, reconstructs the family, and makes the family house hers; and who narrates this adventure in a voice that is hers, one that will necessarily sound less familiar to those accustomed both to the Realist novel and to the Gothic mode.
1
The short opening chapter of the novel provides remarkable insight into the narrator. The chapter begins not with the I/eye of autobiography, but with an external view of Cassandra: "'That child,' said my Aunt Mercy, looking at me with indigo-colored eyes, 'is possessed'" (5). Immediately, Cassandra then shifts the point of view to herself, but this shifting point of view, and especially Cassandra's ability/concern to "see" herself from another's point of view, establishes two fundamental features of the novel: from a young age, Cassandra is attuned to how others perceive her; and her narration is marked by sudden shifts of point of view, tone, style, and focus, a style often described as "elliptical."
When her aunt says this, the ten-year-old Cassandra is climbing a chest of drawers in order to reach a book about polar explorations. The older Cassandra repeatedly uses books and narratives to mark her development; this particular book indicates that at ten she already aspires to be a climber and explorer. While her own explorations will eventually be bounded by gendered domestic spaces that contain chests of drawers, bookshelves, and fences, within those confines she continually provokes startled reactions from the people around her: at the end of this scene, her aunt gives "a shriek" when she sees Cassandra climbing a gatepost. Cassandra's mother has use only for religious books, like Richard Baxter's The Saints Everlasting Rest (1650), and she asks Cassandra in this opening scene why she wastes her "time on unprofitable stories." Cassandra responds by saying that she hates all "good stories" for children, although one "good story," Hannah More's The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain (1792), made her "hungry to read about the roasted potatoes the shepherd had for breakfast and supper" (6). Her mother reads for the moral or the truth behind a story, not for aesthetics or for pleasure. Cassandra reads for sensual and visceral delight. She dislikes "profitable" stories precisely because their message is didactic; she likes (part of) More's story because it is enjoyable, because it provokes in her a hunger. It is good but not necessarily good for her, or at least "good" in the way the author and her mother intended.
On her way out of the room, Cassandra is reprimanded by her aunt for a blithe comment she made about a sacred hymn. She covers her ears defiantly, and the older narrator then startles readers by pulling us out of the deep well of time into the narrative present, a temporal shock when, for the first time in the novel, we realize that the narrator herself, like the aunt in the opening sentence, is viewing these events from outside young Cassandra's point of view: "I put my hands over my ears, and looked defiantly round the room. Its walls are no longer standing, and the hands of its builders have crumbled to dust. Some mental accident impressed this picture on the purblind memory of childhood" (6). Elliptically, the narrator then immediately returns us to the scene itself, recounting her desire "to escape the oppressive atmosphere of [that] room." She bounds away, headed for the outdoors and stopping only to ask her great-grandfather's wife to show her a picture of Ruth and Boaz in the family Bible. "'Did Ruth love Boaz dreadfully much?'" she whispers, but her great-grandfather sends her away (7).
Cassandra appreciates the story of Ruth and Boaz. Whatever biblical truth or moral there is to Ruth's story, the basic narrative of exile, love, and fidelity seems to touch her, a young girl with few examples in life or in books about the power of love. To Cassandra, the story of Ruth and Boaz is a good story, as opposed to Hannah More's didactic tale. More's story is about a frugal, honest shepherd who lives in a tiny hovel with his wife and eight children. He is content with the lot God gave him, despite and perhaps because of his lack of possessions and creature comforts. More's story is allegorical; its meaning is symbolic and spiritual. In contrast, the story of Ruth and Boaz presents a different kind of family, one that even at the age of ten Cassandra implicitly recognizes as different: Ruth leaves her own people (the Moabites) to accept the God of the Israelites; after the death of her first husband, Ruth leaves her birth family to cling to Naomi, her mother-in-law. Later, at the instigation of Naomi, Ruth then marries Boaz after they overcome the obstacle of another relative having a stronger claim to marrying her. When Cassandra asks whether Ruth loved Boaz, then, she is looking for the aesthetic, felt experience that is the kernel of a story that is good, perhaps the romance, perhaps the friendship of two female relatives, perhaps the disintegration and reconstitution of family. In the contrast between these two stories, Cassandra points to two options: in the shepherd's story, a religious, happy, and husband-dominated family content with a life of denial; in the Book of Ruth, an unusual, political, and woman-centered family determined to succeed. The first is a fantasy belied by every marriage Cassandra encounters: her parents', Charles and Alice's, the Somers's, Ben and Veronica's. The second, however, approximates the family that Cassandra assembles at the end of her story, after she learns to possess herself and soften her satiric stance toward the world around her.
This opening chapter is a remarkably compact and revealing tableau. In it, Cassandra the writer establishes herself as able and willing to shift temporal perspectives and subject positions, elements of the elliptical or epigrammatic style that defines her voice. She identifies domestic space, figurative limits, gender constraints, and inherited religious conventions as the boundaries of her world, demonstrating how the repressive circle of female domestic space works to confine her. And she foreshadows her struggle to find herself in stories, the "good" ones of her religious inheritance containing no lived, felt experience and offering no clear path to achieve her desire to escape boundaries in order to "realize" liberty (248).
2
Cassandra structures her autobiography around three trips: during the first, to visit her maternal grandfather, she confronts a powerful male figure of her mother's and her culture's past; during the second, to visit her attractive male cousin, she confronts a figure of prohibited sexual desire; during the third, to visit her friend Ben Somers, she confronts a powerful female figure who threatens to keep her from the eligible man she desires to marry. Each trip is urged and planned by someone else, ostensibly for Cassandra's good, and each trip sadistically subjects her to physical, mental, and emotional suffering. The three visits hint that her narrative is really an occluded fairy tale, an idea that Cassandra calls attention to when she recounts a conversation with Ben about their favorite fairy stories, focusing on Bluebeard (184).
In chapters 7–10, Cassandra is sent by her mother to live for one year in her childhood home in Barmouth, in order that Cassandra might "learn some of the lessons [her mother] had been taught" (27). Her grandfather's house is constructed crazily: "The house had many rooms, all more or less dark and irregularly shaped. The construction of the chambers was involved, I could not get out of one without going into another. Some of the ceilings slanted suddenly, and some so gradually that where I could stand erect, and where I must stoop, I never remembered, until my head was unpleasantly grazed" (29). These are features that Shirley Jackson later employed to much greater effect in another domestic fiction, The Haunting of Hill House (1959): the house is at odds with this inhabitant, its spaces irregular and surprising, its effect disorienting. In the cellar, Cassandra discovers that the house is built on a "great granite bed," "smooth and round, like the bald head of some old Titan" (32). Her grandfather is that Titan, "aboriginal in character, not to be moved by antecedent or changed by innovation — a Puritan, without gentleness or tenderness" (28). Like Puritanism itself by that time (the 1830s), the house is "not unpicturesque" from the outside, but its interiors are "dark and irregular," the foundation hidden, solid, featureless, fearsome. Inside the house, her grandfather and aunt "repress" each other. Her aunt wears a "mask before her father"; her grandfather does not permit play, demonstrations of emotion, or thought. When Cassandra one day notices "beautiful pigeons" roosting on the roof, her grandfather promptly shoots them. "'Why did you ask him not to shoot the pigeons?' said Aunt Mercy. 'If you had said nothing, he would not have done it'" (44).
What Cassandra learns in this stifling, cruel atmosphere is how her mother had been "trampled upon" (31). She ponders in these chapters the idea that chamomile purportedly grows faster for being trampled upon, but in fact these scenes in Barmouth demonstrate to her that the Puritan past simply crushed her mother. She was at the mercy of social forces too large to comprehend and her only "escape" was into a marriage that trampled her further. Though Cassandra is only eleven, she gains a glimpse into her parents' buried lives. At school, for example, some girls allude to rumors that her mother "was in love, poor thing" (40), before she married Cassandra's father. Cassandra had earlier referred to her parents' contested marriage, obliquely assigning the family's resistance to her mother's lack of connections. But if she hints here that her mother may have fallen in love with the "wrong" man, only to be "saved" by a hasty marriage to Cassandra's father, she also discovers at the same time that her father has a separate life from his family. He takes Cassandra on a business trip to a nearby town and leaves her briefly with a woman at an inn who shares an "unwarrantable familiarity" with him. Strangely, and suggestively, the woman "'never knew that he had a daughter,'" or any children. While Cassandra is waiting for her father, this woman gives her a Gothic novel to read: "'There is a horrid monk in it'; but she gave it to me. ... I devoured its pages, and ... forgot my own wants and woes" (39).
Perhaps because of that book, Cassandra reconstructs her year with her grandfather as a mildly Gothic tale: she is confined in a dark and repressive space; she is emotionally abused; secrets are hinted at but never fully revealed. Her time in Barmouth revolves around figures of freedom being curtailed: clipping a young girl's wings (38); keeping provocative things "cut off, and kept out of sight" (31); crushing, trampling, and silencing. Cassandra reads the environment in Barmouth as a Gothic space, not unpicturesque from the outside but stifling and sadistic on the inside. The pigeons are shot. The prayers are painfully long. Her grandfather "was sociable to those who visited the house, but never with those abiding in his family" (43). There is, of course, something sadistic in her own mother's wish that Cassandra should relive these experiences: she knows in advance that Cassandra will be subjected to pain and unhappiness.
(Continues…)
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