Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic
224
Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic
224Hardcover(2nd ed.)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780708322239 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 01/04/2010 |
| Series: | Gothic Literary Studies |
| Edition description: | 2nd ed. |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic
By Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2009 Laurence Talairach-VielmasAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7083-2223-9
CHAPTER 1
'Sensation is [his] Frankenstein': Monomaniac Obsessions in Basil, 'Mad Monkton' and The Woman in White
* * *
In her introduction to the Standard Novels edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote on 15 October 1831: 'It was ... on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true composition, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.' The writer's association of the Scottish mountains near Dundee with literary creativity reflects, of course, a clichéd Romantic projection of the self on the rugged and picturesque sublimities of mountainous scenery. However, if Shelley's Dr Frankenstein – born and brought up amidst the Swiss mountains a league from Geneva – first seems to echo his creator's fascination with climes and peaks, Shelley makes radical changes to the Romantic painting of mountainous sublimity.
At the opening of the novel, the narrator of the frame narrative, Robert Walton, has just started on his journey to the North Pole, and believes he is already being inspired by the cold northern breeze playing 'upon his cheeks ... [and] brac[ing] [his] nerves' (F, p. 269). The breeze gives him 'a foretaste of [the] icy climes', making his daydreams 'more fervent and vivid' (F, p. 269). From the start, therefore, the 'icy climes' already merge the Romantic icon of sublimity with the explorer's hubris, foreshadowing Shelley's mad scientist's Promethean quest and his exploration of other unknown regions: those of life and death, of the body and of the mind. Shelley's mountains are thus no borderlands between the physical and the spiritual universe. Driven by a passion compared to 'a mountain river' (F, p. 297), her Dr Frankenstein carries out his scientific experiment by 'tread[ing] in the steps already marked, ... pioneer[ing] a new way, [and] explor[ing] unknown powers' (F, p. 308). The depiction of scientific experiment further draws on landscape metaphors: Frankenstein often finds himself 'on the very brink of certainty' and '[clings] to the hope which the next day or the next hour will realize' (F, p. 314), as if clinging to the face of a rugged cliff, until he reaches 'the summit of [his] desires' (F, p. 312).
However, the scientist's feverish 'dream' soon turns into a nightmare, and Frankenstein is compelled to face his handwork on 'real' mountains. When he reaches Geneva after William's death, he looks up at the snowy mountains. The contrasted 'black sides of Jura and the bright summit of Mont Blanc' (F, p. 336) bring about electric tension in the text – discharged later on through the storm which illuminates some peaks while darkening others, and lets the thunder echo 'from Salêve, the Juras, and the Alps of Savoy' (F, p. 337). The sound and light show reveals double-faced mountains: what appears illuminated – or illuminating – on one side, is shadowed by a dark reflection on the other. The spectacle does not elevate the Romantic hero's spirits for long. The natural spectacle prefigures the appearance of the creature, 'hanging among the rocks of the nearly perpendicular ascent of Mount Salêve' (F, p. 338) and then reaching the summit and disappearing. Dramatically staged, the invasion of modern science – the creature which electricity has animated – monstrously encroaching upon the natural landscape, turns the Romantic scenery into a wretched panorama of Frankenstein's own corrupt ambition and passionate drives. The creature, who is 'capable of scaling the overhanging sides of Mount Salêve' (F, p. 339), appears among 'the precipices of an inaccessible mountain' (F, p. 339), and changes heights into precipices. The mountain peaks reflect the depths of the ambitious scientist's psyche – the murderous drives of the man who now wishes he could make 'a pilgrimage to the highest peak of the Andes [to] precipitat[e] [the creature] to their base' (F, p. 355). The Romantic stereotype of spiritual elevation and the sublime are cut at their bases: Shelley's elated protagonist does not just parody the excesses of Romantic vision; he also illustrates how the progress of science and the secularization of the modern world have replaced the divine. Revelation is not metaphysical; Frankenstein's scientific ascent – his 'lofty ambition' (F, p. 484) – is not a moral rise but a fall down a precipice.
The precipice soon becomes a trope mapping out Frankenstein's fate, though the scientist hardly sees its vertiginous depths. When Frankenstein starts on a walk towards Chamonix, his literal ascent is, again, followed by a fall: the sublime scenery only paves the way for a deeper disenchantment. Frankenstein cannot re-experience, as in the past, 'the sublime ecstacy that gave wings to the soul and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy' (F, p. 361). This rise is, indeed, 'precipitous' (F, p. 361), and when Frankenstein arrives at the top of the peak and calls up the 'Wandering spirits', he beholds the figure of his creature bounding over the crevices in the ice 'with superhuman speed' (F, p. 362). As the creature tells his story at the summit of the glacier, the climax of the novel becomes a literal cliffhanger. Frankenstein listens to the tale of his own creature and, with sensations weighing on him 'with a mountain's weight' (F, p. 416), sees his ambitious scientific project hurled down the mountain.
The monster, who has taken refuge in the Alps, is the offspring of modernity and its aggressive science, precluding all kinds of rapture and exaltation. Because they are associated with the murderous creature, the high mountain slopes cannot represent a significant landmark separating the physical from the spiritual. Terror is not holy; horror is man-made. The mountain stands out as a representation of Frankenstein's 'superhuman' ego, a 'platform of hubris,' in Simon Schama's terms, revealing the extent to which Frankenstein's quest for knowledge is, in fact, no more than a discovery of himself – an exploration of his own psychic depths. The successive highs and lows of Shelley's hero become disorientating as Frankenstein's scientific elevation, represented by his creature's inhabiting the top of the mountain, marches hand in hand with the scientist's moral downfall. The perspective is reshuffled, compelling the reader to witness Frankenstein's moral descent as he climbs up the mountain, and preventing sublime experience.
When Frankenstein decides to move to England in order to create a mate for his wretch, the ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices, dotting the shores of the Rhine, seem to signpost the fall of the picturesque typically found in traditional Gothic narratives. Castles have been replaced by the scientist's laboratory, a site of torture and horror set in the northern highlands of Scotland on the 'remotest of the Orkneys' (F, p. 432). Since it involves another scientific experiment, Frankenstein's journey to the north is, of course, no ascension: his friend Clerval is murdered soon after Frankenstein decides to destroy his half-finished creature, and the scientist is accused of the crime. Similarly, after their wedding, Frankenstein and Elizabeth behold Mont Salêve, Mont Blanc, the mighty Jura and the spire of Evian – the heights ironically once more foreshadowing Frankenstein's next plunge into despair with the loss of his wife on their wedding night. Summits are murderous spears, sharp as lancets cutting through the bodies of those he loves; the mountains around Geneva only echo the creature's laugh 'as if hell surrounded [the scientist] with mockery and laughter' (F, p. 475). The picturesque mountainous scenery must be fled. So Frankenstein leaves Geneva and commences his 'destructive and almost endless journey across the mountainous ices of the ocean' (F, p. 479), exchanging the Alps for the mountains of ice of the North Pole. The change is highly symbolic. The Gothic sublimities of the Alps, linked to Frankenstein's past, give way to the mountains of ice of the North Pole – directly alluding to Britain's imperial ambition with its modern polar expeditions, such as the quest for the Northwest Passage. Just as ice replaces rock, the narrative revamps the Gothic mysteries of mountainous scenery. Frankenstein's journey into the unknown territories of the body has eventually led him to embark upon a voyage towards the polar regions, chilling blood not just emotionally, but also physiologically. Snow covers Gothic traces, freezing the flame of passion of the scientist who handles icy blades, offering horror wrapped up in a pure white coat. Awesome crests melt away, revealing the fathomless depths of the human mind under the coat of ice. As Mariaconcetta Costantini argues, though Shelley prefers open spaces to the prototypical Gothic sites of persecution, the characters are 'constrained within their tortured consciousness', their 'mental enclosure [being] most effective in the description of frozen landscapes, whose cold expanses become all-encompassing metaphors of loss and captivity'. Increasingly, the Gothic quest becomes a psychological exploration – horror is located in the self.
Following in the footsteps of Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins takes his readers into the minds of his characters. Basil (1852), 'Mad Monkton' (1855) and The Woman in White (1859–60) are three early novels which point out the transformations of mid-Victorian society. Basil particularly highlights the dangers of modernity; 'Mad Monkton', playing upon old-fashioned Gothic, underlines the shifting of horror from stereotypical Gothic sites of persecution to the inner world of the characters; the rise of medical science goes a step further in The Woman in White, which describes a society in which everyone can play parts and identity is unstable, leading all the characters to look madly for signs that can guarantee individuality. In these three novels, monomania plays a central part in the plots, encapsulating the characters' obsessions and viewing them through a medical lens. By underscoring the links between fear and subjectivity, Basil, 'Mad Monkton' and The Woman in White remodel the Gothic quest into an exploration of the self. While Basil shows how constructions of the self are linked to the rise of the market economy, 'Mad Monkton' associates monomania with the secret crimes of the past. A curse underlies the narrative of The Woman in White too; yet the novel uses mental disease to shatter the frontier between sanity and insanity and to mix the fears of an asylum inmate with the romantic fantasies of the hero.
On the very brink of a precipice
Basil is a significant instance of the evolution of the Gothic genre throughout the nineteenth century. Just like Shelley's mad scientist, Collins's eponymous hero is fatally pursued and persecuted by a monstrous being. However, though the monster is the work of Basil's own hands, Collins highlights the extent to which the hideous creation also results from Basil's lack of perceptual experience – hence strengthening all the more the links between horror and subjectivity. In a review published in November 1852 in Bentley's Miscellany, the reviewer argued that 'in truth the writer of that work ought to have been called Mr. Salvator Fuseli. There is nothing either of Wilkie or Collins about it.' As in Fuseli's Night-Mare, indeed, Collins's Basil depicts the Gothic world of the inner self, haunted by demons. Set at the heart of London, the novel traces the daydream of Basil, the son of an ancient family, who is lured by a linen-draper's daughter. Blinded by his passion, he proposes to the socially inferior Margaret Sherwin, and agrees to postpone the consummation of his marriage for a year. Yet, the 'beauty of the dream' soon vanishes on the night before his year's probation is completed. Basil sees Margaret and her father's clerk, Robert Mannion, entering an hotel. Through the partition wall, Basil hears Mannion seducing Margaret. Out of anger, Basil then waits for Mannion and hurls him on the newly 'macadamised' road, leaving him monstrously disfigured – a counterpart of Dr Frankenstein's creature. In fact, Mannion is the son of one of Basil's father's employees who was hanged for forging Basil's father's name. Monomaniacally obsessed with taking revenge on Basil, and believing that 'something less earthly and apparent ... urges [him] horribly and supernaturally to link [himself] to [Basil] for life ... [and] makes [him] feel as the bearer of a curse that shall follow [Basil]; as the instrument of a fatality pronounced against [Basil] long ere [they] met', Mannion follows Basil to Cornwall and leads him to be expelled from the superstitious Cornish community as 'a curse' (p. 324). But, as they meet on the cliffs, Mannion threateningly raises his hand in the air, loses his balance and falls down a precipice, disappearing into the mouth of a chasm.
The novel explicitly borrows from Shelley's Frankenstein. The unconsummated marriage, the hero's unrestrained passion, which disfigures Mannion and makes a monster of him, Mannion's narrative, explaining the curse that follows him, embedded in Basil's confession, and the emphasis on dreams, ravings, deliriums which punctuate the plot, strongly connect the two novels. Moreover, just as Shelley sought to reconstruct the supernatural by moving away from 'the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment' (F, p. 267), Collins gets rid of old-fashioned ghosts and sets his tale in London at the heart of modern culture. The sublime assault on the senses of the Romantic traveller becomes an assault on the senses of the consumer. Yet perceptual experience provides no access to knowledge; on the contrary, it blocks all faculties of reasoning. While Dr Frankenstein is 'blinded' to the horror of his experiment, his mind obsessionally 'fixed on the consummation of [his] labour' (F, p. 433), Basil is bedazzled by the lures of commodity culture, which creates desires and fancies which haunt him and literally lead him to the brink of a precipice. As Collins makes clear, the ownership of private property does not ensure social power: the more Basil loses control of his purse, the more he loses control of his mind, as the commodity he intends to consume – Margaret Sherwin – can never be consummated. Material culture is a 'phantasmagoria', in Walter Benjamin's terms, which blinds and maddens the consumer, turning the phantasmagorias of the marketplace into a horror motion picture.
At the beginning of the novel, Basil comes out of his father's bank in the city. He has just cashed his quarterly allowance, emphasizing the role of the circulation of money in the narrative. For the novel's frantic pace mirrors the mad tempo of consumer culture. Interestingly, as he comes out of the bank, Basil boards an omnibus. The omnibus, which Basil has boarded '[i]n the idle impulse of the moment' (p. 27) to amuse himself, circulates through the city and becomes a site of visual entertainment in which the kaleidoscope of faces assault the senses of the idle flâneur. For Basil, the omnibus is a 'perambulatory exhibitionroom of the eccentricities of human nature', 'collecting together' classes and temperaments, the 'infinitesimal varieties of human character – as various even as the varieties of the human face' (p. 27). As a place of both anthropological study and entertainment, the omnibus prepares the appearance of the 'fashion freak' Basil is about to see. A stranger soon boards the omnibus; Basil is electrified: he feels a thrill 'in every nerve' (p. 29) when he touches her arm, and his powers of observation, so far exerted in describing the passengers' outfits, 'desert[–]' him (p. 30). Mesmerized by the veiled stranger, Basil is thrilled by the sensations the sight produces in him, teasing him to discover what lies under the veil, while simultaneously paralysing his ability to reason. Thus Basil's romance starts as a visual experience. The protagonist is dazzled by the beauty of the stranger, and the motion of the omnibus turns the meeting into an optical tease: the female character lifts up her veil and puts it down again as the omnibus drives on and on. The movement of the veil up and down, reminiscent of Victorian optical devices making images appear and disappear, hypnotizes Basil, who loses his self-control and follows the stranger into a suburb of new houses. The difficulty of seeing the complete picture of the beautiful stranger, forcing the beholder to imagine what is hidden, is furthered through the depiction of suburbia, with its '[u]nfinished streets, unfinished crescents, unfinished squares, unfinished shops, unfinished gardens, surrounding [the hero]' (p. 32). The lack of completion creates a sense of claustrophobia, not only recalling uncontrolled suburban growth, but also hinting at frustration: the unfinished picture prevents visual fulfilment. Basil's experience is ultra modern: his sense of imprisonment goes hand in hand with a myriad of impressions which both assail his senses and preclude reasoning: 'My impressions wanted repose ... My ideas were in utter confusion, all my thoughts ran astray. I walked on, dreaming in full day – I had no distinct impressions, except of the stranger beauty whom I had just seen' (p. 32).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas. Copyright © 2009 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsIntroduction: ‘A creepy sensation down the spine’
1 ‘Sensation is [his] Frankenstein’: Monomaniac Obsessions in Basil, ‘Mad Monkton’ and The Woman in White
2 The Substance and the Shadow: Invisibility and Immateriality in Armadale
3 ‘My grave is waiting for me there’: Physiological Prisons in The Moonstone
4 Transformation, Epilepsy and Late Victorian Anxieties in Poor Miss Finch
5 The Shadows of the Past: Digging Out Hidden Memory in The Haunted Hotel
6 Mad Scientists: Jezebel’s Daughter and Heart and Science
7 The Quest for Knowledge in ‘I Say No’
8 Born to Kill: the Haunting Taint in The Legacy of Cain
Notes
Bibliography
Index