A Companion to the Gothic

by David Punter (Editor)

This Companion is a standard reference work for scholars and students of the Gothic from its origins to the present day. Providing stimulating insights into Gothic writing, its history and genealogy, it offers coverage of criticism of the Gothic and of the various theoretical approaches it has inspired and spawned.

Genres: Gothic, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism

Hardcover

First published October 16, 2001

Reviews

[PRJ Greenwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another all-inclusive guide to all things Gothic fictional. Goes into the subject a little deeper than the other few books I've read. Possibly dry reading to anyone only peripherally interested.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 3 out of 5]

He took up a little, very neatly constructed pocket telescope, and looked through the window to try it. Never in his life had he met a glass which brought objects so clearly and sharply before his eyes. Involuntarily he looked into Spalanzani's room; Olympia was sitting as usual before the little table, with her arms laid upon it, and her hands folded.

For the first time he could see the wondrous beauty in the shape of her face; only her eyes seemed to him singularly still and dead. Nevertheless, as he looked more keenly through the glass, it seemed to him as if moist moonbeams were rising in Olympia's eyes. It was as if the power of seeing were being kindled for the first time; her glances flashed with constantly increasing life. As if spellbound, Nathaniel reclined against the window, meditating on the charming Olympia. - E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman”, translated by John Oxenford

Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ is mentioned in 5 of the essays here, and other works of Freud in 2 others. It’s not clear how many of those authors have also read the Hoffmann story, quoted above, which was the inspiration for and subject of ‘The Uncanny’. None of them, nor Freud himself, cite Coppola’s telescope which distorts rather than clarifies vision as a metaphor for the dangers of approaching textual analysis with a theoretical bias.

Freudian interpretation and the essays often being written in an academic jargon unintelligible to those who aren’t graduate students in Literature (a common complaint of mine about literary criticism) are the main drawbacks in this collection. To read many texts and yet get the same ideas from them – primal scenes, phalluses present and absent, castration fears, returns to the womb – seems a terrible waste of time, even worse when I suspect that the authors knew they were going to find these things before even starting their analysis.

But there were a lot of good things in this collection, too. The opening sections gave a somewhat consistent concept to the protean term “Gothic” – a people, then an artistic style, standing against Roman rule, then against Classical aesthetics. Thus the 18th century “Gothic revival” is a reaction against dominant aesthetic values in literature. But, as Jerrold E. Hogle points out in a later essay, this was actually a counterfeit rather than a revival – an adaptation of older concepts and attitudes that are no longer supported by the power utility of belief – neither the author’s nor readers’ – and thus a kind of masquerade. It is the desire to find out what’s behind the masks that leads to the orgy of interpretation indulged in by many of the other essayists.

Introduction: The Ghost of a History (David Punter) "... representations do not 'hold' in the cultural psyche unless they find an answering resonance." (xiii)
I. Gothic Backgrounds
1. In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture (Fred Botting) The Gothic (natural, democratic) contests the Augustan Classical (artificial, foreign (transplanted), hierarchic (aristocratic)); it paves the way for the Romantic in its discovery of nature, but remains separate from it, "relegated to the popular and trashy realm of cheap, formulaic fiction." (12).
2. The Goths in History and Pre-Gothic Gothic* (Robin Sowerby) A case for the term having some consistent meaning, at least negatively applied: Gothic = not Roman, not classical.

Much was believed, but little understood,
And to be dull was construed to be good; - Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

3. European Gothic (Neil Cornwell) An overview of French, German, and Russian Gothic literature in the 18th and 19th century. The Russian section is especially deep given the author's specialty.
II. The 'Original' Gothic
4. Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis (Robert Miles) Focusing on the two main figures of the high Gothic, the author uses feminist and queer theory to define the "female" and "male" Gothic. "... the early female writers of the Gothic are primarily interested in rights, for their class, for their sex, and often both together; whereas the early writers of the male Gothic are more absorbed by the politics of identity." (45)
5. Mary Shelley, Author of Frankenstein* (Nora Crook) Reviews various interpretations of Frankenstein, concentrating on supposed autobiographical elements. Brief discussions of Valpurga and Rambles In Germany And Italy, In 1840, 1842, And 1843. Interesting sidenotes: among the Gothic stories Mary Shelley is said to have read "prior to 1817" (that is, before she wrote Frankenstein) was Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntley; Crook says the painting of The Nightmare was "was a famous picture Mary Shelley almost certainly knew: her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had been infatuated with its artist, the Swiss Henry Fuseli."(59)
6. Walter Scott, James Hoggand Scottish Gothic (Ian Duncan) Traces Scottish Gothic from "Ossian" and Robert Burns through the title figures to Blackwood's and Sartor Resartus. Duncan would take the quotes off Ossian

The vulgar consensus that Macpherson forged these works has recently given way to a more nuanced understanding of an ideologically complex act of synthesis.

He nevertheless captures the atmosphere of Macpherson's Fragments very well, despite his academic inflection:

'Songs of other times', the Ossian poems invoke Gaelic culture as a ghostly presence that always turns out, at its own moment of historical being and in its own expressive utterance, to be fading away into some yet remoter anteriority. As disembodied as the wraiths with which they familiarly converse, the Ossianic heroes inhabit an empty, reiterative temporality of haunting and an evanescent scenery of cataracts, mists and lonely cairns. The characteristic speech act of this world is the elegy, whether spoken by the chieftain mourning his slain children or sung by the aged bard, the last of his race mourning himself and that posterity which is occupied only by our act of reading.(72)

7. Irish Gothic: C. R. Maturin and J. S. Le Fanu (Victor Sage) Concentrates on the careers of the two title figures. Helpful information about Maturin's other novels.
8. The Political Culture of Gothic Drama (David Worrall) Disappointing. Assumes familiarity with British theater and political history in the decades before and after Napoleon that I expect few readers will have. The concept of the "artisan Gothic" is intriguing but not elaborated: the differing intellectual and narrative requirements of audiences for novels and drama makes for a tension between material intended for readers and theatergoers.
III. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Transmutations
9. Nineteenth-Century American Gothic* (Allan Lloyd-Smith) A good overview of writers. stories, and themes - lots of summaries with interpretive commentary. Especially at such short length, such analysis tends to be like looking at a sculpture from a fixed POV. The "References" section would seem to indicate that some of the many works mentioned are known second hand.
10. The Ghost Story (Julia Briggs) A look at the history of the form, from its apparent beginnings as Victorian Xmas entertainment. Offers a thesis that the ghost story offers a way of dealing with powerlessness (for female authors) or real-life horrors (the popularity wartime ghost stories). "Literature, with its fundamental process of mirroring lived life, is by nature uncanny." (125)
11. Gothic in the 1890s (Glennis Byron) Fin de siecle Gothic relocates the source of terror from the past and foreign lands to modern London invaded by the 'other' from without or within. The Great God Pan, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, The Beetle, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Picture of Dorian Gray; though arguments are also relevant to Dracula, implied but not discussed, above all.
12. Fictional Vampires in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (William Hughes) An attempt to displace or look beyond Dracula as the foundation for literary vampire studies. "... as Robert Mighall argues in an important revisionist study of Dracula, 'a vampire is sometimes only a vampire, and not a sexual menace.'" Points out 20th c vampires as narrators / POV characters, "narrating" rather than "narrated". The choice of modern works tends toward the sexualized vampires of Anne Rice, Lucius Shepard, and Poppy Z. Brite - no Stephen King, a significant omission.
13. Horror Fiction: In Search of a Definition (Clive Bloom) Starts out well, the highlight being a sequence of quotes detailing the deaths of revenants from 18th through 20th centuries. But decomposes into specious Freudianism.
14. Love Bites: Contemporary Women's Vampire Fiction (Gina Wisker) Sees the subject as revolutionary in de-pathologizing women's sexual appetite and normalizing same-sex relationships.
15. Gothic Film* (Heidi Kaye) A look at how film adaptations of the stories of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll expand meanings and address shifting societal concerns.
16. Shape and Shadow: On Poetry and the Uncanny (David Punter) An nice mini-anthology of four poems, two each by Hardy and Plath. The commentary provides a nice connective text for them, but descends to nonsense by the end. First paragraph is a tease, posing questions the essay does not answer:

In thinking about the Gothic, we are ineluctably led to a series of questions about the uncanny. For example, what kind of thing is the uncanny? Is it a feature that can be isolated in a text or a series of texts? Is it something that can be demonstrated through techniques of verbal analysis? Is it rather a set of effects of which we might become conscious during and after - or in some cases before - an act of reading?

IV. Gothic Theory and Genre
17. Gothic Criticism** (Chris Baldick & Robert Mighall) Attempts to refute the foundational assumptions of many of the other essays, particularly their reliance on psychoanalytic theory and the "oneric conception of Gothic fiction". This results in "generic confusion" and "de-historicizing". In regard to the former, the authors criticize the "unreflecting habit of treating Frankenstein as a 'Gothic' novel on the flimsy basis that its subject matter is horrifying or unnatural." (This begs the question, especially since the influential Penguin edition of Three Gothic Novels : The Castle of Otranto ~ Vathek ~ Frankenstein is mentioned, of why Vathek is a Gothic novel, but the authors don't go there.) As an example of "de-historicizing", the widespread critical understanding of Stoker's Dracula as a subversive sexually liberating antihero is cited – the authors provide the only reminder in the collection that Stoker and his readers saw the Count as unquestionably the villain of the novel.
18. Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (Michelle A. Masse) Starts out as an effective riposte to the previous essay, but like so many pieces in this book degenerates into the barely readable. Talks about the development of psychoanalysis and Gothic criticism in term of the progression Elements->Structures & Themes->Systems . Talking about the two at once inevitably results in misrepresentation. Both disciplines start out making limited observations about their subjects, expand their terms of reference, and then become so general as to be essentially saying nothing (my reaction).

Just as elements reconfigure as structures or themes, so from about 1980 on, the latter begin to be understood during the systems stage in paradigmatic relation to one another and in conjunction with other systems.

19. Comic Gothic (Avril Horner & Sue Zlosnik) Contrasts two pairs of "comic" and "serious" novels: Trilby / Dracula and The Witches of Eastwick / 'Salem's Lot. Unlike most other essayists, the authors attempt to outline their conception of "Gothic":

Gothic writing always concerns itself with boundaries and their instabilities, whether between the the quick/the dead, eros/thanatos, pain/pleasure, 'real'/'unreal', 'natural'/'supernatural', material/transcendent, man/machine, human/vampire, or 'masculine'/'feminine'. Serious gothic writing manifests a deep anxiety about the permeability of such boundaries.

V. The Continuing Debate
20. Can You Forgive Her? The Gothic Heroine and Her Critics* (Kate Ferguson Ellis) An excellent compendium / summary of critical assessments of the Gothic heroine. Falls apart at the end as the author attempts to synthesize viewpoints in her reading of Continental Drift as a Gothic novel.
21. Picture This: Stephen King's Queer Gothic (Steven Bruhn) I haven't yet read the novel, but it seems that, beneath an almost impenetrable impasto of literary-critical-psychobabble, the author provides an interesting look at the treatment of homosexuality in The Shining.
22. Seeing Things: Gothic and the Madness of Interpretation (Scott Brewster) Sees interpreting the Gothic as necessarily akin to the madness of the narrators. Too much Foucault and Derrida (tribal totems) and, of course, Freud (the Zeus or Jehova). "Any reading raises suspicions 'that what we pretended was the author's meaning was in fact only our own'." (284 Quoting Freud (!) - this is from an apparently obscure essay, "Delusions and dreams in Jensen's 'Gradiva'".) Actually reading the quote in context dispels the notion that Freud is here undergoing a moment of rare self-doubt. The full version has

In this connection we have, of course, been obliged to make many assertions which sounded odd to the reader because they were strange to him and probably often awakened the suspicion that we were giving out as our author’s meaning what is only our own meaning.

This clearly puts the doubt in the mind of "the reader" rather than in "our own".
Not bad brief analyses of 'The Fall of the House of Usher', Dracula, and 'A Warning to the Curious'.
23.The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection (Jerrold E. Hogle) Another piece barely written in English, but perhaps worth parsing. The early Gothic revival offered counterfeits of older forms and beliefs associated with aristocracy and Catholicism. With the industrial revolution 19th Century Gothic looked at reproduction of simulacra: monsters (Frankenstein), vampires (Dracula) or personas (Dr. Jekyll). Gothic and psychiatry developed due to the same historic imperatives - the need to "abject" undesirable elements of self unto the Other or the unconscious.
24. The Magical Realism of the Contemporary Gothic (Lucie Armitt) An interesting look at traditional Gothic manifestations in politically inflected magic realist texts. The Crow Road (Banks), The House of the Spirits (Allende), Shame (Rushdie), and Spider (McGrath). The first does not sound like MR and in the last, which I read a long time ago, I don't recall as having MR elements. Good stuff:

In magic realism ghosts are simply 'there', usually giving testimony to the voices of the those whom society has rendered silent or 'disappeared', but rarely the primary focus of the mystery of a text. In the Gothic the phantom is that central source, manifesting a secret that disturbs, even chills. (315)

In magic realism narrative itself is a fabulous panorama, whereas the Gothic landscape is inevitably claustrophobic. (308)

I have defined the Gothic itself in terms that emphasize such a conflict between worlds, the world inside the Gothic mansion being 'an interior dream- (or rather nightmare-) space' and that beyond its walls forming 'the outer world of daylight order.' Once this dichotomy is in place, 'a Gothic text becomes a Gothic text only when such fixed demarcations are called into question by the presence of an interloper who interrogates the existence of such boundar[ies]'.

[Apoorva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some chapters got a little dry, but I really liked the rest.

[a.]

good + thorough, appreciated the scope of the work & particularly liked baldick & mighall's 'gothic criticism.' i have got to get into matthew lewis.

[Madly Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent companion and overview of The Gothic. I wish I could write essays like this.