THE GOTHIC TEXT - Hardcover

Brown, Marshall

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804739129 ISBN 13: 9780804739122

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Combining a new genealogy for the gothic novel with original research into gothic contexts in German idealist thought and romantic psychology, The Gothic Text offers lively readings of British and Continental novels pointing back toward the Enlightenment and ahead toward Freud.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marshall Brown is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He is the author of Turning Points (Stanford, 1997) and Preromanticism (Stanford, 1991).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Romantic gothic fiction is not exciting.
Gothic novels are not ghost stories.
Gothic novels are not women's writing.
Opening with these three theses, The Gothic Text undertakes a fresh approach to a much-studied mode. Marshall Brown's book combines the teleological approach to literary history developed in his Preromanticism with a European perspective on the one truly international literary form of its era. New insights into literary history and the history of ideas provide a framework for innovative close readings that approach classics of the genre from unusual angles. Accessibly written and argued in careful, lively detail and with extended readings of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, among others—together with a thoroughly researched account of German romantic psychology as it developed out of Kant's idealist philosophy toward a gothic sensibility as a pioneer in the rendering of consciousness—The Gothic Text will give many new impulses to the study of romanticism, nineteenth-century fiction, and the origins of psychoanalysis.

Aus dem Klappentext

Romantic gothic fiction is not exciting.
Gothic novels are not ghost stories.
Gothic novels are not women's writing.
Opening with these three theses, The Gothic Text undertakes a fresh approach to a much-studied mode. Marshall Brown's book combines the teleological approach to literary history developed in his Preromanticism with a European perspective on the one truly international literary form of its era. New insights into literary history and the history of ideas provide a framework for innovative close readings that approach classics of the genre from unusual angles. Accessibly written and argued in careful, lively detail and with extended readings of Horace Walpole s The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe s The Italian, and Mary Shelley s Frankenstein, among others together with a thoroughly researched account of German romantic psychology as it developed out of Kant's idealist philosophy toward a gothic sensibility as a pioneer in the rendering of consciousness The Gothic Text will give many new impulses to the study of romanticism, nineteenth-century fiction, and the origins of psychoanalysis.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE GOTHIC TEXT

By Marshall Brown

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3912-2

Contents

Preface...................................................................ixA Note on Sources.........................................................xxiii1. Three Theses on Gothic Fiction.........................................12. Fantasia: Kant and the Demons of the Night.............................8PART IORIGINS: WALPOLE3. The Birth of The Castle of Otranto.....................................194. Excursus: Notes on the History of Psycho-Narration.....................345. Ghosts in the Flesh....................................................42PART IIKANT AND THE GOTHIC6. At the Limits of Kantian Philosophy....................................697. Kant's Disciples.......................................................858. Kant and the Doctors...................................................929. Meditative Interlude...................................................105PART IIIPHILOSOPHY OF THE GOTHIC NOVEL10. The Wild Ass's Skin...................................................11511. The Devil's Elixirs...................................................12712. Melmoth the Wanderer..................................................13513. Caleb Williams........................................................149PART IVCONSEQUENCES14. In Defense of Clich: Radcliffe's Landscapes..........................16115. Frankenstein: A Child's Tale..........................................18316. Postscript: Faust and the Gothic......................................209Notes.....................................................................223Works Cited...............................................................253Index.....................................................................271

Chapter One

Three Theses on Gothic Fiction

During the romantic decades, gothic fiction flourished not only in Great Britain and the United States but throughout much of Europe. Works such as Honor de Balzac's Wild Ass's Skin, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Devil's Elixirs, and numerous tales by Tieck, Kleist, Nodier, Pushkin, and Poe, for example, are exemplars as fine as any written in Britain. Given the international compass on the romantic gothic, it is perhaps surprising that scholarship of the genre has been largely parochial, confining itself to the literature written within specific national or linguistic borders. Certainly exceptions exist, most notably Mario Praz's classic study of the heritage of Marquis de Sade, The Romantic Agony (first published in Italian as La Morte, la carne e la diavola [Death, Flesh, and the Devil]), which examines works produced throughout the major literatures of Europe. But for the most part, books on the gothic, especially those by Anglo-American scholars, remain sturdily monoglot in their choice of subject texts. At best, English-speaking critics may nod toward German influence, idealist philosophy, or the French Revolution. But one looks long and hard for scholarly recognition of the romantic gothic as a common enterprise developed by an international community of writers.

To some extent this scholarly reticence about the romantic gothic is understandable. The romantic period was an age of growing nationalism, which bred an attendant sense of cultural separation. We take it for granted that Enlightenment artists of lasting importance were known across Europe: Mme de La Fayette, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Laurence Sterne, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and many others were European novelists, not just national ones; Nicholas-Despraux Boileau, Alexander Pope, Matthew Prior, James Thomson, Edward Young, Thomas Gray, Voltaire, and many others (though not yet Dryden) were European poets; Handel was trilingual and tricultural, and Haydn and Mozart garnered commissions and celebrity both at home and abroad. But after the revolutions, things changed. William Wordsworth and Jane Austen are pretty exclusively national treasures; likewise Friedrich Hlderlin, Jean Paul (J. P. F. Richter), Heinrich von Kleist, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), and Joseph von Eichendorff. Many great writers of the romantic era remain mostly untranslated to this day. Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel swept intellectual Germany off its feet with astonishing rapidity; they were much slower to penetrate abroad than had been their predecessors John Locke, David Hume, and the philosophes. Romantic paintings rarely crossed the Channel or the Rhine. For Beethoven, triumph meant Austria; for Rossini, Italy and, fitfully, France. Of course there were others of the romantic era-Goethe (in some of his works), Sir Walter Scott, eventually Edgar Allan Poe-who became international darlings, but they appear to have been exceptions and no longer represented the norm or the goal of artists, generally speaking.

Yet the gothic (together with its dramatic counterpart, the melodrama) remains the one form of literary endeavor that was not then and should not now be divided into national schools. Gothic fiction began unequivocally in England, with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, but it is a work that bears its internationalism in its title and in its original preface. (Imagine Austen setting a novel abroad, even fancifully. Consider what happened to Scott's work when he did.) William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, and Monk (Matthew G.) Lewis were European or even global in their settings, as in their reputations (and, in the men's case, in their formation as well). Scott's folk magicians find their original inspirations in German ballads; Wordsworth blames the depraved taste for sensationalism on German writers; Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein after reading German ghost stories in French translation; Charles Robert Maturin's devil ranges the world; Charlotte Bront's madwoman came from across the seas; Hoffmann and Eichendorff at times transported their wonders to a fantastic Italy or (in Eichendorff's case) to mysterious oceans. Even Balzac travels abroad for some of his gothic realms-setting Seraphita in Norway, "Jesus Christ in Flanders" in the Low Countries, "Massimilla Doni" and the inserted tale in "Sarrasine" in Italy; and drawing upon a seething Italy for the background of "Sarrasine" and an inscrutable Irish provenance for "Melmoth Reconciled"-because the gothic would dwindle into normality in the French bureaucracy. In an uncharacteristically uneven recent essay, Terry Castle has claimed, "To affirm, with Addison, that there is something distinctively `British' about the Gothic mode is undoubtedly true," but to my mind her claim is undoubtedly false.

In this book I have sought to respect the international character of the mode, using examples from several non-English-speaking nations in addition to those from Great Britain and the U.S. Romantic fiction from the Continent does substantially alter the balance of what one sees in the gothic. It is from the experience of reading romantic-era gothic fiction in its broad extent that I propose the three theses that follow.

1. Romantic gothic fiction is not exciting. Authors of the romantic period were quite capable of crafting page-turners and cliff-hangers. Sophia Lee's The Recess abounds with amazing turns and gripping plot lines; like virtually all writing in the period it does have gothic elements, but taking it as a gothic paradigm distorts its accomplishment as a historical novel and sheds little light on the accepted classics. Elizabeth Inchbald, for once breaking free of her depressingly conformist drama, constructed a plot of ever-growing intensity and excitement for her masterpiece, A Simple Story; here, too, a powerful psychological study of temptation and persecution would be flattened by being measured against Ann Radcliffe, and vice versa. Fascination rather than excitement is the hypnotic core of the great gothic novels. Radcliffe was known as much for her landscapes as for her ghosts, which hardly even tried to avoid the charge of hokeyness, and it was acknowledged in her own day that "her best style is essentially pictorial; and a slow development of events was, therefore, necessary to her success." The big-boned novels of Lewis and Maturin have vast empty regions; both authors also wrote more concentrated fiction and drama, which was very popular in their day but has been little read or performed since. The violence in Frankenstein looms but then takes place offstage; vast tracts of scenery make large pauses in the action; months elapse in waiting that tries to forget the lurking dangers. Especially if you come to these novels from the even slower-moving long fiction of the Germans, the protracted vacancies in the action, lyrical interludes, and romance motifs seem integral to the genre, not irritants along the way. Gothic novels are to be savored and even reflected upon; their psychosexual fantasies are more like those of Richardson than like those of the grotesquely overheated Sade.

Ghost stories can be exciting, of course. Some of the tales that Shelley and her companions read in Geneva are. They are quick and shallowly sensational. Some novels squarely in the gothic camp are sensational as well. Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya is more compact than its model, Lewis's The Monk, with much shorter chapters and many more climaxes; Radcliffe's Sicilian Romance, similarly, is shorter and more adventure-filled than her better novels. William Godwin's Caleb Williams eventually builds up a pretty head of steam; still, it earns a place in this book by virtue of its reflective dimension, which is much more in evidence than in Godwin's more plot-filled later novels, such as the overtly supernatural St Leon or the historical romance Fleetwood. Eventually, madness and cruelty grew together with a swift pace in novels like Wuthering Heights, and supernatural fiction blended with adventure plotting in Dracula and Rider Haggard's novels. But if there is a comprehensible reason why Poe dismissed long fiction as an impossibility, it is perhaps because the novels in his gothic mode do in fact constitutively lack the excitement that he sought. The failure of his apparently incomplete novel, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, shows how difficult it could be to imagine gothic fiction as a world of frenzy. Consequently, I arrive at a second thesis.

2. Gothic novels are not ghost stories. In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Shelley speaks of "my ghost story-my tiresome unlucky ghost story." It isn't clear whether she is speaking of the nightmare that begot the novel, of the kernel episode in the book, or, retrospectively, of the entire book. What is clear is that the ghost story, if there is one, is the book's jumping-off point, not its essence. If, indeed, there is a ghost story, for it is palpable that there are no actual ghosts in the book. One may well conclude from Shelley's self-disparagement that she regarded science fiction as one way of rejecting supernatural sensationalism, or of transmuting it into richer metal. Similar tendencies are pervasive in the romantic decades. One of the signature novels of the 1790s, Ludwig Tieck's William Lovell (English in title, setting, and inspiration), contains an episode of post-humous manifestations, doppelgngers, and a mysterious portrait that comes to life (bk. 3, letter 11). The episode reads as a throw-back, not of serious consequence in the plot, and it is eventually "explained" in the novel's concluding wrap-up. At the same time, it points toward the novel's central problem of the borders between error and madness, Irrtum and Irrsinn. The novel's dark protagonist is led astray not by this early supernatural silliness but by a sadistic manipulator masking himself in the pretense of visionary illumination. Serious psychological probing replaces juvenile dalliance. About Tieck's novel Friedrich Schlegel had this to say in Athenaeum Fragments: "The whole book is a contest of prose and poetry.... The absolute fantasy in this novel may be misunderstood even by devotees of poetry and scorned as merely sentimental, while its sentimentality by no means appeals to the rational reader who, in exchange for his money, demands to be touched and who finds it very wild [furios]" (frag. 418). A contest of values occurs in serious novels such as William Lovell, Frankenstein, and Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho or The Italian. It is not supernatural elements but rather displacements and renegotiations like Tieck's and Shelley's that are fundamental to the "romanticism" of the gothic. Of course, the transformations of expectation take widely varying forms, and (even in the early Tieck) they operate on political, social, and philosophical planes as well as on the psychological. All the better gothic writing has a method in its madness, an intent replacing the empty theatrics of popular supernatural fiction. For surely, even as they sought the approbation of readers and reviewers to dignify their enterprise, writers also had to endow their works with a content and a purpose. Of my three theses, this one is the true foundation of this book.

3. My third thesis is perhaps the most controversial at present. It is also the least integral to my argument. It justifies omissions rather than explaining what is included here. It is this: Gothic novels are not women's writing. In England, to be sure, women are prominent among the leading exponents of gothic fiction. "It is an odd fact," a usually meticulous scholar has written, that gothic novels, with their powerful sexuality, "were, for the most part, written by women and gay men" (Perry, "Incest," 269). But odd facts with sample sizes under a dozen are merely odd. Ruth Perry here leaves out of account Charles Brockden Brown, William Godwin, James Hogg, Edgar Allan Poe, Friedrich Schiller, Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honor de Balzac, Charles Nodier, and Aleksandr Pushkin, among others. (She does specify her terrain as "English," which might refer to the country rather than the language despite some historical material from the U.S., and she later accommodates Godwin, and could have accommodated Brown, under the ad hoc rubric "feminist men," 270.) Even in England, much of the finest fiction by women is not best regarded as gothic, though it was of course in touch with gothic impulses, as essentially all literary writing in the period was. The leading women writers in French, Mme de Stal and, later, George Sand, were not gothic novelists, nor were most of the more prominent women writers in German. It unduly limits our sense of women's literary accomplishments to single out a popularizing mode like the gothic as their particular terrain, and an exclusive focus on feminist issues (or, in a related tendency, on "feminization" and hence on gayness) limits our sense of gothic novels. This is in no sense to contest the important presence of feminist and other gender concerns in gothic novels. The sexes, the genders, bodies, and social roles are inescapable in almost all novels, and certainly in most gothic fiction. Other critics, including some of the most powerful and most influential on my own approach, have examined gender issues in detail. I have chosen, rather, to explore avenues that have remained outside the scope of the proliferating writing on gothic fiction. I have no polemical intention in adding a new perspective to the many already in circulation. But it remains important to point out that I am not betraying some imagined essence of the gothic by turning the focus away from sexuality. There is more than one way to skin the black cat of the gothic novel.

Chapter Two

Fantasia Kant and the Demons of the Night

I Listen, for a moment, to the demons of the night. Their accents have become worn with time and familiarity; let them recover the sharp freshness of the dawning of dream and madness.

Night envelops the earth.... The noise of the wind crying or whistling through the ill-jointed planks of the casement is all that remains of the ordinary impressions of your senses, and at the end of some instants, you imagine that this murmur itself exists within you. It becomes a voice of your soul, the echo of an undefinable but fixed idea that blends with the first perceptions of sleep. You begin this nocturnal life that takes place (O wonder!) in worlds ever new, among creatures whose form the great Spirit has conceived without deigning to complete it, content to sow them, flighty and mysterious phantoms, in the limitless universe of dreams.... For a long while you see the transparent and motley dust escaping like a little luminous cloud in the middle of an extinct sky.... The imagination of a man asleep, in the power of his independent, solitary soul, participates to some degree in the perfection of spirits. It springs up with them, and, miraculously carried into the midst of the aerial chorus of dreams, it flies from surprise to surprise until the instant when the song of morning alerts its adventuresome escort to the return of light. Frightened by the premonitory cry, ... they fall, rebound, reascend, cross like atoms driven by contrary powers, and disappear in disorder in a ray of sun. (Nodier, "Smarra," in Contes, 84-85)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE GOTHIC TEXTby Marshall Brown Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804739129
• ISBN 13: 9780804739122
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 308
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar