-1THE RISE OF THE GOTHIC NOVEL, Maggie Kilgour

The Nature of Gothic

In general the gothic has been associated with a rebellion against a constraining
neoclassical aesthetic ideal of order and unity, in order to recover a suppressed primitive
and barbaric imaginative freedom.
It has also been treated as a kind of missing generic link between the romance and the
novel.
The form itself is a Frankesteins monster, assembled out of bits and pieces of the past.
Gothic creation suggests a view of the imagination not as an originating faculty but as a
power of combination.
An analysis of the form often devolves into a cataloguing of stock characters and devices
which are simply recycled from one text to the next.
It also seems a confused and self-contradictory form, ambivalent and unsure of its own
aims and implications. These contradictions have been reflected in the criticism.
Some modern critics have wanted to assert its psychological complexity.
Others have agreed that gothic is simplistic in its representation of character, which it
subordinates to plot, scenery, and moralising. Critics who agree on this point,
however, still debate its implications. Elizabeth Napier argues that this focus on
surfaces reveals that the gothic, is a shallow and superficial form. Keily argues that the
subordination of person to place enables the gothic to explore the whole concept of
individual identity, to show human personality as essentially unstable and
inconsistent. For Robert Miles it is a site, a carnivalesque mode which represents the
subject finding itself dispossessed in its own home, in a condition of rupture,
disjunction, fragmentation.
Ian Watt, however, argues that the gothics main concern is not to depict character but
to create a feeling or effect in its readers by placing them in a state of thrilling
suspense and uncertainty. It has also been involved in discussions concerning the
relation of art to life, aesthetics to ethics.
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The gothic played a significant part in late 18 -century debates over the moral dangers of
reading.
Some of the more power critiques of the force of the gothic appear within the gothic.
The gothic seems to both represent and punish the imaginations power to realise its
own desires. While to earlier conservative moralists the gothics offer of an
imaginative retreat from reality was seen as a potentially amoral subversion of social
order, to many modern critics this has proved to be a reactionary, socially conservative
form. Reading can be seen as a dangerously conservative substitute for political and
social action, offering an illusory transformation to impede real change by making
women content with their lot, and keeping them at home - reading.
The fact that the endings are often unsatisfactory when compared to the delicious
experience of the middle of the text, might in itself suggest a radical, antiteleological,
model for reading, in which closure is deprivileged.
Some recent critics have claimed further that it is in its potential as a vehicle for female
anger that the gothic provides a plot of feminine subversion.
/By cloaking familiar images of domesticity in gothic forms, it enables us to see that the
home is a prison, in which the helpless female is at the mercy of ominous patriarchal
authorities.

-2 For Day the gothic exposes the gothic reality of modern identity, and by failing to present
an adequate solution it forces its readers to address them in real life.
Past and Present
Since Ian Watt, the rise of the British novel proper has been tied to the emergence of
Protestant bourgeois culture. The gothics relation to the class that produced and
consumed it has seemed convoluted. The gothic is part of the reaction against the
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political, social, scientific, industrial and epistemological revolutions of the 17 and 18
centuries which enabled the rise of the middle class
Like Romanticism, the gothic is especially a revolt against a mechanistic or atomistic view
of the world, in favour of recovering an earlier organic model. The location of authority
within the individual is suspected of leading to rampant and anti-social individualism.
The gothic villain is frequently an example of the modern materialistic individual taken
to an extreme. The gothic is thus a nightmarish vision of a modern world made up of
detached individuals fragmented and alienated from each others and ultimately from
themselves. Normal human relationships are defamiliarised and critiqued by being
pushed to destructive extremes. Incest in particular, suggests an abnormal and extreme
desire that is antithetical to and subversive of social requirements. Individualism further
creates a broader conflict between individual desire and social duty. Most commonly,
gothic novels revolve around a battle between antithetical sexes, in which an aggressive
sexual male is set against a passive spiritual female, who is identified with the restrictions
of social norms
Concerning the gothics relationship to the past Samuel Kliger noted that the modern use
of the word gothic connected specifically to the imaginary ancient constitution of
Britain, thus associated with native political freedom based on the true Gothick
Constitution which resists tyrannical foreign laws. While the term gothic could thus be
used to demonise the past as a dark age of feudal tyranny, it could also be used equally to
idealise it as a golden age of innocent liberty.
The gothic is thus haunted by a reading of history as a dialectical process of alienation and
restoration, dismembering and remembering, a version of the secularised myth of fall and
return, which, as M.H. Abrams showed, is central to Romanticism.
The Sublime and the Odd
The gothic becomes easily allied with Rousseaunian primitivism. While for Rousseau the
past is irretrievable, the gothic tries to use its necromantic powers to raise it. An idealised
past is constructed in order to deconstruct a degenerate modernity. Gothic writers will
often claim that their stories came to them in their dreams, and were written not only
about but from demonic compulsion. With the striking exception of Radcliffe, the gothic
author often seems a passive vehicle, a rather crude version of the Romantic artist. One of
the consequences of this strategy of self effacement, however, is that it encourages a
transference of authority and responsibility from the writer to the reader.
It might have been an aesthetic dead end if the terrifying events of the 1790s had not made
it an appropriate vehicle for embodying relevant political and aesthetic questions.
The French revolution created a lot of heated discussions which implicated gothic as well.
According to Burke the Revolution is an artificial entity, a grotesquely unnatural body
politic, fabricated by a conspirational band of illuminati, the models for many gothic
villains. Burke represents the Revolution in terms of gothic imagery of grave robbing,
parents dismembering their children and children dismembering their parents.

-3 The potential solution that gothic offers reproduces the problem, as the restoration of
original unity itself turns into the monstrous merging and confusion of differences.
Attacking the present, the gothic ends up also parodying its own enterprise.
Everything that Rises Must Converge
The sublime further informs the gothics narrative principle of prolonged suspense. The
suspense and the unimaginative ending suggest a contradiction between what Freud
would call a reality principle, which pushes the narrative forward to get to the truth, the
moment of revelation, and a pleasure principle, which attempts to defer this moment, to
enjoy the aesthetic experience of the suspense itself. The general effect is often to create a
sense of stasis, and non-development.
The gothic has been described as an immature form, a throwback to an earlier stage of the
literary tradition which rises in infantile resistance to the grand progress of the novel
proper towards the maturity of realism. Gothic authors too often are described as
children.
The gothic interest in the child is of course a manifestation of a broader interest in
individual as well as historical past which appears at this time. The freedom of childhood
was opposed to the slavery of adulthood in the same way that the natural freedom of the
individual was antithetical to the society.
Reflecting a rise of interest in eccentrics and abnormal states of mind, the gothic expands
on the stories in the margins of Lockes texts, focusing on children who do not grow up,
or who become eccentrics, whose development is not teleological but caught up in a
repetition compulsion.
The gothic both represents and distorts the Romantic artists attempt to recover an earlier
stage of individual development,childhood, which is idealised, like the gothic middle
ages, as a time of symbiotic unity and oneness with the world before the alienation of
adulthood set in.
The gothic thus constructs a distorted version of the Bildungsromans narrative of normal
maturation. Like its ancestor, the romance, the gothic has been associated with the preoedipal, oral, phase, and thus with the failure of normal maturation.
In its elimination of autonomy as the goal of development, it raises questions about both
personal identity and sexual identity.
Some recent discussions of the gothic have identified two traditions of the gothic, one male
and one female. Male identity is based on autonomy, while female identity is conceived as
essentially relational. In the gothic these two gender positions are pushed to extremes,
both in representation of character and in narrative structure. In the male gothic the focus
of the narrative is on the individual as satanic revolutionary superman, who is so
extremely alienated that he cannot be integrated into society. The basic narrative form is
linear, causal. In contrast, the female pattern has a circular form that works to eliminate
conflict and radical discontinuity. The male plot is one of teleological development
towards detachment; the female, one of repetition and continuity. The male hero achieves
what is commonly seen as the goal of male development: autonomy; the female heroine
what is commonly seen her lot: relationship. Each extreme is achieved, however, at a
price. The first implies that individuality makes society impossible, the second that
society makes individuality impossible.
These two traditions, divided by gender, suggest - superficially - polar political
implications. The male gothic seems revolutionary while the female seems reactionary.
The female suggests a bourgeois aesthetic. In the female gothic, the private world is
turned temporarily into a house of horrors but this transformation cannot serve as a

-4revelation of the fundamental reality that the bourgeois home is a gothic prison for
women.
The gothic is an extremely allusive form that is self-conscious of its own literary traditions;
intertextuality is one way of imagining reconciliation. One of the most omnipresent
spectres called back in the gothic is that of Milton, whose version of the myth of fall and
redemption, creation and decreation, is, as Frankestein again reveals, an important model
for gothic plots. His Satan provided an important model for the gothic villain. He is the
tragic individual, whose grandeur is increased by the fact that his quest is doomed by a
predetermined fate. As the prototype for the gothic version of the individual, he suggests
the illusory nature of individuality. Furthermore, through romantic readings of Satan as a
figure for Milton himself, he anticipates a gothic identification of an author with a satanic
figure. Writers like Lewis and Wilde identified themselves with their gothic villains. If the
gothic identifies reader and text, it also often assumes a peculiarly intimate relationship
between author and text.
Like Miltons Satan, Rousseau provides a link between the gothic villain and the Romantic
artist as revolutionary, the outsider and outcast. The artist is in fact the ideal individual,
whose natural desires alienate him from a hypocritical society that resents his revelation
of its underlying truths. Rousseau is the model for both Romantic artist and gothic villain,
the individual at odds with society because of his individuality, who yet has no power of
self-determination of self-control.
The gothic world seems a revolutionary one in a literal sense, in which one thing becomes
its opposite. Politically, it begins as a conservative reaction against a progressive and
radical middle class; as that class establishes itself as the new status quo, the
revolutionary possibilities of the form appear. The degeneration into conventionality is
the inevitable fate of a form that depends on suspense.