The Evasion of Literary History

Abstract

The origins of most literary genres are lost, either in scholarly controversy or the dark backward and abysm of time, but the Gothic novel presents an admirable clarity. The antiquarian and aesthete Horace Walpole, inspired by a nightmare involving “a gigantic hand in armour,” wrote a novella-length narrative published in December 1764 as The Castle of Otranto. It was akin to similar forgeries evoking the Middle Ages that appeared in the 1760s, like James Macpherson’s “translations” of Ossian and Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems. But unlike the other forgeries, Otranto had legs: it stimulated the historical romance, developed by Clara Reeve in The Old English Baron (1777) and Sophia Lee in The Recess (1783–1785), which reached something like canonical status with the medieval romances of Walter Scott.The supernatural terror Walpole’s tale evoked took longer to erupt. It was not until the last decade of the eighteenth century that thrilling tales of horror set in Italian castles and Spanish monasteries began to crowd out novels of manners set in London townhouses and Hampshire mansions. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), by Ann Radcliffe, and The Monk (1796), by Matthew G. Lewis, spawned hundreds of imitations in a craze whose original impetus carried it into the next century. A dozen, perhaps, were works of talent and genius, among which were Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). By then, the original impulse of the Gothic romance had played itself out, although the tale of terror was to survive as an element within and as an influence upon mainstream realist fiction through the Victorian era, and in its purest form as a minor component of the house of fiction in both serious and popular narrative up to the present.This narrative of the Gothic’s origin, development, effulgence, and fall is a familiar story; it began to be told almost exactly a century ago, when Edith Birkhead published her learned and balanced study, The Tale of Terror (1921). English literature had long been a subject of scholarly inquiry, but it wasn’t entirely clear in the early twentieth century that the Gothic novel could be considered “literature” in the evaluative sense of the word, so Birkhead was something of a pioneer. Only a handful of books on the Gothic followed over the next fifty years, but around 1978 there began a major revival of interest by literary scholars and critics that has shown no sign of stopping. Part of the impetus may have come from feminism and gender theory—many significant Gothic novels were written by women and gay men, and as a genre the Gothic was also gendered as female reading—so it is no accident that some of the groundbreaking studies of Gothic were written by queer theorists Eve Sedgwick, George Haggerty, and Jack Halberstam, or that feminists Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar viewed canonical texts by women through a Gothic lens. But that era was an age of theory generally, so we should not be surprised that the Gothic was also psychoanalyzed by David Punter and Michele Massé, viewed through the New Historicism by Nancy Armstrong, and deconstructed by Tilottama Rajan. My own contribution to this welter of words about the Gothic, The Progress of Romance (1996), was an attempt to understand the history of the Gothic in its first flowering 1764–1820 in three different ways, as an outgrowth of inexorable tensions within Georgian society, as an institutional form of narrative, and as texts that altered the literary responses and motivations of the reading public.A century after Birkhead the Cambridge History of the Gothic has arrived, a monument in three volumes, not a monograph but a collection of sixty-odd essays headed up by three general editors evidently led by Dale Townshend of Manchester Metropolitan University, the only name on all three volumes. I’ll be reviewing the first two volumes, which is all Cambridge was able to send me,1 and I’m going to discuss a few of the most interesting essays before analyzing the curation of these volumes and the business model of academic publication that brought them into existence.But right at the start it is hard to avoid noticing what an awkward idea it was, for both the writers and readers of the Cambridge History, that the volumes break at 1800 and 1900. Since the first heyday of the Gothic continues through about 1820, it might have made more sense for Volume I’s “Long Eighteenth Century” to have ended there; Volume II could reasonably end at World War I.2 Only a few essays in Volume I deal with the period before 1740, while those in Volume II were often forced to cover a lengthy and diverse period in a very few pages. Charles L. Crow’s essay on “The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century America,” for example, took us from the New England radical Charles Brockden Brown to Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers (II: 376–93). Crow managed to get it all in, using a series of nine short segments that concisely capture a variety of disparate text types. One segment, “Power of Blackness,” dealt with the three key figures of dark romanticism: Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. But others, like “Mysteries of Philadelphia and the Hudson Valley” discussed writers previously unknown to me like Rebecca Rush, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Robert Montgomery Bird, and William Gilmore Simms, along with canonical authors like Washington Irving. Crow’s incisive writing makes the journey enjoyable, but we are clearly on a bullet train covering a continent over a century, and the authors and titles flicker by as we pass. (By contrast, Angela Wright gave herself a chapter on “The Summer of 1816.”)One of the genuinely excellent essays in Volume I was James Uden’s “Reassessing the Gothic/Classical Relationship” (I: 161–79). A classicist at Boston University, Uden finds three stages in this opposition, all of which demonstrate the Gothic writer having serious fun at the expense of the classics. At first, the authority of the classical is directly challenged: the classics are not merely ignored but elaborately spoofed. Horace Walpole “scrambl[es] ancient texts and myths”—and Uden cites the Latin epigraph of The Castle of Otranto, taken from Horace’s Ars Poetica lines 7–9 but cleverly misquoted so as to reverse Horace’s recommendation of artistic unity. Second, there comes a reaction against the challenge. Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron is the example here. Rather than being a tame version of Walpole’s Gothic, Uden suggests that it should be read “as a meld of Plutarchan moralism and contemporary narrative form.” Reeve’s critical essay on the novel, The Progress of Romance, reframes the epics of Homer and Vergil as an important element of the tradition of the contemporary novel. “Reeve reassesses the distinction between the Gothic and the Classical by making the two look surprisingly alike” [171]. Finally, “the Classical world is seen through a Gothic lens.” One of his examples is Matthew Lewis’s “The Love of Gain” (1799), which “frequently deviates from its Latin original [Juvenal’s Satire XIII] to incorporate scenes reminiscent of The Monk and his melodrama The Castle Spectre, so that the Classical imitation becomes an implicit commentary on his own Gothic literary works” [175]. Another is Frankenstein, seen as Shelley’s imitation of both Ovid and Aeschylus (Metamorphoses I: 80–87 and Prometheus Bound, respectively).My favorite of the essays in Volume I was Robert Miles’s “Time in the Gothic” (I: 426–49). Miles, now at the University of Victoria, started his career with Gothic Writing: A Genealogy (1993) using Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses, with its notion of a historical coupure between the Classical and the Modern epistemes, as the can-opener to understand Gothic as a mode of écriture, a discursive practice, that bridges the void between the Age of Sensibility (within the Classical Episteme) and the Age of Romanticism (Modern Episteme). His essay in the Cambridge History patriotically adopts a Canadian rather than a French can-opener, in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2013). Like Foucault, Taylor is interested in explaining how modern thought and the modern self emerged, and as in Foucault, the coupure is located around the time the Enlightenment gives way to Romanticism around the turn of the nineteenth century.Different from Foucault, but not all that different: as before, the texts Miles is most interested in straddle the boundary between the premodern and modern ages. Radcliffe has not quite crossed the divide to secularity: for her “the autonomous self is forever on the point of inward collapse.” Miles draws out in his essay the consequences for Radcliffe’s Udolpho, Bürger’s “Lenore,” and Coleridge’s “Christabel” of the Gothic being on the cusp of secularity, with one world dead, the other powerless to be born. If one has a sense that Miles is playing new innings of a game he played three decades ago, his essay nevertheless gives one a sense of discovery rather than a duty dance with the old familiar texts.Not my favorite but an essay I wished longer was Peter N. Lindfield’s “Gothic Revival Architecture before Walpole.” Lindfield, of Manchester Metropolitan University, gives us a sure-footed and serviceable guide to late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gothic revival architecture, and we hear about most of the usual suspects: Wren, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, Kent, and the “notorious” Batty Langley. Lindfield stops the show with Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, but does not go on to consider what many think is the choicest morsel of Gothic Revival connected with literature: William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, designed and built by James Wyatt beginning in 1796. It was far more spectacular than Strawberry, but we know it only from sketches because the structure—including a 300-foot tall octagonal tower—was unstable and fell into a Gothic ruin about a dozen years after it was completed. It seems a shame that Beckford’s Vathek is treated in Volume I but not his Gothic revival home. And would that Lindfield had also been turned loose on the innovations in landscape architecture of the period.The equivalent essay in Volume II was Alexandra Warwick’s essay, “Nineteenth-Century Gothic Architectural Aesthetics: A.W.N. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris” (II: 118–38). Warwick, from the University of Westminster, leads off with a propulsive narrative about the destruction by fire of the Houses of Parliament in 1834 and the competition for a design for rebuilding them in a style that would mesh with the medieval buildings that had been saved. Like several others, she notes that the Gothic was political and that for the nineteenth century it signified a myth: the free and democratic institutions of Teutonic tribes standing up to Roman and Norman invaders with autocratic ideas of divine right. Warwick traces this political aesthetic through the three figures she discusses, even though they had little influence on each other. (And she mentions, though she does not discuss, Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey.)Another essay in Volume II that taught me a great deal was Anthony Mandal’s “Gothic Fiction, from Shilling Shockers to Penny Bloods”(II: 139–61). Mandal, from Cardiff University, gives us a clearly written and straightforward account of cheap popular fiction in the nineteenth century, “blue books” and chapbooks in the early part of the century, contemporary with the vogue of the Gothic, “penny bloods” in the midcentury (1840–1870), and “penny dreadfuls” around the fin de siecle. The blue books were imitations or plagiarized abridgments of longer Gothic novels like The Monk and The Italian. In his article on the Sadleir-Black Collection at the University of Virginia, Frederick Frank called these texts “the toxic literary waste . . . of the period.”3 It’s hard to write anything very interesting about the recycling of earlier texts, but Mandal discusses some of the innovations in pamphlet and book production that made the blue books and chapbooks profitable, and he finds a couple of auteurs, Isaac Crookenden and Sarah Wilkinson, who put their personal stamp on the mechanical product. In the midcentury period, novels were often published as serials, and here Mandal focuses primarily onG. M. W. Reynolds’ sprawling 1844–1848 serial, Mysteries of London. Written in imitation of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris, it had a working-class sensibility in that revolutionary era: instead of evil abbesses and marquises, the power that threatens to crush the protagonists is wielded in the 1840s by the establishment: “politicians, financiers, lawyers, and venal public servants” (153). It’s a text whose vision bears comparison to Dickens’ Bleak House (1852–1853), though Mandal does not go there. Around the same time (1846–1847), Lloyd’s Weekly Magazine serialized A String of Pearls, by J. M. Rymer and T. P. Prest, best known today as the novel behind the late Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street with its mordant view of the rich who feed off the poor and, with the aid of Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, vice versa. Mandal has only a few pages for the “penny dreadfuls” of the 1860–1890 era, which he differentiates as periodicals with tales of violent action and crime aimed specifically at children, with heroes like the eighteenth-century highwayman Dick Turpin and the adventurous Jack Harkaway.Perhaps, my favorite essay in Volume II was Maximiliaan van Woudenberg’s “Fantasmagoriana: The Cosmopolitan Gothic and Frankenstein” (II: 41–64). Everyone who has read or taught Frankenstein in the 1831 revision is likely to be aware of Mary Shelley’s account of the genesis of the novel, how in June of 1816 “some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands” and that it was under their influence that Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. Woudenberg, a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge, identifies the volumes as Fantasmagoriana and views the moment as “a particularly cosmopolitan event: an English literary coterie reading a French-edited translation of popular German ghost stories acquired from a Swiss library or bookstore that inspired English Gothic classics of enduring fame” (II: 55–56). It’s a clever sentence, but the excellence of Woudenberg’s essay lies in the careful way he traces the text of Fantasmagoriana backwards and forwards. Woudenberg works backwards from Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès 1812 translation/edition of the narratives to the German sources from which they were selected, primarily the first two volumes of the Gespensterbuch (1810–1811) of Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun. In addition, Eyriès included a folktale by Musäus, an earlier story by Apel, a story by Heinrich Clauren, and, most complex, a told-as-true narrative of ghostly visitation written by Clauren for one Berlin periodical, which was queried and rewritten by Apel for a different periodical, two versions that Eyriès wove together as a single pastiche. The very title of Eyriès’ volumes, Fantasmagoriana, alludes to the magic lantern shows presenting ghostly images that became popular entertainments starting in Germany in the 1770s, then spreading like the ghost stories from Germany to France and then to England, where Byron and the Shelleys probably experienced them in London. Some versions of these fantasmagoria included experiments with the new phenomenon of electricity—like producing Galvanic responses, temporary movements in dead bodies—that directly influenced Mary Shelley’s narrative. Woudenberg then works forwards, discussing the specific stories in Eyriès collection and how certain elements from them worked their way into Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s a synthetic as opposed to an analytic essay, one that gives us a fascinating sense of how disparate influences combined in the crucible of Shelley’s mind to produce her masterpiece.With limited space, I cannot do justice to all the excellent essays in the first two volumes. Let me merely mention Deborah Russell’s “Domestic Gothic Writing after Horace Walpole and before Ann Radcliffe,” which fills in that embarrassing quarter-century gap; Yael Shapira’s “The Gothic Novel Beyond Radcliffe and Lewis,” which makes a case for the originality of some of the lesser-known competitors of the most celebrated Gothic writers; Barry Murnane’s “The German ‘School’ of Horrors: A Pharmacology of the Gothic,” on a group of German texts of the late eighteenth century whose translation into English influenced and invigorated Gothic writing in Great Britain; and Tamar Heller’s “Victorian Domestic Gothic Fiction,” about the “sensation novels” of Bronte, Braddon, and Woods, focusing on the moral panic into which the staid Victorian reader was thrown by the sympathy with which these texts invested women’s deviant desires. That said, with about a dozen exceptions, the writing for these volumes is dull and routine; few of the contributors write cogently, or incisively, or even with a sense of discovery. Most of them, including the general editors in the articles they assigned to themselves, seem to be dutifully surveying well-traveled ground. A few peddled minor bits of misinformation.4 One can hardly imagine anyone other than a reviewer reading these volumes straight through.So exactly what did the general editors have in mind in creating three volumes with sixty-seven separate essays titled The Cambridge History of the Gothic? The editors define their task as “the compilation of a comprehensive cultural history of the Gothic that runs from antiquity to the present day” (I: 18). Comprehensive is not the key word here: although texts written in languages other than English are occasionally discussed, the focal culture is British.5 The key word is “compilation”: they want to chronicle “transitions” and “significant moments” and “cultural events.”But literary history in a strict sense, trying to understand why the Gothic novel originated and developed, when and where and how it did so, is not really what they should even be trying to write, because they do not think it is what the Gothic wants. “To write a history of the Gothic is thus to engage with a literary mode that resists the tidy, linear and teleological compulsions of history itself, compulsions all too often associated with the Gothic through the numerous ‘Whiggish’ critical accounts of its ‘rise’ and ‘development’ across time” (I: 11). So the editors are “jettisoning the more familiar ‘generic’ or ‘formal’ approaches to the field”; instead they “are guided by a strongly revisionist impulse”: they want to “counter the inveterate tendency” to trace the origin of the Gothic novel to The Castle of Otranto,6 or to “collectively change the once-prevalent argument that held that, following Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer of 1820, the gothic went ‘underground’ … prior to enjoying a concerted ‘renaissance’ in popular fiction in the Victorian fin de siècle” (I: 18–19).7The general editors never tire of claiming that the Gothic is not a form or a genre, it is a rather a “mode.” In the Introduction to Volume II, Townshend claims that after the 1820s the Gothic “loses much of its formal and generic stability, fragmenting and dissolving into a mercurial mode” (II: 16). Even that may sound too much like a historical judgment for Townshend’s antihistorical frame of mind, and he cannot help deconstructing it: “even in the earlier period, the Gothic had always been more a fluid ‘mode’ of cultural expression than a fixed and static literary genre” (II: 16, emphasis mine). Catherine Spooner, the editor of Volume III, in her introduction has the same insistence on treating the Gothic as a “mode,” although unlike Townshend and Wright, Spooner sees the defects as well as the virtues of doing so:A mode is an aspect or set of aspects whereby one cultural production can be seen as analogous to another. But analogical relationships are not causal, and thus a mode cannot have a coherent history any more than there can be a history of all the novels with a heroine named Sarah or of all the poems that begin with the word When. So I find it ironic that these volumes, filled with random-seeming chapters,8 contemptuous of Whiggish critical accounts, should be called The Cambridge History of the Gothic.And why are they so called? The acknowledgments page of Volume I lets us know that the project was initiated not by its editors but by the then editorial director of the Cambridge University Press, and it was under her encouragement that it expanded from a one-volume to a three-volume opus. Its editors should be properly proud that its publication is mentioned explicitly in Cambridge University Press’s Annual Report for 2021:In this overview of the ecology of academic publishing, there are individual titles, presumably of monographs, presumably eminently worthy of publication: Cambridge is clearly not stinting at its traditional role. But at the pinnacle are the Cambridge Histories, which will be sold collectively by subscription to university and municipal libraries, primarily as e-books, which cost little to typeset and nothing at all to print or to warehouse. And then there are the handbooks, similar to the Cambridge Histories in being compilations of separate essays rather than monographs, but mere one-volume productions.On the subject of handbooks, the editors’ dig at “the more familiar ‘generic’ or ‘formal’ approaches to the field” is footnoted with a list of ten “available ‘Companions’ to the Gothic” published between 2002 and 2019 (I: 18). That was by no means an exhaustive account: I take the liberty of supplementing their list with fifteen others found through the database WorldCat:What is striking is not only how many of these “handbooks” and “companions” there are, but also the exponential increase in the period from 2017 to the present: from ten published between 2002 and 2016 to fifteen in only the last five years. (Striking also is the overlap between the editors of these collections and the authors of chapters in the three volumes of the Cambridge History of the Gothic.)This is the way we publish now, in overlapping handbooks and companions and supersized companions in three volumes labeled as “history.” This is also the way our university libraries’ limited budgets for books and periodicals is expended, almost certainly at the expense of monographs expressing individual voices and visions. This is where the dream of open access has gone to die.