Gothic Texts Research Articles

<i>Queer Gothic</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Queer Gothic Scarlet Bowen Queer Gothic. By George Haggerty. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. 248. $65.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper). George Haggerty's Queer Gothic is remarkable in its scope, taking us on a fascinating tour of the first British gothic novels by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe all the way to present-day vampire fictions by Anne Rice. By conducting such a sweeping historical survey punctuated with insightful close readings, Haggerty succeeds in illustrating the argument that gothic fiction is not just queer in an uncanny sense but that gothic fiction's queerness has always been and continues to be concerned with manifestations of nonnormative sexual and romantic desires. As Haggerty shows, from its very inception the gothic novel emerged in the late eighteenth century in Great Britain as a counterdiscourse to a host of novels, conduct books, and tracts about sexuality that increasingly promoted the organization of sexuality along heteronormative lines. [End Page 578] What is most daring and therefore sometimes less successful, however, is Haggerty's methodological aim of showing how gothic fiction "anticipates the history of sexuality and gives that history its most basic materials" (5). What Haggerty refers to by this incredibly broad concept varies throughout the book, and thus it may be helpful to tease out some of the specific meanings he assigns to "the history of sexuality." On the one hand, "the history of sexuality" refers to theories of sexuality produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe. Thus Haggerty aims to show how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British gothic texts both anticipate and deviate from later theories articulated by Freud, sexologists, Judith Butler, and Foucault, to name a few. His investment in how early works are in conversation with these later theories exists in tension with another endeavor, which is to articulate how representations of sexuality reflect and produce historically and culturally specific attitudes toward sexuality and sexual identity. These two aims and meanings of "the history of sexuality" are not irreconcilable, and Haggerty in several parts of the book uses both approaches fruitfully, but one often feels that in his attempt "to look forward from the eighteenth century to understand how gothic fiction gave sexuality a history in the first place" (5) he neglects to examine the ways gothic texts speak to their own historical moment. One of the principal challenges that historians of sexuality face is to divest ourselves of modern preconceptions and definitions of sexuality in order to be attentive to different formations of desire in the past or in cultures different from our own. Haggerty innovatively answers this challenge in part by foregrounding Western society's inherited ideas of sexuality and looking to early gothic fictions for signs of their alterity. This approach succeeds not only in revealing the historical situatedness of certain universalizing theories of sexuality but also in expanding our sense of the many ways there are to organize and theorize desire. In chapter 2 Haggerty shows how productive this approach can be by looking at how Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797) depict alternative configurations of Freud's "family romance." Walpole's gothic novel, instead of abiding by the logics of an Oedipal narrative, portrays a father who wishes to supplant his son and marry his son's fiancée. Reversing Freud's conception of normative female development, the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe predicate the heroine's transition to adult heterosexuality on a reunion with the maternal: "The maternal figure in 'female gothic' holds out the possibility of love, of self-realization, and of escape from the confines of patriarchal culture" (15). Haggerty also draws out the erotic associations of Ellena's attraction to her mother, in effect queering the heterosexual romance in the novel. Haggerty convincingly shows that Vivaldi has to compete with Ellena's love for her mother before he can marry her and that he is rendered attractive only insofar as he resembles the [End Page 579] attributes of Ellena's mother (35). This approach results in similar findings in his analysis of Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya (1806), but in this instance the protagonist, Victoria, is negatively...

Amitié sincère

Amitié Sincère – a Counter Narrative and a Story of Love Between Women. A Reading of Karen Blixen’s/Isak Dinesen’s »The Roads Round Pisa«
 »The Roads Round Pisa« is the opening story in Karen Blixen’s debut work Seven Gothic Tales (1934). It is also one of her most remarkable stories and the one that most openly questions heterosexuality as a road to happiness. Blixen often works with an ironic, intertextual play with other texts, which takes the character of a counter narrative. Early on, both Ellen Moers and the Gothic scholar David Punter saw the connection between Blixen’s interest in the Gothic tradition and a gender critical attitude. In spite of Dinesen’s use of the Gothic this has not played any central role in the Dinesen reception. Modern researchers on the Gothic period, like Cyndy Hendershot, have pointed out how the disruption of stable notions of gender and sexuality is a characteristic of the genre. It is in this respect Blixen’s relation to the Gothic tradition should be investigated. Her texts are full of skeletons and ghosts, and with a focus on the fundamental instability of identity, gender and sexuality.
 In this article, which is part of a larger project on Blixen and the Gothic, I argue that, by connecting Blixen again to this disruptive Gothic tradition of transgressing gender we can also change our way of reading her. Where earlier feminist readings have looked for feminist representations in Blixen, I suggest a change of focus, to how intertextual »genre trouble« also produces »gender trouble.« Blixen’s feminism works through criticism and irony. Through a reading of »The Roads Round Pisa«, I will show how the Gothic and the gender criticism work together in an intertextual play with two classical Gothic texts; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, to tell a story of love and loyalty between women.

EBooks on Demand (EOD): a European digitization service

Within the framework of the European Union funded project Digitization on Demand (2006—2008), the eBooks on Demand service (EOD) is currently available in more than eighteen libraries in ten countries. EOD enables users to order public domain books as PDF eBooks. The requested books are digitized, delivered as an eBook and saved long-term in a digital library. The EOD service is implemented within the framework of a network. The individual library is responsible for the processing of the order and the digitization. The ordering of eBooks, delivery to the customer, electronic payment and automatic text recognition even for old and gothic font texts are supported through a central database with web access. The basic advantages of the network lie on the one hand in the reduced workload of individual libraries and on the other hand in the recognition value of the EOD service for the user and the public.

Charlotte M. Yonge: Reading, Writing, and Recycling Historical Fiction in the Nineteenth Century

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] Budge argues convincingly that the “Victorian typological world view” should be traced—not to the impact of German idealism or early nineteenth‐century Evangelicalism—but to the Common Sense philosophers and theologians of the late eighteenth century such as Joseph Butler. An expanded version of Budge’s analysis here appears in chapters four and five of his recent book, Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism, and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2007). [2] Yonge slightly misquotes canto II, verse iv, substituting “thou must watch with me” for “I shall watch with thee”. The line also appears earlier in canto I, verse xxii in the form “he shall watch with thee”, as part of Lady Branksome’s instructions to her retainer (Scott, Poetical Works 6). [3] See R.B. Anolik, “Gothic Murder: Containment of Horror in Charlotte Yonge’s Chantry House”, for a fuller exploration of Yonge’s engagement with the Gothic genre in this novel. This paper suggests that Yonge creates a “moral synthesis” which brings closure to the “typically disruptive Gothic text”. [4] Ironically, the box of silver coins has been planted by Lovel—who is believed to be illegitimate himself and thus rejected as a suitor for Isabella Wardour—in an effort to save Sir Arthur from ruin (295–96). [5] The two ladies afford a great contrast, though. While Lady Glenallen is a sinister matriarch whose wicked and duplicitous attempt to prevent her son’s marriage leads to the suicide of the woman he loves and his own decline, Margaret Winslow is a victim of family pride and greed. The first creates a destructive family secret, the consequences of which are only set right by her death; the second exposes a fraud after her own demise. [6] Yonge herself was aware of the criticism in sections of the press concerning her use of the supernatural, and wrote to her friend Miss Barnett that “indeed I did not put in the ghost for the sake of variety or sensation, but to work out my own belief and theory. I could tell you things that I quite believe that chime with it” (Coleridge, Yonge 306).

The Gothic Text (review)

Reviewed by: The Gothic Text Robert Miles Marshall Brown . The Gothic Text. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 312pp. US$48. ISBN 978-0-8047-3912-2. The Gothic Text is trained on a single, bewildering consequence of modernity: the astonishing fact of "mind." The modern historicizing school of Gothic criticism has tended to marginalize Immanuel Kant as a peripheral figure who could have had little impact on, and therefore relevance to, the ideological material narrated by the Gothic. In direct opposition to this critical tendency, Marshall Brown meditates on a fundamental consequence of Kantian philosophy: the defamiliarization [End Page 181] of mind. Although British empiricism had the capacity to render the mind passing strange, especially as it drove a sceptical wedge between sense data and things, it rested on a camera obscura model of mental functioning that reinforced naturalism. Thus, while one might question the relationship between the image cast on the mind's tabula rasa, and its source, the unintended consequence of the metaphor was to reinforce a model in which, as Richard Rorty puts it, "all the knowing gets done" under "the gaze of the unblinking Eye of the Mind" (cited in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992], 55). Even for sceptics, the mind was a box in which sense data impinged on a receptive consciousness. By contrast, Kantian philosophy closed the shutter on the world of things. It ushered in a form of radical subjectivity in which the mind shadowboxed with itself, disconnected from anything graspable through "common sense." For Brown, the Gothic is the literary form that arose in astonished contemplation of this fact. Brown begins his revisionist reading with three theses, each carefully designed to pick apart the critical consensus: Romantic Gothic fiction is not exciting ; Gothic novels are not Ghost Stories ; Gothic novels are not women's writing. Pace Henry Tilney, the Gothic is not designed to set one's hair on end, but is a ludic thought-experiment: the "gothic exists in a state of suspense—of questing and questioning—that we have come to call the fantastic" (9). For Brown, as for Todorov, the Gothic belongs in an uncertain halfway house, a stage in metaphysical history in which the mind stood mutely wondering before the Kantian rupture. As thought-experiments they have almost nothing to do with the gender politics attributed to the Gothic by a long tradition of feminist criticism. Indeed, the negative of the third thesis is just another expression of the parochialism that Brown sets out to dismantle. The Gothic is not circumscribed by gender, nation, or language, but is a pan-European form, stretching from the Urals to the Western plains, flowering along the trade and immigration routes that spread the Kantian revolution. In his short second chapter, "Fantasia: Kant and the Demons of the Night," Brown lays down the true cornerstone of his book: "The greatness of the gothic—inseparable from the seeming frivolity of all its greatest exemplars—is not that it plays with terror and the limits of reason, but rather, precisely, that it plays with these things, that is, that it imagines them" (14). In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick advanced the influential thesis that live burial was the Gothic's master trope, its organizing grammar, or structure, where terror turned on one of two modalities: the dread of being cut off from others, whether literally, in a box, or figuratively, through the impediments of mind or language; and the dread of being invaded, of [End Page 182] not being able to keep contaminants out, whether rapacious banditti or destructive fantasies. In the live burial trope, barriers remain shut when we want them open, but stay open when we want them closed. Brown appears to sketch a similar dynamic when he argues that the Gothic imagines and plays with the limits of reason. He angles towards a "transcendental aesthetic" of a sublime beyond human psychology, which is to say, beyond Burke and his proto-Freudian reading of terror as the overturning of the ego. In explaining this transcendental aesthetic, Brown is teasingly cryptic. At the centre of this...

The Gothic Text (review)

Reviewed by: The Gothic Text Aaron Chandler Marshall Brown , The Gothic TextStanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, xxii + 280 pp. With The Gothic Text, Marshall Brown continues the provocative project (begun in his 1991 study Preromanticism) of rereading literary history teleologically, though Brown's concept of telos is emphatically not a single point of arrival from which final judgments of value can be made, but rather a vector of thought aiming uncertainly into the future. Conjoining text and time in this fashion exposes unseen relationships between texts, and it is Brown's insistence on this perspective that makes The Gothic Text so rewarding and suggestive. At the heart of this study lies the bold proposition that "Kant and the gothic together discovered a new dimension of human consciousness," namely the confrontation with reality-as-unknowable (ix). This epistemological and psychological shift forced a split between phenomena and the thing-in-itself and thus opened the realm of the transcendental, at once governed by unseen laws and haunted by undisclosed monstrosities. The consequences of that split come to fruition in the work of Freud; indeed, part of Brown's insight is that the form of the gothic itself anticipates his own extremely Lacanian lens. The first two parts of Brown's book place the first gothic text, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, in extended dialog with Kantian philosophy. The insights gathered from that intertext are neatly threaded through the attendant chapters in the book's third and fourth sections, culminating in rereadings of Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. However, even if the body of his text begins and ends with English writers, Brown insists on the international character of the gothic and draws on French, German, and Russian examples, strengthening his claim that gothic literature helps to inaugurate a significant change in Western thought. As if to underscore this continental scale, The Gothic Text ends with a postscript, co-written with Jane K. Brown, in which Goethe's Faust is engagingly read as both the culmination of the gothic impulse and the mark of its circumscription. Throughout, in accessible and warm prose, Brown offers readings that challenge us to take the gothic seriously and to read philosophy imaginatively. [End Page 178] Aaron Chandler University of North Carolina–Greensboro Copyright © 2007 Southern Comparative Literature Association

Being There: Gothic Violence and Virtuality in Frankenstein, Dracula, and Strange Days

Being There:Gothic Violence and Virtuality in Frankenstein, Dracula, and Strange Days Jules Law No sooner did that idea cross my imagination, than I became convinced of its truth. —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein This is not "like t.v., only better." This is life. It's a piece of somebody's life. It's pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. . . . You're there, you're doing it. —Strange Days For some years now we have regarded the gothic as a particularly embodied genre. Modern gothic, suggests Judith Halberstam, begins when Mary Shelley discovers "fear to be a by-product of embodiment rather than a trick played upon the body by the mind." Beginning with the crudely stitched epidermis of Frankenstein's monster, gothic literature helps turn skin into the nineteenth century's "metonym for the human," refiguring various social crises and identities in increasingly sexual terms.1 Kelly Hurley, too, finds the various estrangements, alienations, and terrors of late nineteenth-century gothic to inhere in a body made newly uncanny by Victorian science.2 For Hurley, fin-de-siècle gothic is particularly notable for its ability to produce visceral reactions in the reader, though in this respect it is the descendant of mid-century "sensation" novels rather than gothic per se. In both Halberstam's and Hurley's readings, the gothic plays out a dialectic of embodiment and dissolution which makes violence the inevitable corollary of corporealization.3 Implicitly linking embodiment to the logic of specularity, these readings point to the perils encountered by bodies caught up in the violent, gendered field of the gaze, subject to the ressentiments reserved for figurations of the human.4 [End Page 975] But is it embodiment that precipitates violence in the gothic text? What if the drive toward violence in the gothic text were generated not so much by the figure of the human as by the fantasy of transcending mediation (an aspiration designated, at different historical moments, variously as "immanence" or "virtuality"), a fantasy built into the narrative apparatus itself and then displaced onto some rival medium or apparatus? In this essay I will suggest—contra much recent culturally-oriented criticism—that such a double apparatus is constitutive of the gothic genre and generative of the latter's peculiar affinities for violence. I will also argue that the impulse within the gothic to abridge, compress, or transcend its own narrative modality, though represented within the diegesis as the effect of particular scientific technologies, is in the end produced at the level of enunciation: specifically through a constitutive tension between deferral and progressively condensed loops of retrospection.5 Gothic is thus not so much about embodiment as it is about a dangerous desire for transcendence which must be articulated but held at bay. This desire for transcendence is a desire for virtuality—a life without bodies or narrative constraint. And if the threat of violence which presides over this desire can be described culturally in terms of a familiar imperial masculine posture, it is nonetheless generated structurally as an effect of narrative desire. In attempting to refine current cultural-historicist readings of the relationship between violence and embodiment, I will first revisit some older theoretical models articulating violence with literary form and attempt to elaborate these in relation to two classic gothic texts before turning to a contemporary permutation of the gothic in the emergent subgenre of "virtual reality" narrative. We might begin this re-examination by returning to Eve Sedgwick's observation that gothic narratives have an awful lot of trouble getting their story told. According to Sedgwick's now classic account, in gothic texts "[i]t is the position of the self to be massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access." This alienation is mirrored in gothic's narrative structure, where "the difficulty the story has getting itself told" weighs increasingly on the characters, the trope of "unspeakableness" producing a "barrier" that cannot be breached without "violent" counter-response.6 We may further note that the "difficulty the story has getting itself told" is almost always the result of a character's difficulty in recounting a narrative; the gothic narrative is composed both...

Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Peter K. Garrett

MLR, I01.2, 2oo6 525 complexity of individual imaginings of "London"' (p. xiv). The inverted commas indicate that this is a tale of two cities: 'the actual spaces of the metropolis' and 'an imaginary "London", an interior world constructed from personal sensory and imaginative experience but also from verbal and visual representations'. There has, in Robinson's view, been too great an emphasis in recent critical writing upon the Laca nian concept of the 'symbolic order', and his aim is to reconsider the literary concept of the imagination in relation to subjective 'agency'. The result is a fascinating book of just eight chapters and forty well-chosen plates, inwhich he offers readings of ideas and impression of London over the long nineteenth century, focusing mainly upon themes relating to economics and gender. In his first two chapters, Robinson considers late Georgian London, and particu larly the relationship between art forms and modernization, and gender relations in a society shaped by market forces. Chapter 3, 'Capital City', examines the 'trans formations wrought by capitalism' that effected the transition toVictorian London (p. 45). In the chapter on Dickens that follows, Robinson is interested in the combi nation of reportage and social criticism in the work of one of many migrants from the Home Counties into nineteenth-century London. Visual culture figures prominently in the central chapters of ImaginingLondon, where Robinson asks why the response of French Impressionism to the upheavals of Second Empire Paris found no equivalent inVictorian London, and how the evolution of lateVictorian aesthetics relates to the commodification of female sexuality and to class anxieties. In the final two chapters, he discusses two aspects of Trollope's 'London'-capitalism and gender relations-and Henry James's 'entanglement' in contemporary debates about theWoman Question, sexuality, commercialism and mass culture, and poverty. Robinson has read very widely indeed and with remarkable insight. His sources range from themajor writers and painters to those obscure documentary sources that are uncovered only after painstaking research. His methodology is not inflexible, but draws mainly upon psychological andMarxist models. The book works best when he writes tightly to his title, and his handling of visual material is particularly assured. His connections are frequently highly original and enlightening. The publication of this book is something of an event in nineteenth-century literary and cultural history. WINCHESTER MICHAELWHEELER Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force inNineteenth-Century Fiction. By PETERK. GAR RETT. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversityPress. 2003. iX+232pp. $I9.95. ISBNO 80I4-4156-0. Peter K. Garrett's scholarly study is remarkable for its refusal to ghettoize nineteenth century Gothic texts. Garrett declines to entertain simplistic divisions between a 'subversive' Gothic tradition and a 'mainstream' realist one, and sensibly maintains that both engage with similar questions of self-consciousness and narrative control. Joining an increasing wave of researchers in the field taking their lead from Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall's manifesto, 'Gothic Criticism' (in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. by David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell 2000), pp. 209-28), Garrett rejects the facile ascription of subversion to Gothic texts, arguing that destabilization and consolidation routinely occur within the same text. However, he does not take the historicist route Baldick andMighall recommend as an alternative, turning instead to Barthes and the Russian Formalists in an attempt to untangle the implications of the complex, self-referential narratives of the Gothic. The resulting thesis is a strong one, but has a somewhat repetitive quality, as Garrett establishes the duality of Gothic texts again and again from themiddle of the 526 Reviews eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The book is divided into three sections: the first deals with the first phase of Gothic, fromWalpole to Poe; the second with the nineteenth-century monsters of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll andMr. Hyde, and Dracula; the third extends the argument to canonical texts by Dickens, Eliot, and James. The invaluable result is that the narrative strategies of the Gothic are seen as integral to nineteenth-century fiction as awhole: not grotesque aberrations, but part of awider literary scene. Poe in particular, through his criticism aswell as his fiction, takes on a new centrality that is both refreshing and timely. The most successful part of the book...

Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic

Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing obscene libel laws. The reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate that public denouncements and threatened prosecution forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.

Poe and the Revenge of the Exquisite Corpse

POE AND THE REVENGE OF THE EXQUISITE CORPSE Judith E. Pike Salisbury State University Although Poe' s debt to the Gothic genre is documented in his tales with numerous references to Gothic texts and occult literature, Poe' s "architecture of death"1 is not merely a case of belated romanticism.2 The resurgence of the Gothic architectures of death in Poe should instead be read as a literary response to cultural attempts to raze those very structures and replace them with a new ideology of death. By Poe' s time, death was being sublimated by a whole new industry and aesthetic of mourning, which in effect commercialized and domesticated death. Although numerous cultural historians have surveyed the shift in the iconography of death from the eighteenth century through to the Victorian period in America, they have failed to theorize fully how the nineteenth-century cult of mourning reveals a profound cultural ambivalence toward the unsublimated dead body, especially the female dead body.3 Poe's writings not only expose this ambivalence but reinvest the dead body with the corporeality that the cult of mourning attempts to eradicate. Poe figures the female living dead as an embodiment of the Lacanian real, which dismantles the nineteenth century's emergent fetishism of the exquisite corpse. At the heart of the nineteenth-century romantic cult of the dead lay a profound ambivalence towards the dead body. On one hand the dead body achieved a certain stature with its own elaborate memorials— death bed scenes, wakes, monumental tombstones—and even, with the garden cemetery movement, its own private property, a fenced-in private plot.4 On the other hand, the dead body was at the height of its exclusion from public view. One ofthe period' s most popular funerary sculptures, the urn, privileged a pile ofashes—the disembodied body— as the figure of death. The more the dead body was memorialized, the more it was forgotten. Phillipe Ariès cites numerous examples of how memorial representations, such as mourning pictures, replaced the natural body; mourning pictures, he argues, "played the role of the tomb, of the memorial, a sort of portable tomb adapted to American mobility ."5 The body was everywhere immortalized but nowhere to be found. 172Judith E. Pike The profound ambivalence toward the dead body inherent in the cult of mourning gave rise to new technicians of death and sublimation . While garden cemeteries and funerary sculptors had successfully rid themselves of any reminders of the dead body, other aestheticians of death were reclaiming the dead body. With the 1839 invention of the daguerreotype, photographers created a new technological means of disavowing death, through postmortem photography. While the deceased are most often portrayed as sleeping, some postmortem photographs display the dead in more lifelike poses, sitting up in a chair or gazing out at the viewer.6 Later in the century, with improvements in embalming techniques, morticians began vying amongst themselves for the best looking corpse. There was even a competition announced by the National Funeral Director's Association for the best looking corpse after sixty days, with a prize worth $1,000.6 Morticians became another genre of body snatchers whose task was to replace the natural body with a sublime one that could survive death, at least up to sixty days. This effort to deny death and the decomposition ofthe dead body nurtured what I am calling the fetish of the exquisite corpse. However, all these elaborate techniques to sublimate the dead body and transform it into a "sleeping beauty" or an exquisite corpse led to a shocking conclusion: the nineteenth-century tombstone no longer marks the site of the dead body nor of the bereaved living, but of the living dead. By the time the body is ready for burial, it has been revived by the photographer's and mortician's arts; in a sense, it is buried alive. All these nineteenth-century technicians were trying to give the dead body a decent burial. Decent burials, however, are all too often premature burials, replacing the naturalistic dead body with the sublime body of the exquisite corpse that hovers somewhere between life and death. It can neither be too alive, for then...

Gender and the gothic in the fiction of Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton s contradictory views of women and men her attitudes toward the feminine and the masculine reflect a complicated interweaving of family and social environment, historical time, and individual psychology. Studies of Wharton have exhibited the same kind of contradiction, with some seeing her as disparaging men and the masculine and others depicting her as disparaging women and the feminine. The use of Gothic elements in her fiction provided Wharton often considered the consummate realist with a way to dramatize the conflict between feminine and masculine selves as she experienced them and to evolve and alternative to the dualism.Using feminist archetypal theory and theory of the female Gothic, Fedorko shows how Wharton, in sixteen short stories and six major novels written during four distinct periods of her life, adopts and adapts Gothic elements as a way to explore the nature of feminine and masculine ways of knowing and being and to dramatize the tension between them. A distinction in her use of the form is that she has women and men engage in a process of individuation during which they confront the abyss, the threatening and disorienting feminine/maternal. Wharton deconstructs traditional Gothic villains and victims by encouraging the reader to identity with those characters who are willing to assimilate this confrontation with the feminine/maternal into their sense of themselves as women and men. In the novels with Gothic texts Wharton draws multiply parallels between male and female protagonists, indicating the commonalities between women and men and the potential for a female self. Eventually, in her last completed novel and her last short story, Wharton imagines human beings who are comfortable with both gender selves.

Home, home on the web

Even a year ago, having an e‐mail address and a fax number were enough to ensure that you were considered among the most technologically advantaged. Now, my old aunt Matilda has them, and she is crocheting an Afghan that includes gothic text URLs of her favorite places on the web. The World Wide Web, that is. If you have not spent the last year under a rock in Katmandu, you have heard about “the web”. The web gives you access to the Internet. Of course, gopher gives you access to the Internet too, but the cute little rodent never made it to News Week, Business Week, Time and even People, as the web does in every issue. Does Al Gore have a gopher server? Does Intel? Does IRS? Even if they did, no one would care any more. The adorable little gopher has been fatally trampled by the faceless web. Today, to be anybody, you must be on the web.

In the Name of Love: Women. Masochism, and the Gothic (review)

Reviewed by: In the Name of Love: Women. Masochism, and the Gothic Frances L. Restuccia Michelle A. Massé . In the Name of Love: Women. Masochism, and the Gothic. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. 301 pp. $39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. Michelle A. Massé's In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic is a response to two questions posed explicitly—Are Gothic novels masochistic? and "Why do feminists still use Freud?"—as well as to two implicit questions—What is the etiology of masochism? and What is the prognosis? To Massé, certain Gothic texts "internalize and replicate the dynamics of oppression": Pauline Réage's The Story of O and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca present "object relations that reproduce the beating triangle" in Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten." (Even their readers become complicit.) Other Gothic texts such as Jane Eyre, Atwood's Lady Oracle, and Naylor's Linden Hills resist masochism by playing out the trauma caused by the prohibition of female autonomy (and therefore of identity in the real world), through repetition whose function it is to recognize that trauma. The Gothic can be self-sabotaging: it points to its own eventual cure. The answer, then, to Massé's first question is yes, only if we grant that works that repudiate "masochistic fantasy" are masochistic. Massé assumes that masochism is a cultural construction, produced primarily by Western culture's gender arrangements (which the Gothic reflects, shapes, and resists). She is admirably determined to show that "women are taught masochism through fiction and culture," that "masochism's causes are external and real," and that individual masochistic psychodramas are "part of a larger cultural production of discipline and punishment." Yet, even as she blasts Freud for constructing the female fantasy in "A Child Is Being Beaten" in a way that feminizes masochism, Massé employs Freud's beaten/beater/ spectator triangle as her paradigm of a masochistic economy to test out which of the three positions Gothic heroines occupy. For psychoanalysis "helps us to understand the Gothic's emphasis upon masochism as a key issue in feminine identity." We might be tempted to think that Massé relies on Freud because he passes along useful (albeit misogynistically contaminated) cultural paradigms. But Massé also regards "the linkage of love and dominance" as "psychological" and reiterates Jacqueline Rose's warning against a lopsided stress on the social at the expense of the psychic (which Rose of course regards as constitutively violent)—all of which implies an etiology distinct from her strenuously made cultural construction argument. Vaguely conflating women at varying levels of suffering, Massé wants "us" to realize that we "might awaken some day from the Gothic nightmare that is our own as well as our culture's." She seeks the abolition of sadomasochistic hierarchies; to this end she presents her study as a contribution to understanding, [End Page 995] in Jessica Benjamin's words, "how domination is anchored in the hearts of the dominated." But the formidable question of domination's appeal remains unanswered, if not unanswerable: for one thing Massé does not address sufficiently the challenging, complicating, crucially relevant issue of desire. Packed with useful references (I picked up a wealth of information from this study, for which I am grateful to Massé), and at many points captivating, In the Name of Love confused me conceptually in ways that precluded my fullest engagement. Frances L. Restuccia Boston College Copyright © 1992 Purdue Research Foundation

Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic by Eugenia C. DeLamotte, and: Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy edited by Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace (review)

REVIEWS Eugenia C. DeLamotte. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. ix + 352. $48.50 CAN. Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, eds. Refiguring the Father New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy. Afterword by Nancy K. Miller. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. xxni + 319. $32.50 US (cloth). Fin de siècle cultural studies have been invigorated by new feminist theory, criticism, and practice. But feminist work has not been agitated by patriarchal anxiety of influence. Instead, to use a conveniently familiar metaphor of women ' s creativity and endurance, contemporary feminist works quilt together treasured squares in new patterns. As part of this ongoing project, the two books under review interrogate our assumptions about a genre—the nineteenth-century Gothic—and a figure/trope—the father. Both contribute to contemporary feminist literary studies. The first part of Perils of the Night explores the Gothic anxiety about boundaries of the self. Part two investigates the way this anxiety emerges as tellingly female in the genre ofwomen ' s Gothic, a fear that negotiates the patriarchy rather than the uncanny. DeLamotte posits that the women's Gothic—as opposed to the traditional form—was primarily concerned with die social and psychological constraints on women's freedom. Women characters in diese novels are not free to make themselves known through the act of "speaking I." This feminist vision of the Gothic questions the now-conventional idea of the evil Other as a disguised version of the self. Women's Gothics perceive "that in an important sense, the evil Other the Gothic heroine confronts is not a hidden self at all but is just what it appears to be: an Other that is profoundly alien, and hostile, to women and their concerns." The selection of texts that illuminate these and related themes offers no surprises—Frankenstein, Melmoth, Wuthering Heights, Villette. The groupings of popular and "classical" Gothic texts, such as those by Henry James and by Ann Radcliffe, are often instructive. The section on knowing and not knowing as quintessentially and unparadoxically Gothic terrors is particularly cogent. The Gothic tradition asks whether knowledge is possible. Reviews97 There are problems with the book. Its goals are rather diffuse. Some, moreover, invite rediscovery of the wheel, such as the plan to "cast new light on the many facets of the Gothic myth" and "on the structural as well as thematic aspects of the genre." As a result, the text walks us through some overly familiar territory, especially on Woman as Other and doubleness. Also, the sixty-page chapter on Vülette seems paradoxically to shrink the arena of the argument. The book might have been more fluent without oversimplifying, and it could have used shaping to eliminate the better-known points. Yet its argument on the boundaries of the self in the women ' s Gothic represents compelUng work. DeLamotte identifies here some of the contradictory impulses of the genre without "explaining away" or appropriating them for a flattened-out feminist project. Her distinctions between men's and women's Gothic are quite fruitful. In women's Gothic, "the isolato at the heart ... is not one of those singular individualists"—Melmoth, Frankenstein—"but the many Emilys, Emilias, Matildas, and JuUas who stand, in their very interchangeability, for Woman—the true ' separated one ' at the heart of a social order whose peculiar disorder it is to make her the fearful other." The exploration is especially productive on the contradictory impulses of women ' s Gothic and sublimity: "the heroine's impulse toward transcendence is always translated in happy Gothic into an impulse toward marriage." Thus the motifs of confinement and imprisonment, suffocation and silence, come to have ominous resonance in the daylight world where the heroine is released from her cathedral cell only to find herself gently manacled to domestic bliss. DeLamotte suggests that the genre is indeed subversive, but usually only because it subverts itself. For this reader, DeLamotte ' s strongest argument is that the most genuine terror in the woman ' s Gothic is that of the woman writer for her real subject: anger. Anger at the father as culpable patriarch—the dark-browed authority in front of the Gothic...

Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus and History

One message of psychoanalysis that finds its echo or development in contemporary literary theorizing is that life is story production, that identity (ego) is a product of the story one (always already) invents to explain/connect the data of one's past. Story production in turn involves two elements: a characterology, or structure of personae in their relations to each other, and a plot, through and in which this characterology is manifested/constituted. For example (and there is nothing random about it), the Oedipus complex, a triangle of relations, and the Oedipal scenario, a dream of incest and parricide, are synchronic and diachronic representations of the individual subject's insertion into our culture. Perhaps the most elaborate schematization of this characterology-of-insertion is Lacan's schema R,I presented in connection with a re-analysis of Freud's analysis of Dr. Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903). Lacan's schema presents a kind of from which Schreber's psychosis differs, a culturally determined norm depending, for example, on a Cartesian conception of the (skeptical) ego. Contemporary with Schreber's madness (and Freud's early work), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) exhibits an elaborate narrativization of Lacan's characterology. What follows is a demonstration of a mapping of the characters in Dracula onto the intersections of schema R by way of Freud's Group Psychology. The value of this demonstration is two-fold: in one light, it is an explanation-by-example of the sense of schema R; in another, it is one of a set of demonstrations on Gothic texts which outline the rise of the Oedipus complex as a determinant of bourgeois psychology in the nineteenth century. In the beginning of Dracula we are introduced to six young people and to the monster who is to threaten the peacefulness of their lives. These young people are all biologically unrelated, but connected as friends or friends' friends. After Lucy is killed and Mina attacked, as Maurice Richardson says,

The Gothic Text of Luke in its Relation to the Codex Brixianus (f) and the Codex Palatinus (e)

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The Vatican Leaves of the Skeireins in High-Contrast Reproduction

Three leaves of the Skeireins (III, IV, VIII) are in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, where they have been incorporated into Cod. 5750. Like the Ambrosian fragments of the Skeireins document, they have been badly damaged in the course of the last fourteen centuries, all extant leaves having been torn from the codex binding, erased with pumice, written over with Latin, and stained with tincture of nut-gall. The remaining edges of some inner margins are badly tattered, and the Gothic text is frequently obscured by heavy smudges as well as by the superscribed Latin. On the whole, however, the leaves have suffered more from bleaching than from any other single factor. The effects of bleaching are most noticeable along page margins, where a steady penetration of light has nearly obliterated some parts of the text; the torn, extremely narrow inner margins have been especially vulnerable. Some marginal additions are no longer visible under ordinary lighting, and although interlinear corrections have been less subject to bleaching, they are often hidden by smudges or by superscribed Latin characters. Outlines of letters showing through the parchment, holes, blots, and flaking along inner margins also offer some difficulty but are generally less troublesome than bleaching and smudging. In the prefecture of Msgr. Achille Ratti (later Pius XI) the Vatican leaves were coated with gelatin in order to prevent their further deterioration, but the marks of age and prior damage are of course ineradicable.

The Prehistory of Indo-European: A Summary

Writing in 1875, William Dwight Whitney' refers to the Indo-European family of languages as more clearly drawn than most; but, he continues, some additions may yet be made to it, as perhaps Albanian and Etruscan. His list did not include Armenian, Phrygian, or Thracian, and it included Illyrian only as the possible predecessor of Albanian. Some years later appeared Kretschmer's great book,2 which could find no Indo-European speech in Asia Minor except on the lips of newcomers such as Phrygians, Armenians, and Greeks. When the Hittite documents from the Turkish village of Bogazkoy were discovered early in the 20th century, their close relationship to Indo-European came as a great surprise to nearly all linguists. Nevertheless that relationship was proved by many obviously Indo-European words, such as e-el-mi 'I am', e-es-zi 'he is', a-va-an-zi 'they are', e-it-mi 'I eat', e-te-ir 'they ate', kat-ta 'with, down', kat-te-ir-ra-al 'lower', gi-e-nu 'knee', sa-li-ga 'he lies with', mi-li-it 'honey', ne-e-ya-an-zi 'they lead', ne-pi-il 'sky', pi-e-da-an 'place', wa-a-tar 'water', ku-it 'quis', ku-it 'quid?', an-dur-za 'within', i-u-ga-an 'yoke', ta-ru-u 'wood', and lu-uk-zi 'kindles'. As soon as scholars examined these items in detail, the case became even clearer. Thus Antoine Meillet long ago said that the precise correspondence between Skt. hanti 'he strikes, kills', pl. ghnanti, and Hitt. ku-en-zi, pl. ku-na-an-zi, was enough to establish the relationship of the two languages. And yet it has now become quite certain that Hittite is not just one more IndoEuropean language. There are certain features of Indo-European that can be accounted for only as having developed in an ancestral language in which Hittite had no part. In other words, if Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Germanic are sister languages, Hittite is only a cousin. One of these features is the familiar pronoun Skt. sa sa tad, Greek 6 7i r6, Goth. sa s5 bata, whose etymological connection with archaic Hittite ta-an 'et eum', ta-at 'et id' was one of HroznjV's brilliant discoveries. The certainty of this etymology emerges from a comparison of the usage of the stem in the early Indo-European languages and in Hittite. In the prose of the Brihmanas, in Homer, and also in many Gothic and other early Germanic texts, there is a remarkable tendency for the stem toto gravitate to the first position in its clause; in Hittite this is the required position of the sentence connective. There are three of these in Hittite. The commonest of them in the texts com-