Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (review)

This is a surprising book. One might initially expect to find a run-through of modernist texts with Gothic elements, and wonder how this could fit alongside the admirably comprehensive Gothic Modernisms, edited by Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, and published in 2001. But in fact Gothic and Modernism is quite different: it does not attempt to live up to any fictional notion of coverage; it addresses a very unusual canon—or anti-canon—of texts; and it is centred around a specific idea, or set of ideas, about what the Gothic has become in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

However, when it comes to expressing exactly what this idea is, the difficulty becomes apparent. It is in fact extremely complex, not least because, of course, it is articulated, to a greater or lesser degree, by ten different writers; but it also hinges on the suggestion that Gothic, which began life as a mode of grotesquerie and exaggeration, has now become horrifyingly assimilated into the actual processes of history. The Gothic is no longer a perturbation or troubling of an accepted mainstream of historical documentation: it now records, in one sense, the actual dreadfulness of events and, in another, the state of a consciousness whose perceptions are coloured—darkly—by a sense of the imminence, if not the actuality, of catastrophe.

John Paul Riquelme, in his introductory essay, speaks of a "doubling characteristic of Gothic writing" which "evokes the mixed, ambiguous character of human experience, which holds the potential for both destructive and creative transformation" (9): here the emphasis is very much on the destructive side—this is, after all, a collection of essays on the "dark" aspects of modernity—beginning with two interesting pieces on Wilde and Stoker. Riquelme's essay on The Picture of Dorian Gray reflects very acutely on the aesthetic "debate" between Wilde and Pater in the context of a highly developed opposition between Echo and Narcissus; Joseph Valente is eloquent on Stoker as a figure for the "metrocolonial." We then move on to a challenging essay by Patrick R. O'Malley called "Jude the Obscure and the End of the Gothic," which concludes with the following words:

If Austen's Northanger Abbey rejected the Gothic because it was too foreign to English experience, Jude destroys it because it has become too familiar. Jude the Obscure signals the end of a certain kind of Gothicising novel as it does the end of an era; the Gothic as a genre has collapsed into the contemporary novel, because the Gothic has, indeed, come home to England.

(75)

Behind this claim lie two arguments: the first is to do with the battle for historical primacy during the nineteenth century between the Protestant and Catholic churches in England, the second centres on Havelock Ellis's remarks on the way in which the child corpses in Jude disturb the otherwise "realist" carapace of the novel. Each of these apparently wildly different trajectories converge on the question of what is Gothic and what is realist, and thus also on the question of what society does with the residues of its past, with the movements towards and away from, for example, "medievalising," with the depiction of the depths to which a man's soul might sink—all questions which obviously could be taken to summarise Matthew Lewis's The Monk, but which here spring into a different light—or, one might say, bearing in mind the notion of the "obscure," a different chiaroscuro.

The next three essays move us across the atlantic, to consider Dorothy Scarborough's anti-Western The Wind, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. Susan Kollin's essay on Scarborough focuses on how American Gothic seeks historical correlatives in the absence of the stock European Gothic repertoire of castles, convents and related scenarios; Charles J. Rzepka's essay on Chandler is fascinating on the traces of medieval, chivalric ("white Gothic") legendry which ripple...