Gothic Anxieties: Struggling with a Definition

Gothic Anxieties: Struggling with a Definition Suzanne Rintoul Throughout the late twentieth century, and now into the twenty-first, critics have expressed growing anxiety about die slippery boundaries of the Gothic genre. A prime example of this anxiety rings clear in Maggie Kilgour's conclusion to TheRise ofthe Gothic NoveL Kilgour writes diat she has watched die growth of Gothic criticism with "amazement and sometimes horror as the bulk ofgothic criticism has swelled with increasing rapidity to its present monstrous dimensions."1 This observation seems strange because, in the same chapter, Kilgour argues that the increased legitimacy granted to academic study of the Gothic coincides with an important interrogation of the canon as a site ofpower, and with equally importantwork that links social and political conditions with popular fiction. Kilgour may not be expressing horror at a spate of trivial scholarship but at the simply overwhelming quantity of Godiic criticism. But what does Kilgour find so especially frightening about this growth in Gothic criticism? Is it that the Gothic itselfnarrativizes anxieties? Perhaps a more likely reason is that the anxieties thematized in die Gothic are so spectral, so indecipherable and sublimely broad. By extension, then, the "problem" oftoo much Gothic criticism lies in the difficulty of defining —of containing—the genre. Critics ofthe Godiic have tended to deal with the impossibility ofdefining the composite, varying genre by listing its qualities, then qualifying diese lists and implying that die Gothic is particularly difficult to set within boundaries. 1 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise ofthe GothicNovel (London; Routledge, 1995), 221. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 17, Number 4,JuIy 2005 702 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 17:4 This kind of approach is often justified by a parallel drawn between the problem of applying a system of identificatory rules to die genre and the genre's thematic emphasis on the impossibility ofsecuring limits. Frustration at this recourse plagues Gothic criticism. In the introduction to the second edition of Gothic Writing, for example, Robert Miles credits David Richter with pointing out the Gothic genre's multiplicity, yet laments that "no single study since Richter's review has set out to chart the multiplicity of 'dialectics' shaping die gothic."2 In an attempt to give die Gothic a single, definitive quality, Miles points out the critical consensus that the Gothic traces the development ofthe subject "in a state ofderacination, ofthe selffinding itselfdispossessed in its own house, in a condition ofrupture, disjunction, fragmentation" (3). Miles moves beyond diis consensus to acknowledge how the genre's various ways ofrepresenting the fragmented subject compete widi one another. Yet when Miles suggests that the genre's "dialects"—psychoanalysis, feminism, or Marxism—overlap and compete, he seems to conflate Gothic narratives with die approaches diat have been taken to read them. In response, this review attempts to clarify thatjust as individual narratives compete with each odier within the genre to represent fragmentation and disjunction, so criticism of the genre follows this same trend to represent the genre itselfas fragmented and disjointed. Its primary question, then, is how Gothic criticism might itself be read as it struggles to define—or resist defining—die fragmentary genre upon which it is built. Generally speaking, Godiic criticism comprises two structural camps. The first consists ofsurveys that attempt to cover several aspects ofthe Godiic in order to define it in its most expansive sense, such as Fred Botting's Gothic (1996), David Punter's A Companion to the Gothic (1999), and Markman Ellis's The History of Gothic Fiction (2001). The second consists of more focused studies ofindividual works that situate a definition ofdie genre along a historical , cultural, and political continuum, such as Eugenia Delamotte's Perik oftheNight: A Feminist Study ofNineteenth-Century Gothic (1990), David Punter's Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (1998), and Andrew Smidi and William Hugh's Empire and the Gothic: ThePolitics ofGenre (2002). In this review essay, I consider four recent books diat evince die critical disparities between the two camps diat I havejust briefly described:Jerry Hogle's collection The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fktion, Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller's collection Approaches to Teaching GothicFiction: TheBritish and American Traditions, Frederick S. Frank's edition of...