Mothers and Other Lovers: Gothic Fiction and the Erotics of Loss

Mothers and Other Lovers: Gothic Fiction and the Erotics of Loss George E. Haggerty Transgressive sexual relations are an undeniable common denominator ofGothic, and from the moment in the early pages of Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) when Walpole's anti-hero Manfred presses his suit on the fiancée ofhis deceased son (and she flees into the "long labyrinth of darkness" in the "subterraneous" regions of the castle), a Gothic trope is fixed: terror is almost always sexual terror, and fear, flight, incarceration, and escape are almost always coloured by the exoticism of transgressive sexual aggression. Gothic fiction, moreover, is not about homo or hetero desire as much as it is about power; but that power is itself charged with a sexual force—a sexual-ity—that determines the action and gives it shape. By the same token, powerlessness also has such a valence and performs such a function. This creates an insistent sexual obsession in most late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Gothic works, closer to what some might crudely label sadomasochism than to any other model of sexual interaction. That nearly a century of fiction would EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 2,January 2004 158 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION function in this way is in itself uncanny, and uncanny too is the manner in which normative sexual relations are articulated and codified, for no marriage at the close ofa Gothic novel can entirely dispel the thrilling dys-functionality (or different-functionality) at the heart of Gothic.1 Recent studies ofGothic fiction, such as those by Emma Clery and Robert Miles, and by EdwardJacobs, have usefully extended the scope ofGothic writing in the eighteenth century.2 By looking at materials earlier in the eighteenth century and reconsidering a range ofwriting that has often been ignored, these critics have suggested that the term "Gothic" itselfshifts in meaning and cultural significance throughout the period considered in this article. In an earlier book, I argued that not historical specificity but rather vague and often indirect historical associations served expressive purposes that no amount ofhistorical investigation can explain.3 The peculiar and often uncanny power of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction still resists attempts to explain it, and useful as this recent historicizing of Gothic has been, it does not radically change the way "Gothic" functions as a literary device in the period I am discussing. As this article demonstrates, a wide range of writers, dispersed historically and culturally, use "Gothic" to evoke a queerworld that attempts to transgress the binaries ofsexual decorum. Ann Radcliffe, who was as popular as any other writer ofthe period, is a useful case in point. As she tells story after story of female victimization, she constructs an alternative reading ofthe family: the disowned and dishonoured heroine often searches for a lost mother in the confines ofa castle or a convent, and at the same time she flees the aggressive attentions ofan overly erotic father or father surrogate.4 In order to help her in her pursuit and to aid her in her flight, the 1 I would argue that an obsession with sexual transgression is common to Gothic fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to today, but that is not really a claim I can make and properly defend in an article such as this. The scope ofthis article ranges from 1790 to the early 1810s. 2 See EJ. Clery and Robert Miles, Gothic Documents, A Sourcebook, 1 700-1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); and Edward H.Jacobs, Accidental Migrations: An Archaeology ofGothic Discourse (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000); see also Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, andDegeneration in liteRn deSiècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3 See Haggerty, GothicFution/GotliicForm (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1989), pp. 14-35. 4 For an alternative reading ofthe power ofthe Gothic villain, see Mary Poovey, "Ideology in The Mysteries ofUdolpho," Criticism 21 (1979), 307-30; for Poovey, the villain has no sexual power over the heroine. MOTHERS AND OTHER LOVERS 159 heroine elicits the almost fraternal friendship ofan emasculated young man, weak, wounded, and powerless, who becomes a surrogate brother as well as a lover and delivers the heroine from the villainous...