Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (review)

308 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:2 Anne Williams. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. xii + 311pp. US$39.00 (cloth); US$14.95 (paper). ISBN 0-226-89907-1. Anne Williams is nothing if not direct. 'This book proposes," reads her opening paragraph , "three ideas about the nature of Gothic. First Gothic is a poetic tradition. Second, 'Gothic' and 'Romantic' are not two but one. Third, 'Gothic' is not one but two; like the human race it has a 'male' and a 'female' genre" (p. 1). Williams is also accurate : her book pursues this complex of ideas across a wide range of texts and topics from The Faerie Queene to the Alien trilogy. She is, however, primarily concerned with works of the Romantic period. There she argues against the separation of Radcliffe and Lewis from Coleridge and Keats and argues both against and for separating Percy and Mary Shelley. Divisions by genre are seen as interested misrepresentations serving primarily to suppress the influence of "low, novel-scribbling women" on transcendent men poets. Divisions by authorial sex are more complicated. What Williams calls "writing in Gothic" is to take up a position in language that has been characteristically left to women but which, as it is rhetorically defined, is accessible to writers regardless of sex. Hence, in one of her early examples, the Pope of Eloisa to Abelard is writing from and in a female position while the Pope of An Essay on Man is not. Moreover, to write in Gothic, to write in and from a female position, is essential to romanticism. Her three propositions, then, are intimately interrelated and, while proposition three and, to a lesser extent, proposition one are unsurprising, linking both inextricably to the controversial proposal that all distinctions between Gothic and Romantic are false gives her argument considerable originality and polemic drive. To follow this line of thought the reader must grant certain preconditions. The first of these is that Gothic is a larger category than most who study it think. Building on George Lakoffs redefinition of "category" in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Williams argues that a generic label like Gothic is structured by a dynamic relation between central elements and "chainings" from them. A single central element will bring with it a chain of associated terms that may or may not relate to the associated terms chained to other central elements. Axes of relatedness run in two directions: across the central terms and down the chains from each of these terms. If, for instance, the isolated dwelling in which bourgeois rules of order are suspended is a central term in Gothic, that term may be represented by a castle, an abbey, a desolate sea-side cottage, or a sylvan inn. From each of these representations depends a chain of associated terms that is not entirely analogous to the chains depending on others. The guest-murdering banditti at the inn are structurally akin to incestuously lustful tyrants or oppressive nuns but they are not identical, nor can they be translated precisely one into another. Moreover, each representation transforms, to a degree, the central term on which it depends in giving that term a local habitation and a name. Which is why tyrants of Otranto differ from Transylvanien Counts and is how Gothic can be translated to contexts far from those preferred by English writers at the tum of the nineteenth century. Similarly expanded is the poetic. Here Williams depends on the work of Julia Kristeva , accepting her argument that any linguistic act disruptive of temporal order, stable significations, assumed laws of cause and effect, etc. is a recidivist tum away from the Symbolic Order (things as they are said to be by those that have power) and is therefore inherently poetic. Williams accepts also—though even more enthusiastically than does her source—Kristeva's association of the poetic with the maternal, especially with the maternal understood as a space of blissful indistinction between self and other. REVIEWS 309 The association of the poetic with the maternal, with a space where the Law of the Father is not, permits Williams to distinguish male from female Gothic. Male...