Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (review)

REVIEWS 551 and doubling between them" complicating the "neat black and white polarities of gender or politics" (p. 39). Within and between the novels, revolution and reaction, rising and falling, are thus presented as part of a single intertextual process which reveals the peculiar dynamics of Gothic creation, the paradoxes of which are dramatized so perfectly in Frankenstein. The eighteenth-century Gothic's attack on the present, whichever angle or side it starts out from, leads to a past that turns into a nightmare double of the present and ends as "a parody of its own enterprise." This is why we are so attracted by it now. Methodologically, Kilgour's model is that of Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot. This provides the internal (i.e., textual) reflex of the book's central conceit of "relations ." The plot is the plot of the author's desire: a struggle between pleasure and reality principles, which manifests itself in two different forms, dependent on which principle is uppermost: the analogical/panoramic (female, delaying) or the teleological/linear (male, driving for closure). Both analogical and teleological plots yield the same Oedipal alchemy of repression and desire at the textual level. There is a nod to the "strategy of self-effacement" (p. 22) of the author in the eighteenth century, and "die increasing shift from author to reader as a centre of attention" during the eighteenth century, but it is the relation between author and text which fascinates Kilgour and provides her with some neat and fresh, but, arguably, distorting shortcuts. Inevitably, despite the wit and brio of the writing, and the thoroughness of the research (the footnotes are admirably suggestive), there is certain schematism in all this. For all the apparent even-handedness that renders the Gothic genre "a parody of a modem nuclear family" (p. 6), there is some unevenness in the treatment of individual writers. The account of Radcliffe's Udolpho is disappointing. Kilgour ironically shows impatience with her most "relational" author because of her own plot-dominated brief. Readers will judge, but for my money it is the account of how the dissenting Protestant and the Enlightenment radical Godwin, Godwin the philosopher and Godwin the novelist, fit together as Godwin the Goth, that provokes the most inspired critical writing and is the great strength of this lively and challenging contribution to current debate. Victor Sage University of East Anglia Jaqueline Howard. Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 307pp. $78.95. ISBN 0-19-81192-5. Jaqueline Howard makes large claims for the interpretative possibilities enabled by dialogic reading. Bakhtin's methodology seems to her to afford a means of theorizing the Gothic, of problematizing the conventional reading of it as a female genre, of reconstructing intertextual relations among the novels she has chosen for consideration, and of situating these texts—Radcliffe's Mysteries ofUdolpho, Austen's NorthangerAbbey, Barrett 's The Heroine, Lewis's The Monk, and Shelley's Frankenstien—within literary and non-literary discourses that reveal their implication in cultural and historical formation. Key to her argument is the notion that Gothic plays out for us the transformation of Bakhtinian heterogeneity into heteroglossia, that it witnesses the processes by which 552 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:4 discursive multiplicity becomes a "dialogue of languages." Gothic fiction proves an especially fruitful genre for such treatment because the authors themselves consciously enlist the devices of pluralistic writing, drawing into conjunction discursive fragments whose indeterminacy or dialogism disallows closed structures and so exercises a vitalizing agency. In her analyses of individual novels, Howard uncovers the traces of folklore, fairy-tale, myth, legend, superstition, tales of the supernatural, songs, letters, poems, and aesthetic, philosophical, and medical treatises, and argues for the interactions that are made possible by this multiplicity, interactions between the incorporated discourses, between readers and texts, and between competing genres. Any study that disavows the aim of authoritative readings courts the opposite danger of unshaped digressiveness. In the first two chapters, the impulse towards comprehensiveness encourages such a loss of focus. The definitional skirmishes with other critics that dominate the "Theories of the Genre" and "Women and the Gothic" chapters have the air of disputatious footnotes, but...