The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel (review)

REVIEWS 165 researched historical accounts of a national way of life (but who failed to discover the equation between individual characters and historical forces that is the mainspring of the Waverley novels); —the popular novelists anticipated Scott not only in their concern with national identity but also in their detailed depiction of working-class life: in both respects, these novelists, so evidently non-Romantic in the heyday of British Romanticism, are Romantic in a way that Austen is not); —the novelists were also Romantic in their fondness for confrontations with death and extreme suffering: Austen differs most markedly from them in her choice of comedy as her genre and implication as her narrative technique; —the popular novels display an operatic, stylized lack of realism, particularly in their language: Jones shows that novelists who write quite tartly in their letters or non-fiction employ a high-faluting jargon in fiction. Consider the closing scene of Owenson's The Missionary (1811): "Luxima!" exclaimed the Missionary, in a melancholy transport, and pressing her to a heart which a feeble hope cheered and reanimated. "Luxima, my beloved! wilt thou not save me from the horror of knowing that it isfor me thou diesfi and that what remains of my wretched existence, has been purchased at the expense of thine? Oh! if love, which has led thee to death, can recall or attach thee to life, still live, even though thou livest for my destruction." A faint glow flushed the face of the Indian, her smile brightened, and she clung still closer to the bosom whose throb now replied to the palpitation of her own. (p. 197) As she so often does, Jones puts this passage in perspective by an apt glance at Jane Austen, who said in a letter of Owenson's style: "If the warmth of her Language could affect the Body it might be worth reading in this weather." Bruce Stovel University of Alberta Frederick S. Frank. The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987. xxi + 496pp. US$50.00. Once again the derisive and formidable opinion of George Saintsbury has been proved wrong; in the Times Literary Supplement (24 December 1938) he called the Gothic an "unprofitable" and an "undelightful" genre of literature, which "harrowed and fascinated Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe." More recent generations of scholars have revitalized critical inquiry into this important literary tradition, once jeered at as "trivial" or "superficial." This body of fiction no longer moulders in the libraries of the curious, but has been brought out for serious analysis and investigation. 166 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION The cheap presses, during the interim between The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), spewed out more than four thousand novels of Gothic variety and people "supp'd full with horrors." This large body of fiction enjoyed prodigious success with its readers, reflected and shaped their imaginations and often stimulated fanciful and creative adventure. This craze for fiction, the proliferation of circulating libraries, the taste of the "leisured-fair," the quick consumption, and the excessive rarity of the works today have already been well charted. But many Gothic novels have disappeared into oblivion. There are the lost and extinct Gothics, although a copy or two no doubt slumbers somewhere, wrapped in cambric or silk in a collector's basement or attic. These trinkets or artifacts, these rarities of Gothic fiction, deserve resurrection, rather than a live burial in the vaults of rare book libraries. The term "Gothic," like the term "Metaphysical," has been enlarged by a rich complex of meanings and associations. As I remarked in The Gothic Flame (1957, p. 217), Gothicism was "symbolic of the primordial content of man's unconscious," an exotic laboratory for plumbing the mysteries ofthe human soul. At the core of the Gothic was a psychological validity, that terrible exploration of the darker side of the human mind and experience, which Mario Praz termed the "Romantic Agony." According to R.D. Spector (The English Gothic: A Bibliographic Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley, 1984), even structuralists, deconstructionists , semiologists, Marxists, and feminists are now attempting to explain what the Gothic communicates. Stressing...