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The Nurture of the Gothic, or How Can a Text Be Both Popular and Subversive?
- University of Iowa Press
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WILLIAM VEEDER The Nurture of the Gothic, or How Can a Text Be Both Popular and Subversive? What I want to do in this essay is offer a contribution to one of the longest ongoing enterprises in fiction studies-the attempt to define the nature ofthe gothic in literature. Nearly two hundred years ago, vexed reviewers struggled to explain the amazing, perverse, inescapable, loathsome, irresistible phenomenon of The Monk by contrasting the narrative practices of Matthew Gregory Lewis and Anne Radcliffe. From the controversy over The Monk came the first tools for defining gothic fiction-the distinction between terror and horror. The inadequacy of these useful terms has driven students of the gothic for the past two centuries to offer other terms, to devise other distinctions. A distinction common in recent gothic studies is my starting point. Critics frequently create a binary opposition between inside and outside, between gothic as an exploration ofthe unconscious and gothic as a concern for and even an intervention in social reality. In refusing this binary of Freud versus Marx, I want to define a gothic praxis that involves-necessarily-the interplay of psychological and social forces. This interplay has determined both the title and the subtitle of my essay. My title, the nurture of the gothic, plays obviously on the phrase "the nature of the gothic" already old by John Ruskin's time, because I believe the nature of the gothic is to nurture. This belief derives from what I take to be a basic fact of commu20 THE NURTURE OF THE GOTHIC 21 nal life: that societies inflict terrible wounds upon themselves and at the same time develop mechanisms that can help heal these wounds. Gothic fiction from the late eighteenth century to the present is one such mechanism. Not consciously and yet purposively , Anglo-American culture develops gothic in order to help heal the damage caused by our embrace of modernity. Thus my title: gothic's nature is the psychosocial function of nurture, of healing and transforming. To define this healing process, I will begin with the work of a physician, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. His notions of potential space, transitional objects, and play will help me produce a general definition of gothic that I can then historicize and contextualize, drawing upon such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Michael Taussig, Ross Chambers, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. This will bring me to the question posed in my subtitle: how can a text be both popular and subversive? Why do we hug closest what threatens us most? This is another way of asking, How does gothic nurture? A MODEL FOR GOTHIC D. W. Winnicott's view of human function enabled him to discuss both infant development and cultural life in Playing and Reality . Essential to his view are three concepts: potential space, transitional objects, and play. Potential space is what Winnicott calls "the third space." It is not the internal psychological or the external social; it is the space between, where we are "when we are ... enjoying ourselves" (105, 106). Our need for this third space begins soon after birth. "The baby has maximally intense experiences in the potential space between the subjective object [the maternal introject] and the object objectively perceived [the mother]" (100). What occurs in this third space between the psychological and the social is, for Winnicott, the paramount human actionplay . For play to occur, the child abiding in the space between psyche and society must be in touch with an object which is also characterized as in-between. "I have introduced the terms 'transitional objects' and 'transitional phenomena' for designation of the intermediate area between thumb and teddy bear, between 100.26.35.111] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:47 GMT) 22 FRAMING THE GOTHIC oral eroticism and true object relationship" (2). Winnicott is careful to establish precisely the peculiar ontology of the transitional object. It "is related both to the external object (mother's breast) and to internal objects (magically introjected breast), but it is distinct from each.... it is a possession. Yet it is not (for the infant) an external object" (14, 9). Practically speaking, the transitional object is something soft-the edging ofa blanket, a strip of flannel, even a string. But we must not let any particular object obscure the ontological peculiarity that Winnicott specifies for all such objects. Paradoxically, "the baby creates the object, but the object wa~ there waiting to be created" (89). Creativity is play of a...