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The Judge Reexamined: Rebecca West's Underrated Gothic Romance By Philip E. Ray Connecticut College In the almost seventy years that have passed since its initial publication in 1922, The Judge, Rebecca West's second novel, has been severely and consistently criticized. West's lapses in the handling of her subject, style, structure, and characters have been repeatedly pointed out.1 It is the purpose of this essay, however, to show that at least some of these "lapses" are actually conventional features of Gothic fiction; that if The Judge has long seemed to the general reader and the professional critic an incompetent piece of literary craftsmanship, the reason may be that both have been applying to it the wrong kind of standards, those appropriate for use in the discussion of the "serious" or "mainstream" novel.2 The standards appropriate to the discussion of the Gothic romance have the advantage of making The Judge appear to be a competently constructed work of literature. Shouldn't a major writer like Rebecca West enjoy the presumption of competence unless the case for incompetence has been conclusively proven? And can that case be regarded as proven before the possibility that The Judge is a Gothic romance has been fully explored?3 One charge leveled at The Judge both by an original reviewer and by the author of the most recent book-length study of Rebecca West provides an introductory notion of how the critical discussion of the work has so far been conducted. The anonymous reviewer of the Times Literary Supplement makes the following comment on the bipartite structure of The Judge: One reaches the end of Book I, with the feeling that, if this is not a great novel, it is at least a witty, acute, and agreeable one. . . . We were left unprepared for the milieu of horror and lust into which the story now moves.4 In his Literary Achievement of Rebecca West (1986), Harold Orel lodges precisely the same complaint, although with much greater specificity: The Judge turns out to be, after a promising beginning, the glummest kind of thesis novel. . . . The darker final half of the novel is schematically plotted, resembles a case history drawn from some psychiatrist's notebook, and dreadfully enervates Ellen's personality so that she becomes—quite unexpectedly—a passive witness of the resolution of an Oedipal conflict that the reader knew nothing about for more than two hundred pages.5 297 Ray: Rebecca West's Underrated Gothic Romance What both critics fail to acknowledge is that just such transitions from an orderly universe in which virtue and sanity prevail to a nightmare universe in which vice and madness undermine all order are a primary characteristic of Gothic fiction.6 Several of the best-known Gothic romances, Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) and Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) for example, rely heavily on transitions of this sort: the hero or heroine walks in sunshine and safety, and then without warning, without preparation, the abyss opens at his or her feet. Before going further into the nature of the Gothic in The Judge, however, we need not only a definition of the term but also a context for West's Gothic conventions. According to Andrew Wright, the central feature of the Gothic romance is the Gothic castle. Speaking of the diverse elements that went into the historical making of the Gothic in literature, he states that they are all separably identifiable as representing tendencies that may lead in other directions, but the Gothic as a literary genre has a distinct and solid central feature, because it could contain or suggest all these elements, together with the human characteristics that these elements make possible: the central Gothic feature is the castle.7 The literary castle need not be a literal castle but may be a chapel or cathedral , a convent or monastery, a farm or manor house, a town hall or railway station. It may in fact be any building old enough to deserve the epithets "rude" and "barbarous," which were the chief synonyms for Gothic in the eighteenth century. Without human inhabitants of a certain sort, however, the castle is incomplete: there must...

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