Museums of the Mind: The Gothic and the Art of Memory

if you had let me rest with the dead I had forgot you and the past.

— H.D.

The most ancient myths tell of the transgressive nature of the backward glance. Lot’s wife heedlessly looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. No sooner has Orpheus glanced at Eurydice, than she is lost to him forever. Yet the Gothic, which emerges in an increasingly secularized society, is a genre that glorifies transgression. Indeed its window on the past suggests the Claude glass as the emblematic artifact of late eighteenth-century English culture. This small convex mirror, originally used by landscape painters, became obligatory equipment for the English tourist seeking picturesque views of nature. Spectators sought out precisely determined viewing stations, turned their backs to the natural scene and viewed it in the glass, framed like a picture and transformed by the mirror’s tinted background foils into an image in the style of the then-fashionable painter, Claude Lorrain. ¹

As its name suggests, the gothic purports to represent a distant, even primitive past. It is nevertheless wholly a product of its day, an eighteenth-century framing of time gone by. This paper will embrace the view that the Gothic, examined in novels by William Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, is part of a search for a sacred that is, of necessity, personalized, and that it is driven by the eighteenth- century cult of sensibility, through which “we are forever urged to escape from the anxiety of emptiness and to seek, through outside sensations and fleeting thoughts, a fullness and intensity that must be continually renewed.” ²

Partaking of two particularly eighteenth-century genres, the esthetic treatise and the guidebook, the Gothic will be treated as a manifestation of a desire to create personal histories, in which all of life is experienced as a kind of museum. The external symptoms of this obsession with history include the passion for collecting, the Grand Tour and later developments such as the popularity of tours of the English landscape and English country houses, where owners constructed personalized spaces or interiors. I will argue that the notion of reverie and the passion for re-collecting are “internal” symptoms of the same obsession. Lastly, the Gothic novel itself will be considered as a literary museum.

Personal Identity and the Art of Memory

So Memorie doth preserve each thing in its degree And rendereth unto everyone his dougthie dignity

— William Fulwod ³

Ironically, the cult of sensibility expressed in such influential works as Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful is the expression of a new attitude towards existence and consciousness theorized early in the century by the philosopher John Locke. The empiricist philosopher’s formulation of a new rational attitude towards existence and consciousness, as put forth in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ultimately leads to a privileging of the irrational. Contradicting Descartes, Locke posits that the soul has ideas only after receiving sensations, indeed that it is only conscious of itself when receiving sensations. Thus “an unoccupied mind is in a sense annihilated,” and the individual, like the eye’s pupil in a dark and terrifying chamber, dilates in order to experience extremes of sensation. ⁴

The fear of insensibility, staged in the Gothic novel as a confrontation with the sublime object that terrifies the subject into momentary speechlessness or loss of consciousness, can also be seen as the fear of memory loss. Locke, emphasizing the importance of the faculty of memory, associates forgetfulness with imminent death:

There seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas, even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive; so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen. Thus the ideas, as well as the children of our youth often die before us; and our minds represent to...