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98 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW ROSEMARY JACKSON THE SILENCED TEXT: SHADES OF GOTHIC IN VICTORIAN FICTION Ein Gespenst geht in Europa— Karl Marx Marxist literary criticism is, by now, familiar with one of the most crucial concepts introduced by Jacques Derrida, Pierre Macherey and their English disciples such as Terry Eagleton: the concept that there exists within a text another text, camouflaged or concealed, but constantly present.1 The working of this sub-text is seen as analogous to the operation of the unconscious according to Freudian theory. It manifests itself in the contradictions of the main text, in those moments of hiatus and disjunction where the work threatens to collapse under the weight of its own repression, and to lapse into incoherence. As Macherey explains, 'the book is not self-sufficient; it is necessarily accompanied by a certain absence, without which it would not exist. A knowledge ofthe book must include a consideration of this absence.'2 In Victorian fiction, this stencilled area of the sub-text is a peculiarly violent presence. It has to do with repressed regions of unconscious experience — sexuality, dreaming, mental aberration, death — but its attempt to articulate all that is 'other' is also related to the suppression (and oppression) of revolutionary energies in class terms. The many structural distortions and inconsistencies in nineteenth century novels can be directly related, in this Machereyean perspective, to a terribly confused and, in turn, confusing ideological matrix in which they were conceived. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, all wrote highly contradictory fictions which betray an ambivalent attitude towards the petty bourgeois ideology framing and forming their work. 'Ambiguously placed within the social formation, the petty bourgeoisie . . . was able to find epitomised in its own condition some of the most typical contradictions of bourgeois society as a whole . . . only writers with an ambivalent class-relation to the society could, it seemed, be open to the contradictions from which major literary art was produced.'3 Inconsistencies in their presentation of class conflict are most evident on the edges of their novels, in the interstices of the text. Indeed, the sub-text, the unsaid, of Victorian fiction is an inchoate, amorphous underworld, full of the violence of desire. It appears as a nest of vipers beneath the stone which weighs down the state, and its revolutionary presence suffers inevitable distortion as it is translated into a less stinging form acceptable to its petty 99 JACKSON bourgeois audience. In literary terms, this sub-text can be identified as the Gothic strand of nineteenth century novels. Gothic episodes erupt into Victorian texts, effectively undermining and eroding from within those normative structures upheld within a dominant realistic mode.4 In these sequences, social, moral, epistemological and psychological orders are thrown into disarray. A predominantly realistic narrative is fractured, spiralling into surrealistic convulsions. But these spaces in Victorian fiction are not merely aesthetic fireworks. The text's formal fragmentation, as it stutters into violence or silence, is less a Assuring of a Romantic kind, hankering after the ideal non-verbal discourse, than a dislocation which can signify maximum political unrest. Gothic fiction had emerged in the mid eighteenth century, with Walpole's TAe Castle of Otranto (1764), and its regressive romance tendencies in novels by Clara Reeve, Peter Teuthold, Mrs. Roche, etc., had expressed a longing for an idealised feudalism, a longing which was 'a nostalgia for a social order in the process of being undermined and destroyed by nascent capitalism.'5 With Ann Radcliffe , M. G. Lewis, Mary Shelley and C. R. Maturin, Gothic had developed into a medium capable of expressing extreme disorientation . It constituted a form of negative Romanticism, unable to accept transcendental ideals, but still strongly 'counter-enlightenment . . . (challenging) an era naive in the fervor ofits scientific naturalism, its rationalism, its benevolism, its commitment to the norms of "common sense"'.6From being an architectural and then a literary term, describing 'a subgenre based on extravagance, disorder, frenzy, and the irrational', Gothic had gradually evolved into a counter-cultural term. It became in the eighteenth century 'a rubric for many kinds of forces that were gathering to chip away at the Augustan ideal', for 'The...

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