God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition by Alison Milbank (review)

Outside the purview of anti-Catholicism, relatively little work has been done in the arena of Christianity and the Gothic. Alison Milbank works to fill this gap with her recent book, God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition. Milbank puts aside the paradigms through which the Gothic is usually read to advance an original argument: nineteenth-century Gothic literature is united in its quest for spiritual and religious mediation as it mourns the legacy of Catholicism and the loss of its mediating practices. Milbank approaches the topic primarily through historicist lenses, working to “theologize the Gothic,” beginning her study earlier than most Gothic critics by starting with the Reformation, which she argues haunts the Gothic (4). Her book is split into four parts, focusing on the Whig Gothic and the Reformation, the Scottish Gothic and duality, the Irish Gothic and the role of blood, and re-enchantment of the material in the later Gothic. These categories allow her to cover most canonical nineteenth-century Gothic in useful ways while bringing in additional, less conventional texts. Milbank primarily writes about British Gothic writers, with brief exceptions of Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allen Poe.

In part 1, Milbank examines the Gothic legacy of the English literary tradition from Foxe and Spenser to Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante. Chapter 1 focuses on the Reformation’s influence on early Gothic novels, which feature ruined monasteries, superstitious pasts, usurpers, and tyranny, topoi Milbank links to politics. In various ways, Milbank shows, the Gothic novel is similar to the Anglican church. She concludes the chapter by reading Spenser’s Faerie Queene as Protestant Gothic. Chapter 2 explores the nostalgia intrinsic to the Gothic. Milbank locates the “loss of the media-tory” (45) in Shakespeare and in Corbet, then lands with Milton, noting that his work centralizes ruined religious edifices as arenas “for nostalgic mediation” (52). Because of this desire for mediation, Milbank writes, it is only natural that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic should allude so frequently to Shakespeare and Milton. Chapter 3 looks at the ways Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Matthew Lewis use the grotesque. In their respective novels, the grotesque often marks divine providence. Milbank suggests Walpole and Lewis resist the Whig ideology found in Reeve. In chapter 4, Milbank turns her attention to Ann Radcliffe, outlining the “Anglican mystical theology” in her novels, where she uses literary allusion to develop “a theology of mediation between natural and supernatural, and between aesthetics and ethics” (87). She points out that Radcliffe’s characters who appreciate nature and the sublime are also morally upstanding, which Milbank sees as a response to a “lack of mediation” (96). Milbank also highlights Radcliffe’s frequent allusions to Milton and similar use of melancholy.

In chapter 5, Milbank looks at Charles Brockden Brown (one of two American writers mentioned in the book) and rational dissent. She reads Wieland as Gothic and specifically critiquing Godwinian “optimistic individualism” as well as “Whig American civic humanism and its religious exceptionalism” (115). In chapter 6, Milbank traces connections between Mary Shelley and Dante, reading Shelley as a mediator between Rational Dissent, “Brockden Brown’s questioning of his optimistic anthropology, and the nineteenth-century’s naturalization of the human” (122). Milbank first turns her attention to Frankenstein, noting Shelley’s references to Milton and Dante’s Inferno and arguing the work’s deep intertextual thinking occurs alongside Shelley’s theological development in the direction of Anglican orthodoxy. Milbank demonstrates how Dante’s work provides a model for Shelley’s narrative structure, creativity, and development of “a moral grotesque” (124). Shelley’s interest in and use of Dante continues in later novels Mathilda and Valperga, each of which Milbank provides useful readings. Essentially, this chapter argues, “Dante mediates the supernatural for Shelley” (147).

Part 2 focuses on Scottish Gothic and...