Limits of the Gothic: The Scottish Example

Lim its of the G othic:tsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The Scottish Example F rancis R . H a rt Th e UNENDING and contentious search for the generic es­ sence of the "Gothic novel" appears as futile as do most searches of the kind. Take the recent debate in P M L A : R. D. Hume in March 1969, and Hume and R. L. Platzner in March 1971. One contestant seeks to force a consensus, the other strives as mightily to establish momentous differences, and together they demonstrate the futility of such debates if little more. I do not mean here to dwell on the confusion in which such debates leave me, nor would substantive criticism of the positions of Hume and Platzner be fair without more preliminary analysis than is possible in a brief paper. But I do wish to begin by taking some issue with the basic critical intentions they share. Although Hume tries at last to deny it, both disputants are bent on generic essentializing. And both are bent, as well, on evaluating a whole genre, on establishing that th e Gothic novel has such-andsuch artistic worth. The first objective, I think, is premature, and the second strikes me as critically dubious. Hume speaks of what the "form" had for its "prime feature" or its "key characteristic," as distinguished from mere "conventions," "devices," or "trap­ pings," when it "came to full flower." In his "Rejoinder" (March, 1971), Platzner (though he speaks not of flowering form but of "mythopoeic tendencies") is equally insistent: because the "Gothic Romance is a conglomerate of literary ’kinds,’ grafting character types and melodramatic devices of Jacobean drama and sentimen­ tal fiction onto a sensibility derived largely from graveyard poetry and the cult of the sublime"—because, that is, of the "synthetic 137 Ra c is m in t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y character of this genre” (the same is true, one supposes, of all genres)—’’one is obliged to isolate what is conspicuously 'gothic’ in the Gothic.” Why? Because otherwise its formal achievement or mythopoeic tendency could not receive serious academic acclaim? In an earlier essay (in ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA E xp erien ce in th e N o vel, 1968), I wrote with such intentions myself, and in an excellent (still unpublished) dissertation on the nineteenth-century Gothic (Yale, 1970) James Maddox quite properly found my argument overstated. I mistake the tendency, says Maddox, for the achievement. But this danger is endemic in criticism of the Gothic, in part because of an understandable defensiveness in seeking academic respectability for a long-disgraced, flagrantly "popular” sub-genre, and in part be­ cause our sense of its "importance” declares itself on such a murk­ ily subjective level of response. We academics respond nowadays to the rediscovered Gothic for some of the same scandalous reasons that our students respond to adult fantasy, elfin, demonic, or spec­ ulative. Our persistent Arnoldian bias then drives us to discover a rationale in moral seriousness for our enthusiasm, and in so doing to distinguish between essential value (whether formal or mytho­ poeic) and "conventional trappings,” even though conventional trappings are a condition of our response to any mode of popular fantasy. What Maddox and others call the Gothic "tendency” is not to be understood by such solemn essentializing. We need a fuller cultural and historical understanding of the Gothic ten­ dency. Only then will we be ready to do critical justice to the stranger confusions or mixtures of mode that the Gothic engen­ dered in the novel. We can say of the late eighteenth-century Gothic tendency in the novel that it consists of at least five major elements, however pro­ foundly, superficially, or incoherently these elements may declare themselves in an individual work: (1) an antiquarian taste for what was taken to be the style or ornament of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance; (2) an ambiguously enlightened taste for the preternatural—a curious revival of the ghost story; (3) a fascina­ tion with the mystery of human malevolence, perversity, sadism; (4) a preference for the style or affective state called sublimity; and (5) a shift of aim away from...