Meaning and Mode in Gothic Fiction

M eaning and M odetsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA in G othic Fiction F rederick G arber OUR UNDERSTANDING of Gothic fiction has too often depended on a view that this mode is merely an extension of "sen­ sibility,” a grim silliness which grew to become the dark under­ belly of the later eighteenth century. But if we are to accept such a historical classification we have to extend the possibilities of sen­ sibility to include more than melancholic lovers leaning on crum­ bling memorial stones: for neither the Gothic tradition nor the forms of sensibility which contributed to it can be easily encom­ passed by the usual views of what they contain. There is consider­ able variety within sensibility itself: kinds and qualities of feel­ ing, attitudes toward feeling, that are related to each other, touch upon each other at various points, but are by no means identical or even very much alike. Richardton has to be brought in to make one kind of sense out of Sterne and another kind out of the Marquis de Sade; yet neither Sterne nor Sade, both extensions and forms of the tradition of sensibility, have much to do with each other. Richardson, of course, gave a good deal to Rousseau’s hapless lov­ ers (who in turn began their own complex traditions), and in this case Sade is quite relevant indeed: the movement from Clarissa to Julie to Justine is one of the more intricate and imaginatively compelling in eighteenth-century fiction. Clearly, the tradition of sensibility has parallel lines within it which are alike in having a concern with feeling but different in their irreconcilable attitudes toward the valuation of that feeling. If there is such complex variety within the forms of sensibility, forms which did much to shape the Gothic mode, similar complex­ 155 Ra c is m in t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y ities occur nearly everywhere else in Gothicism as well. The mode, it seems, collected within itself all sorts of intricate traditions, and not only those included in the varieties of sensibility. For example, the Gothic penchant for sublimity and ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA its conglomerate of emo­ tions is no closer than sensibility is to being comfortably homo­ geneous: the awe which expands consciousness as one stares deep into an immense valley is close kin to its exact inversion in the claustrophobic terrors of constrictive dungeons. The emotions felt at the top of a tower are both cognate and contraposed to those felt in the holes deep within it. In his essay on the sublime Burke had mentioned in passing (Part II, Section vii) that "the last ex­ treme of littleness is in some measure sublime.” In fact, such paired inversions echo as an elemental structure throughout Gothic fic­ tion, the mode which also recognizes the implicating mirror images in the consanguinity of Richardson and Sade. Gothicism is full of these varied tricks. Clearly, then, we ought to consider the mode as a most complex amalgam, one which is in part a collective of other modes whose affinities were perceived with an astonishing subtlety by the best practitioners of Gothic fiction. And it is through this quality as a collective that the Gothic reaches out to fulfill its own radical form and statement. One way of describing this amalgam is to call it a meeting of modes or, more accurately, a confrontation among them. The lov­ ers out of the literature of sensibility do as they did (or wished they could do) in the fiction they dominated, and villains sired by Machiavelli out of the Jacobean stage still function darkly, though smarting somewhat from their pre-Gothic tumble onto a burning lake. Melancholy still finds its inspiration in rot, and garrulous servants, loyal to their masters but of the wrong class to swoon over sublimity, carry through with an occasional craftiness which was made definitive in Figaro. Most studies of Gothic fiction have been occupied, Jack Horner-like, with picking out these separate plums. But the point is not only that Gothicism blended other modes so skillfully into a unique organic coherence but also that it destroyed none of their separate...