University Degree Diploma

In English Literature
 Sexual anxieties in the English
Gothic NovelContents

Prologue

Introduction
The meaning of the word Gothic
Origins of Gothic
Emergence of Gothic literature
The Definition and Characteristics of Literary Gothic

Chapter One
The Female Gothic
The Division of Gothic Literature in Terms of Gender
Masculine Plots of Transgression of Social Taboo
Feminine Plots of Sexual Repression

Chapter Two
The Gothic Female
The Extreme Development of the 18th Century Cult of Sensibility
The Neurotic and The Obsessive as Main Preoccupation
The Gothic Heroine – Idealization and Repression

Chapter Three
Sexual Anxieties
Virtue in Distress – Persecution of the Patriarchal Power
Nightmarish Neurotic Sexuality

Chapter Four
The Hero-Villain – Victimizer and Victimized
The Byronic Figure
Transgression of Human Social and Ethical Constraints – Tragic
Destiny

Epilogue
 Prologue

The subject of this work is mainly the sexual anxieties presented by English

writers of Gothic literature, more specifically, in the English Gothic novel, written in

England between 1760-1820. I have said mainly because I have also approached a

number of other topics related to the main one, in a more restrained manner. One

of these so-called minor topics that has interested me in a special way is the

relation that women writers had with the Gothic novel and the way they expressed

their dissatisfaction with the times of patriarchy in which they lived, their fears

when facing this world of confusion about the sex-roles, the repression of emotion

and the suppression of femininity. This is not to say that I have paid less attention

to the male writers of Gothic literature, although I, myself, have found more

interest in analyzing the works of the women writers, or that this is a feminist

work. Feminism is one thing and literary feminism is another. Moreover, no one

can deny the fact that, for one reason or another, Gothic literature has been

somehow taken over by women, both as writers and readers and also as main

characters in the stories. Gothic novels by women interrogate this gendering of

the genre and their heroines are often a response to cultural anxieties and

dominant discourses of the time, making us, the readers reflect upon and query

the fictional role of the heroine in Gothic writing and the social construction of

‘woman’.

I would like to thank my University professor, Mrs. Mira Stoiculescu, for

helping me with the final elaboration of this work and especially for the way she

inspired me with love for such a beautiful literature as the English literature,

during the first two university years. Thanks to her and to many other teachers

and professors I stand today here, hoping with all my heart that one day I shall

become ‘one of them’.

 Introduction

1. The Meaning of the Word Gothic

Gothic is a word that has a variety of meanings and has had in

the past even more. It is used in a number of different fields: as a
literary term, as a historical term, as an artistic term, and as an
architectural term.
The term Gothic has become firmly established as the name
for one sinister corner of the modern western imagination, but it
seems to work by intuitive suggestion rather than by any agreed
precision of reference. Whereas Gothic in architectural contexts
refers to a style of European architecture and ornament that
flourished from the late twelfth century to the fifteenth century,
Gothic in its cinematic and literary senses is used to describe works
that appeared in an entirely different medium several hundreds of
years later.
The original meaning was literally to do with the Goths, or with
the barbarian northern tribes, the word becoming a virtual synonym
for Teutonic or Germanic, while retaining its connotation of barbarity.
In its earliest sense, it is only the adjective denoting the
language and ethnic identity of the Goths. The Germanic people
were first heard of upon the shores of the Baltic. Their later
marauding and migration from the third to the fifth century a. d. took
them across southern Europe from the Black Sea to the Iberian
peninsula, fatally weakening the Roman empire in the face of further
barbarian incursions. Long after they disappeared into the ethnic
melting pots of the Northern Mediterranean, their tremulous name
was taken and used to prop up one side of that set of cultural
oppositions by which the Renaissance and its heirs defined and
claimed possession of European civilization: Northern versus
Southern, Gothic versus Graeco-Roman, Dark Ages versus the Age of
Enlightenment, barbarity versus civilization, medieval versus
modern, superstition versus reality. Therefor, although the Goths
themselves never constructed a single cathedral, nor composed any
Gothic fiction, these later senses of Gothic still have a recognizable
meaning by their polar opposition to the classical architectural and
literary traditions derived from Greece and Rome. Accordingly, by
the late eighteenth century, Gothic was commonly used to mean
medieval, therefor barbarous, in a largely unquestioned equation of
civilization with classical standards.
Where the classical was well–ordered, the Gothic was chaotic;
where simple and pure, Gothic was ornate and convoluted; where
the classics offered a set of cultural models to be followed, Gothic
represented excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and
uncivilized.
The early sense of literary Gothic is founded upon this usage
denoting a tale concerned with the brutality, cruelty, and
superstition of the Middle Ages. The assumed superiority of
specifically classical culture then tends to be eroded by the
challenge of the Romantic movement, but there remain other terms
of opposition - the modern, the enlightenment, the rational - which
serve to hold the pejorative sense of Gothic in its place. Unlike
Romantic, then, Gothic in its literary usage, never becomes a
positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it an
identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or
tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational
principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the
Middle Ages.
 In this important respect, literary Gothicism differs crucially
from serious medieval reviviscence of the kind found in the mature
phase of the Gothic Revival in architecture. In the nineteenth century
a rehabilitation of the Middle Ages took place, as the great age of
Faith and of social responsibility, and the term Gothic was radically
revised to mean Christian. Such a contrast helps to clarify the fact
that the most vexatious aspect of the term Gothic is indeed that
literary Gothic is anti-Gothic. The anti-Gothicism of Gothic, which
means its inveterate distrust of medieval civilization and its
representation of the past originally in terms of tyranny and
superstitions, has taken several forms and has persisted as a major
element of the tradition.
At first sight, Gothic fiction may appear, as it did to many
anxious readers in the late eighteenth century, as some sort of
irresponsible relapse into the old delusions of a benighted age,
nostalgically glamorizing the worst features of a past from which we
have thankfully escaped. In the early days of Gothic writing, the
strong anxiety among both critics and practitioners of Gothic fiction
about the risks of dabbling in bygone superstition, and especially
about the permissible use of supernatural incidents was animated by
a watchful Protestant fear of popery and its imaginative snares.
Often regarded as simply an escapist mode, Gothic constitutes
in fact a rich, powerful and still vital language of images and styles
in which to represent deep-rooted social and psychological fears -
anxieties about social hierarchy, about the repression of emotion,
about sex-roles and the suppression of femininity, about
incompletely comprehended problems in familiar relationships. By
providing a language in which these tensions can be expressed and
resolved, Gothic has a deep relevance to the inner life of society:
‘The more a work frightens, the more it edifies. The more it
humiliates, the more it uplifts. The more it hides, the more it gives
the illusion of revealing. It is the fear one needs: the price one pays
for coming contentedly to terms with a social body based on
irrationality and menace. Who says it is escapist?’i
Then another change took place at the middle of the eighteenth century:

the medieval, the primitive, became invested with positive value in and for itself.

Starting from Gothic as old-fashioned opposed to modern, barbaric as opposed to

civilized, a case was made out for the importance of these qualities. Therefor it

was claimed that the fruits of primitivism and barbarism possessed a fire, vigor,

and a sense of grandeur that was sorely needed in the English culture. This shift of

values was probably complete by the 1870s: not in that Gothic became a universal

standard of taste, but in that by that time the arguments which supported it had

received their fullest articulation. Therefor the stage was set for Gothic to flow into

romantic poetry which, apart from the fiction itself, was to prove its major cultural

influence.

Over the last two centuries, the term has acquired a number of other

usages, some of them apparently only tangentially related to the original Gothic.

For instance, the publishers still use the term to sell a particular genre of

paperback historical romance. Another example is its reappearance as a

description of a certain kind of American fiction of which practitioners have in

common a kind of psychic grotesquerie.

This New American Gothic is said to deal with the landscapes

of the minds of the psychologically obsessed characters. Violence,
rape, and breakdowns are their essential motifs.
Gothic is also used in a less tendentious sense to refer to horror fiction

itself, in the common form of the ghost story. Many of the best-known masters of

recent supernatural fiction derive their techniques of suspense and their sense of

the archaic directly from the original Gothic fiction. Much of the fiction of our

century has its roots and it relies on themes and styles, which by rights, would

seem to be more than a century out of date.

 2. Origins of Gothic

It is no accident that the Gothic fiction first emerged and

established itself within the British and Anglo-Irish middle class. This
was a society which had through generations of warfare, political
scares and popular martyrology, persuaded itself that its hard-won
liberties could at any moment be snatched from it by papal tyranny
and the ruthless wiles of the Spanish Inquisition. At the foundation of
Gothic literature's anti Gothic sentiment lies the nightmare of being
dragged back to the persecution of the Counter-Reformation.
And so, the novels and tales of the early Gothic writers are
peopled by scheming Franciscan poisoners, depraved abbesses,
fearsome Inquisitors, and diabolical murderers from every monastic
order, plotting against helpless maidens who have been forced
against their wills into the hypocrisies of a conventional regime.
While the repertoire of claustrophobic settings, gloomy themes and
threatening atmosphere established the Gothic genre, later writers
from Poe onwards achieved an even greater sophistication and shift
in emphasis from cruelty to decadence. Modern Gothic is
distinguished by its imaginative variety of voice, from the chilling
depiction of a disordered mind to the sinister suggestion of
vampirism.
The background against which the emergence of Gothic fiction
needs to be seen is very complex. Intellectual, technical and
commercial developments play a very important part. The
background also includes the appearance and early growth of the
novel form itself, the attendant emphasis on realism and the
complicated relationship which that bears to rationalist philosophy.
The question of the relation between Gothic and the rise of the
novel in general is related to that of how it was possible for a new
literary form to emerge this way and what occasioned such a
massive change in the panorama of literary production. The principal
point here is the eighteenth century change in reading public. The
writers of the middle seventeenth century had usually perforce
produced within the system of patronage and for the benefit of a
close aristocratic circle. Later, the appearance of a trading middle
class and the growth of urban centers combined to produce other
potential readers.
Despite the differences between the realistic novel and the
Gothic and despite the attacks mounted on Gothic fiction by various
arbiters of middle-class taste, the readership for the two genres was
pretty much the same. For, although the distancing of the divine and
the insistence on human knowledge can be seen as progressive, the
reduction of the human to the rational can also be seen as circular
and sterile. Reliance on reason may appear to remove mystery, but
only at the expense of outlawing large expanses of actual
experience, the experience of the emotions, of the passions.
Therefor a new genre, that of the sentimentalist novel, gave
the prevailing tone to fiction, as a reaction to rationalism. The
sentimental novel was one that dwelt upon the fine emotions of its
characters, tracing their feeling minutely, choosing situations to
bring out their heightened self-consciousness, situations filled with
pathos and anguish.
 Pre-eminently, sentimentalism was a tone and we shall come across this

tone in the early Gothic novel. The Gothic could not have come into being without

a style of this kind, for it is in this style that we begin to glimpse the possibility of

the balance and the reason of he Enlightenment being crushed beneath the

weight of feeling and passion. This is not, of course, by any means, the

prerogative of the Gothic novel as such, but the essence of the Gothic cultural

emphasis.

There also appeared a new kind of poetry called graveyard

poetry. At this point, it is worth going into graveyard poetry because
it is a kind of poetry that challenges rationalism and vaunts
extremity of feeling and because its involvement with death and
suffering prefigure the Gothic novel. This poetry contains an array of
Gothic props: charnel houses, ravens, tolling clocks, hollow growls. It
is a blend of indulgence and moral rectitude that we shall find
throughout Gothic writing. Essentially, it is a justification for a
literature of terror, on the grounds that terror guards our sanity.
Another root of the Gothic fiction is represented by the
development in the middle of the eighteenth century of the theory of
the sublime. The literature of sublime is a literature not of the
limited but of the limitless, a kind of writing which masters its
audience with its grandeur and which resists false and impose
constraints. This represents the first attempt to systematize a
connection between sublimity and terror (for example the claim of
self-divinity, the conviction of the writer of being potentially a God).
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger,
whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible
subjects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of
the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which
the mind is capable of feeling. Thus, the excitation of fear becomes
one of the most significant enterprises a writer can undertake, and it
is recognized as the primary means by which the dictates of reason
can be bypassed.
Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that the
elements of Gothic first begin to emerge in a hesitant way within the
mainstream of the realist novel itself. However, the crucial
feature of the first Gothic novels has to do with their relation to
history. It is only later that the writers' preoccupation with terror as
such returns and becomes substantially connected with historical
interest. In addition, the reason why it is sometimes difficult to draw
a line between Gothic fiction and historical fiction is that Gothic itself
seems to have been a mode of history, a way of perceiving an
obscure past and interpreting it. In the 1770s and 1780s, several
kinds of new fiction rose to challenge the realist tradition.
But what they all had in common was a drive to come to terms
with the barbaric, with those realms excluded from the Augustan
synthesis, and the primary focus of that drive was the past itself.
Without some understanding of Augustan principles and their role in
eighteenth century it is difficult to understand the real purpose of
the Gothic revival, in terms of history as much as in terms of the way
in which it purported to offer a new confection of the relations
between the human, the natural and the divine. Augustianism took
its name from the Augustan period of the Roman Empire. The
Augustan saw their period of national history as analogous to this
past age, in that it too seemed to them a silver age: that is, it
seemed poised between golden achievements in the past and
possible future collapse into a barbarian age of bronze. This is where
the Gothic literature took its taste for the past, the revival of old
values and the appreciation of history.
3. Emergence of Gothic Literature

In a literary context, Gothic is most usually applied to a group

of novels written between 1760s and the 1820s.
Through the earlier part of eighteenth century, the ghosts and
the phantoms, which had played so important a part in earlier
literature, seem to disappear, because there was no room for them
in the supremely rational world of the Augustans. Nevertheless, they
started to reappear with the Gothic revival, occurring often in the old
ballads, and from there they moved into Gothic fiction. The ways in
which they were presented were manifold: in some works there are a
number of supernatural occurrences, in others only events which
prove after all to have reasonable and natural explanations.
Nevertheless, even if the ghosts are eventually explained away, this
does not mean that their actual presence within the text can be
forgotten, and almost all the Gothic writers used the supernatural for
one purpose or another.
The so-called Age of Reason manifested a strong hostility
towards the representations of the supernatural. The taste for such
horrors was seen as an uncountable weakness in reasonable
creatures that love to astonish and terrify one another. The
Enlightenment objected to this form of writing, which perpetuated
irrational ideas for the sake of affect, and supernatural fiction was
considered as the ultimate luxury commodity, produced by an unreal
need for unreal representations.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, literary tales of
terror were being affirmed as manifestations of an autonomous
realm of the aesthetic, detached from the didactic function that had
guaranteed the social utility of the realist novel.
The literature of terror arose in the late eighteenth century as
a symptom of and reflection on the modern. It had the power to
disturb and, by the very force of the prohibition against it, to voice
otherwise unspeakable truths.
Against the expectations of the rationalists, the invisible world
was not to be demystified, deactivated and nullified by contact with
a modern world of commerce and Enlightenment. On the contrary,
the smooth absorption of the ghost story into the rationalized
apparatus of commercial production would depend on the material's
continuing power of fascination. Doubt concerning the existence of
spirits would increasingly operate as a mechanism of fictions to
which individuals might voluntarily subscribe.
At that time, the purpose of Gothic was to educate the reader's
feelings through his identification with the feelings of the characters,
to arouse his sympathy, as the aesthetics of sensibility demanded,
by evoking pity and fear, and to explore the mind of man and the
causes of evil in it, so that the evil might be avoided and virtue
fostered.
The fictional form adopted in order to be free to create a
fictional world, which embodied the fears of the Gothic writers and
offered them a retreat from insoluble problems was the form of the
romance. The earliest Gothic romances are literary fantasies
embodying, for didactic purposes, ideas about man's psychology
that were the culmination of a century of philosophical speculation
on the subject. In them, good and evil are starkly differentiated
absolutes, but as succeeding works delved deeper into the idea of
evil as psychological, evil quickly began to be seen as relative and,
in no time, its pleasures were being explored.
All these works were based on accepted views about the
human mind. Later authors, employing the same literary devices as
the early works, introduced changes that both reflected and
developed a modification of these views. As tales of the weird and
horrid persisted through the nineteenth century, using the same
stock characters and settings repeatedly, they gradually pieced
together among them a picture of evil as a form of psychological
monstrosity. The original querying into the origins of evil shifted to
ambiguous presentation that questioned the nature of evil itself.
The highly conventionalized nature of the settings and
characters, structure and imagery of Gothic fiction has always been
recognized. It has been called escape literature, intended to inspire
terror for terror's sake. But the view of the early Gothic romances as
just a form of escape does not adequately explain why they appear
when they did or why their appeal was so violence reflecting a
violent age, or as a literature immediate and so strong. Descriptions
of the genre as a literature of violence reflecting a violent age, or as
a literature of sensation needed to perk up a jaded age are circular
as well as contradictory. Recent attempts to treat Gothic literature as
an aspect of Romanticism also fail to see its significance as a
convention.
 There is to be found in Gothic literature a peculiar form of
symbolism. In analyzing it, one must speak of storms that stand for
the villain's anger, or heroines that more closely represent a concept
of virtue than flesh-and–blood women. Unlike the artfully buried
symbols customary to a realist work, the flagrant, all pervading
symbols of a Gothic tale are almost, though not quite, allegorical.
The surface fiction is full of vague, unexplained horrors designed not
to render a precise meaning, but to evoke the emotion of terror. Yet,
these effects of terror in Gothic tales refer to something beyond the
fictional devices that produce them. The quasi-allegorical effect
derives from what lies behind the terror-inspiring fictional devices.
These tales make use of the realization that monsters in fiction
frighten because they are already the figments of our dreaming
imagination, they are the shapes into which our fears are projected
and so can be used in literature to explore the subterranean
landscape of the mind. The fictional beings of Gothic fiction
symbolize real but vague fears that the reader recognizes as his own
and all men's. Beneath the surface fiction there is a probing of
humanity's basic psychological forces, an exploration for the misty
realm of the subconscious, and the symbols correspond to
psychological phenomena that yield to literary analysis.
4. The Definition and Characteristics of Literary
Gothic

From the point of view of the Gothic revival, as a recognizable

movement in the history of culture, with recognizable socio-
psychological causes, Gothic is a specific outcropping of a general
flow of ideas and attitudes.
Gothic fiction is a literature of nightmare. Among its
conventions are found dream landscapes and figures of the
subconscious imagination. Its fictional world gives form to
amorphous fears and impulses common to all mankind, using an
amalgam of materials, some torn from the authors own
subconscious mind and some stuff of myth, folklore, fairy tale and
romance. It conjures up beings - mad monks, vampires and demons -
and settings - forbidding cliffs and glowering buildings, stormy seas
and the dizzying abyss-that have literary significance and the
properties of dream symbolism as well. It gives shape to concepts of
the place of evil in the human mind.
In nature of plot, Gothic fiction is marked by narrative
complexity and by its tendency to raise technical problems which it
often fails to resolve. This difficulty might reside in the taboo quality
of many of the themes to which Gothic addresses itself: incest, rape,
various kinds of transgression of the boundaries between the natural
and the human, the human and the divine - a representative of a
particular antagonistic attitude towards realism. In nature of theme-
Gothic themes prescribe a style because of their uneasy social and
psychological situations. Gothic deals with the unadmitted, and it is
not possible to do that in modes which have already been
appropriated for other purposes.
Fear is not merely a theme or an attitude; it also has
consequences in terms of form, style, and the social relations of the
texts. Exploring Gothic is exploring fear and seeing the various ways
in which terror breaks through the surface of literature.
Gothic techniques are essentially visual in their emphasis on
dramatic gesture and action and in their pictorial effects, giving the
reader an experience comparable to that of a spectator at the
theatre. Though the Gothic writers always insist on the powers of
feeling and imagination, they tend to concentrate on external details
of emotional display, while leaving readers to the deduce for
themselves complex inner psychological movements from such
evidence as a certain wildness of aspect, or a settled paleness of the
countenance. There is a precise recognition of the violent physical
effects of the emotion and we are given the gestures of feeling
rather than any insight into the complexity of the feelings
themselves.
 Language is also affected by extensive borrowing from drama,
so that, like physical appearance and gesture, it is a kind of
attitudinizing and can not function as an individual statement of
feeling. There is no flexibility, no delight in verbal inventiveness,
particulars of individual feeling are blurred by orthodox rhetoric and
conversation is restricted by decorum to being a statement of the
outward appearance of emotion.
The presentation of landscape is a way of suggesting
emotional states and atmosphere. The novels are full of sublime and
picturesque scenic descriptions, sometimes evoking a purely
aesthetic response in the reader, but more frequently used as a
visual correspondence suggestive of an inner psychological state.
With the Gothic novels the stability of the external world breaks
down, it is interiorized, translated into the private world of
imagination and neurotic sensibility. The Gothic world is the external
image of the character's or the novelist's own obsessions.
The configuration of Gothic has a psychological rather than
physical existence. When reading Gothic fiction we have no sense of
the real world even in the passages of static picturesque description,
partly because they derive from imaginary landscapes and partly
because they have only the most illusory stability. Nothing is
constant: an ordinary room can suddenly be transformed into
nightmare by the unlooked-for appearance of a ghost in a chair or a
waxen figure covered in worms hiding quietly behind a velvet
curtain; objects look different in the moonlight from what they do in
the day-time. Scenery shifts arbitrarily from one episode to the next.
This is not merely related to the conventions of romance landscape,
but more fundamentally to the general instability and impermanence
of things.
 Everything in Gothic novels is exaggerated: the tranquil
beauty of the country, the seemingly infinite corridors of the castles,
the dimness of moonlit landscapes, the ferocity of storms, the
ruggedness of mountains, etc. The elements of setting become
bearers of anger, fear, and tranquility and, as a result, these
emotions become general and the whole world is filled with them, so
that both character and reader may experience these emotions.
The system of narration is frequently first person and
sometimes epistolary. Both systems lend themselves easily to these
narrative devices and simultaneously produce another effect. They
help create confusion and ambiguity. Frequently Gothic fiction leaves
us guessing and thereby greatly increases the sense of groping
toward something puzzling and partly known, in this case, the mind.
The first person narrator may be the central character, a major or a
minor one, or only one who appears in the slenderest frame to start
the story rolling and sometimes to round it off at the end.
The Gothic literature provides us with characters into whose
shoes we could step and make us face doubtful monsters who might
be figments of a disordered mind or creatures from the abyss. It
makes us feel terror and horror because of some sense of danger to
ourselves.
The grotesque takes the work out of the realm of didactic
literature and gives an uncertainty to its values and its moral stance.
The grotesque is the literary means of portraying the human
condition as threatened with meaningless. Good and evil are
intermingled and they have a slippery tendency to change places
and this undermines moral values and makes life seem uncertain
and directionless. The grotesque asserts that life is haphazard, or
may be; that man is a fool of chance; and that the universe is empty
of meaning. Gothic fiction makes use of the grotesque to create a
doubtful murky atmosphere. Through it, inner evil is projected
outward. The grotesque is eminently suited to embody the view of
madness as demonic possession. The monsters tend to be demonic,
not of this world and this is what gives them their
incomprehensibility. If we were able to relate them to our world, the
grotesque would lose its essential quality. In the grotesque, the
supernatural world and the abysmal realm must remain outside Man
to create that unimpassioned view of life on earth, as an empty,
meaningless puppet play. The manifestation of such ideas in figures
of the grotesque has the effect of objectifying them without
providing a means for dealing with them. This produces the reaction
of horror, and horror combined with a sense of helplessness evokes a
further reaction-hysteria. Hence the grotesque has two features. It
has a pervasive comic element that seems to arise from and
produce that uncomfortable sense of the incongruously horrible that
makes the viewer laugh as he inwardly groans.
To some extent, all Gothic stories are dreams. Real dreams
being themselves manifestations of mental material, their figures
and settings are a natural choice for fictional exploration of the
mind. However, for these dreams to give rise to works of Gothic
literature, the authors must have been predisposed to see the dream
material itself as suited to furnish a fiction. Even so, the Gothic work
is not a transcription of the dream itself and too much should not be
made of its origins in the subconscious of the writer, since the
imagination is compelled to draw much of its imagery from the
subconscious on the one hand, and on the other hand no piece of
fiction is a simple transcription of unconscious thought process.
From the beginning, the dream-like quality of Gothic is evoked
through the narrative structure. The fact of a remote world created
through the method of narration interposes a mind between the
reader and the tale. When the mind belongs to a character within
the tale, the effect is intensified. It is the condition of such a story
that the reader is told what the narrator thinks, has heard, or has
seen to be what happened. This concentric narrative structure shows
clearly how the isolated worlds of Gothic novels are set up
analogously to dreams even when they are not presented
deliberately as dreamlike.
The dream quality is most important in setting up the
landscape as a mental one. It also works to compel suspension of
moral judgement and so, gradually increases understanding of the
foibles of human nature. This growing objectivity is seen in the
intensified ambiguity of the self-reflecting characters as they
reappear in Victorian Gothic fiction.

CHAPTER ONE

The Female Gothic

From the eighteenth century onwards, Gothic writing has been

conceived of in gender terms. Some of its earliest and most
celebrated practitioners were women, such as Clara Reeve, Ann
Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre and Mary Shelley, and any Gothic tales
first appeared in the pages of journals like The Lady’s Magazine.
Women’s periodicals also encouraged submission for their readers
and this way reciprocity of female reading and writing of Gothic was
established. Through the circulating libraries for the middle class,
and the Gothic chapbooks for the lower classes, a new generation of
women readers was able to enjoy, like Catherine Morland in Austen’s
Northanger Abbey (1818), the delights of narrative suspense: ‘While
I have Udolpho to red, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable.
Oh! The dreadful black veil!’ whether the description of the devourer
of Minerva Press productions as female was accurate is debatable,
as men were extensive novel readers, and Austen’s heroine has her
male counterpart in Peacock’s Scythrop in Nightmare Abbey (1818)
who sleeps with the Horrid Mysteries under his pillow.
The division of Gothic writing into male and female tradition is
customary and usually follows the gender of the author. It
distinguishes between masculine plots of transgression of social
taboo by an excessive male will, and explorations of the
imagination’s battle against religion, law, limitation and contingency
in novels such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), in which rape,
murder and mortgaging of the self to the devil are variously
attempted. In the female tradition, the male transgressor becomes
the villain whose authoritative reach as patriarch, abbot or despot
seeks to entrap the heroine, usurps the great house, and threatens
death or rape.
The Gothic novel written by men usually presents the father's
incestuous rape of his daughter as the perverse desire of the older
generation to usurp the sexual rights of the younger generation,
while the Gothic novel written by women represents incest as a
cultural taboo which functions to repress the sexual desires of
women.
 The one who made the first excursion into Gothic territory was
Horace Walpole with his famous Castle of Otranto in 1764. This story
reveals many of the preoccupations of the later Gothic novel. It looks
back to a feudal world, in which the Lord of the Manor, Manfred, the
first of a long line of Gothic villain/heroes, exercises his seigniorial
rights over the minds and bodies of his subjects. Isabella, the first of
a line of intrepid Gothic heroines, refuses his incestuous proposals
indignantly and flees through the subterranean vaults of the castle,
taking refuge in the local monastery church. She is saved later by a
young peasant with whom she falls in love and who turns out to be
the right heir of the castle. This plot encodes various obsessions of
the later Gothic: the setting in medieval and superstitious Southern
Catholic Europe; the conflation of hero and villain; the rise of an
ambitious bourgeoisie eager to exercise individual freedom in
marriage and inheritance; the focus on the victimised, but often
defiant, position of women; the use of confined spaces: castles,
dungeons, monasteries and prisons, to symbolise extreme emotional
states by labyrinthine incarceration – all these characteristic
modalities spring into being, more or less fully formed, in Walpole’s
tale.
However, it was not until the 1790s that the implications of a
fantasy literature embodying contemporary neuroses began to be
thoroughly explored and exploited. The definition of terror and
horror fiction set the pattern of anxious ambivalence that
characterized the Gothic novel for the next 20 years. Mrs. Ann
Radcliffe and M.G. Lewis are the great Gothic experimentalists, and
after them the public demand for morbidly sensational fiction was
catered for by a host of minor writers.
The works of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis stood out
interconnected in a complex web of influence disagreement and
rejection. M.G. Lewis claimed to have been largely inspired by the
success of Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, while Mrs. Ann
Radcliffe responded rather shocked to the sensationalism and sexual
explicitness of Lewis’s The Monk by her best two novels The
Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian.
Ann Radcliffe is so highly specific in her perception of the
social and psychological tendencies that produce the contradiction
and strain that the characters experience. What lies behind her
novels is a concern with hypocrisy, with that fine dividing line
between the kind of sexual and social hypocrisy that is encouraged
by, and perhaps necessary to regularize social intercourse, and that
kind which is destructive and repressive. In Udolpho it is noticeable
that even in the idyllic early part of the book, Emily and her father
spend a lot of time concealing their emotions from one another. For
her father's own good, Emily conceals from him her premonitions of
his death. For his daughter's good St Aubert conceals the fate of his
sister, which is going to cause her such anguish later. And, of course,
the relations between Emily and Valancourt are couched throughout
in terms of the permissible hypocrisy that characterized relations
between sexes at the time. But it cannot be ignored that, for all the
contemporary normalcy of this concealment, their fictional
consequences are appalling; and this is hardly surprising in view of
the degree of sexual segregation practiced at the time. The kind of
situation that Radcliffe dramatizes is the result of the actual process
of female education in the epoch.
In 1818 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as well as C.R. Maturin's
Melmoth the Wanderer two years later, come to complete the list of
the most important Gothic novels.
Women writers have been especially drawn to the Gothic novel
because its conventions permit them to explore one of the most
deeply repressed experiences in a patriarchal culture, that is female
sexual desire. For example, Mrs. Ann Radcliffe typically used the
medieval ruined castle or abbey as a metaphor for the female body,
penetrated by a sexually attractive villain. Within the ruined walls
hides a chaste young woman who is both terrified and hypnotically
fascinated by the villain. Thus she articulated the deep sexual
ambivalence experienced by the young female readers who
intensely desired the passionate erotic experience that a patriarchal
culture firmly forbids to unmarried girls. The conclusion of these
novels, in which the heroine is narrowly saved from seduction or
death by a chaste knight whom she then marries, enables the
female reader to have her cake and eat it, too, to participate
imaginatively in an intensely erotic seduction but to wake warm in
the virgin morn, no weeping Magdalen. The real evil encountered in
the Gothic novel is then the female's overwhelming desire for
uninhibited and all-consuming sexual experience in a society, which,
even in the late twentieth century, is for the most part
uncomfortable with the aggressive sexually liberated woman. The
Gothic romances provide an acceptable form of sexual passion to
women whose own lives do not permit it, although this sexual
passion is often directed toward aggressive, dominating, virile men
whose egotism can lead them to manipulate, exploit and even rape
the women whose desire they arouse.
In another way as well, the genre of the Gothic novel or horror
story uncovers and satisfies a repressed female desire. In a
patriarchal culture that assigns linguistic and social authority to
men, the very act of a woman's speaking in public is a trespass on
male domains. The women who wrote for publication in the
eighteenth century defied the decorum of the proper woman,
decorum so long established that it was considered a law of nature.
Hence the very act of female authorship could be seen as an
unnatural act, a perversion that arouses both anxiety and hostility in
the male reader. While the England of Mary Shelley's day admitted a
legitimate of female authorship, from the Duchess of Winchelsea to
her contemporary Jane Austen, this tradition was sufficiently fragile
to arouse Mary Shelley's insecurities. Doubtlessly inspired by her
mother's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she specifically
portrays the consequences of a social construction of gender which
values men over women. Victor Frankenstein's nineteenth century
Genevan society is founded on a rigid division of sex-roles: the man
inhabits the public sphere, while the woman is relegated to the
private or domestic sphere. This separation causes the destruction
of many of the women in the novel.
Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey, published in
1796, offers a different vision, lacking all the violence and
arbitrariness that we find in so much Gothic fiction. Mrs. Roche deals
with feelings belonging to the gentler region of Sensibility: nostalgia,
love of nature, friendship and most importantly, honourable sexual
love. This theme makes it a very feminine novel, with its main focus
on women’ s feelings about sexual love and marriage in a world
where to be married was the highest point of a woman’s aspirations.
By working out her narrative in contemporary society Mrs. Roche
manages to be a great deal more persuasive about the threats to
innocence than those novelists who translated problems into
medieval Gothic fantasy. Instead of creating an enclosed fictive
world where both escapism and neurosis could flourish, Mrs. Roche
offers pastoral nostalgia and sentimentalism toughened by a
disturbing awareness of civilised city life and the threat that it poses
to such romantic longings. As we might expect, the perfect
embodiment of all the virtues is the heroine Amanda Fitzalan. She is
the most completely traditional character in the novel, having the
inevitable sentimental attributes of the ineffable sweetness and
sensibility and idealised by the author as a paragon of innocence
and integrity. With such a moral code Amanda has little chance to
show herself as anything other than a victim, someone who seeks
refuge and male protection. In the character of the villain Colonel
Belgrave we find a real discrepancy between the realistic
assessment of him as an eighteenth-century libertine using his
superior social position to exploit women sexually and economically,
and the other romantic view of him in his role as a villain, the
predatory man whose deceitfulness and lust are so exaggerated by
the heroine’s fear that he becomes the embodiment of evil in her
eyes. True, Amanda is sexually threatened by Belgrave, who really is
as bad as Manfronè or any other Gothic villain and as assiduous in
his persecution. The author illustrates very skillfully the orthodox
eighteenth-century moral and social assumptions in the most
fashionable form of fiction available to her and her novel contains
potentially disturbing elements of social criticism and emotional
awareness, even though presented differently from other women
Gothic writers.
The prominence of women in the Gothic tradition as popular
and influential authors as central fictional characters and as devoted
readers is noticeable. Gothic fiction has long been presided over by
Ann Radcliffe and her successors, commonly employing the
Radcliffean model of the heroine enclosed in the master’s house: a
formula persistently re-worked in the popular variety of women’s
fiction still known as the Gothic romance, whose descent can be
traced back through Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It is more than likely that this enduring adoption
of Gothic fiction by women has to do with the relative failure of
modern societies to ensure for women the kind of economic, legal
and personal security that are enjoyed as the post-absolutist rights
of man. And if the liberties of women are felt to be more precarious
in these public senses, their traditional sphere of the domestic
interior will often come to appear less as a refuge than as the most
imprisoning space of all, where they may survive the most archaic of
tyrannies. The imprisoning house of Gothic fiction has from the very
beginning been that of patriarchy, in both its earlier and its
expanding feminist senses. Developing the principle more widely, we
can conclude that while the existential fears of Gothic may concern
our inability to escape our decaying bodies, its historical fears derive
from our inability finally to convince ourselves that we have really
escaped from the tyrannies of the past. The price of liberty, as the
old tale tells us, is eternal vigilance; and in Gothic fiction we find this
vigilance running beyond the sober assessment of dangers into a
lurid form of fatalism for which paranoia is often not too strong a
term. Gothic fiction is a way of exercising such anxieties, but also of
allaying them by imagining the worst before it can happen, and
giving it at least a safely recognizable form.
More typically, writing on the female Gothic plot reads it
psychoanalytically. An influential article by Norman Holland and
Leona Sherman, Gothic Possibilities, marks out a female alternative
to the male Gothic Oedipal struggle in which the son acts to
overthrow the father and gain hidden knowledge of the forbidden
mother. Here the psychology lies behind an analysis of the Gothic
plot of entrapment and escape from a labyrinthine castle as the
girl’s difficulty in separating from the mother when she does not
have the obvious marker of sexual difference from her that the son
possesses. The castle is a ‘potential space’ which inwardly
simbolises the mother and outwardly father, who is both feared and
desired by the heroine. In this rapturous play of desire the female
imagination can hover between radical exploration and a familiar
conservative ending.
Clare Kahane’s essay ‘The Gothic Mirror’ similarly attends to
the daughter’s move towards psychic individuation, which she finds
figured in Gothic writing as ‘the spectral presence of a dead-undead
mother, archaic and all encompassing, a ghost signifying the
problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront’.
Typically, Kahane reads female characters in a novel such as The
Mysteries of Udolpho as doubles for the heroine, so that the
murderous Signora Laurentini becomes a mirror for Emily’s own
potential for madness and transgression.
 Chapter Two

The Gothic Female

Gothic fiction represents the extreme development of the

eighteenth century cult of Sensibility, as if Richardson's heroines had
finally lost all sense of objective reality and had retreated into their
own fantasy worlds only to find that the anxieties of real life were
monstrously exaggerated within their own isolated nervous
consciousness. Certainly there is nothing new in the Gothic novelists'
fascination with emotional dynamics; novelists from Defoe onwards
had been interested in 'the wild wonders of the heart of men'. ii
Defoe's Roxana had her dark reflections and her death's-head
hallucinations. Although Richardson said that his aim was to 'inform
the judgement rather than fire the imagination'
Pamela and Clarissa had suffered acutely from nervous hysteria as
the result of persecution, while the Lady Clementina in Sir Charles
Grandison had even run mad under the stresses of religion and love.
In Fanny Burney's Cecilia the heroine temporarily loses her senses
when an attempt is made to seduce her and runs wildly through the
alleys of London's East End.
However, all these novelists managed to suggest that such
behavior was only aberration, and they put the emphasis on
society's ways of assimilating and annihilating it.
With Gothic fiction there is a radical shift in emphasis; the
neurotic and the obsessive become the central preoccupations, and
the view of experience recorded is so exclusively subjective that
individual awareness loses touch with every day life or at least exists
in a very uncertain relationship with it. By the 1790s sensibility
seems to have become a nervous disease, as Michael Foucault
suggests in Madness and Civilization. In his detailed accounts of
melancholia, madness, hysteria and hypochondria drawn from
eighteenth century treaties dealing with disorders of the nerves, he
frequently provides a very clear clinical diagnosis of what are
characteristically Gothic states of mind, though, of course, these raw
materials are often sublimated in the process of giving them fictional
form. Evidence of this sickness can be noticed in the exacerbated
sensibility of Gothic heroines in whom there is an extraordinarily
heightened sense of the inter-relatedness between physical and
emotional responses. To be aware of something meant to feel it
through the whole organism, so that feeling was truly a matter of
sensation as much as of emotional or imaginative perception. Many
of the Gothic descriptions of strong feelings are certainly
behaviouristic and physiological: fear always reduces its victims to
'ashy paleness' accompanied by fits of trembling and stifled groans.
People tend to totter and stagger as they gaze around with a
wildness of aspect, and a sudden shock first of all induces deathy
cheeks and then the crimson blood rushes to the face with
suffocating violence.
As way of total response, sensibility could be cultivated as the
irrational alternative to judgement. In this highly introspective state,
Gothic heroines, as well as heroes and villains react with an intensity
which often affects them physically so that they fall ill or faint from
overpowering feeling. The relation between sensibility and
insensibility is alarmingly close, and it is no accident that the cult of
sensibility merges with a cult of debility in its extreme
manifestations at the end of the eighteenth century.
The Gothic heroine is the prime example of this febrile
temperament, being always in a state of intense awareness, yet
peculiarly isolated from her circumstantial context and from personal
relationships, existing as she does in a self-contained fantasy world.
Constantly threatened by emotional and physical assault, she is so
delicately elusive that she deprives aggression of its reality and her
sufferings impinge on her no more than the events of nightmare. Her
experiences in no way lead to the growth of her self-awareness or a
modification of any of her attitudes; at the end she emerges with
sensibility intact, even if on rare occasions, physically violated. She
is the familiar figure in women's fiction of any age, embodying all
the fashionable feminine fantasies and neuroses.
Just as the Gothic heroine was the idealised image of beauty,
so was she the image of sublimated sexual fantasy. She innocently
arouses the admiration of practically every man she meets, but
usually escapes the penalties of commitment until the end, when
she is happily married and promised a future of unalterable bliss.
True, she is presented with the alternative of sensibility and passion
in the persons of her hero and the villain, but there is never any
doubt about which she will accept; of course she chooses the first,
and despite the terrible risks she runs from, the villain remains
blissfully ignorant of the second. Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines turn with
disgust from any suggestion of sexuality even when shown by the
hero, and later on, Maturin's heroines who fall in love with Byronic
figures never explore the implications of the magnetic attraction to
which they respond. Maturin's Immalee, who actually marries her
demon lover, Melmoth, never understands him, remaining totally
innocent and ignorant and dying untained by her contact with him.
Clearly, idealization and repression go together in the heroine;
to be angelic and robbed in white is only the romantic side of
eighteenth century convention, the other side of which is the
condemnation of woman to a passive role in which she can be
sacrificed by society for sexual and economic interests. As there was
little if any initiative that she could take she was forced to be
negative and out of her inhibitions to construct a convenient fictive
world of fragile sensibility and self-deception. In the Gothic novels
we find awareness as acutely realized as Richardson's or Jane
Austen's of both sides of woman's image, where adulation is
balanced by anxiety-ridden isolation and inviolate purity by
persecution mania. The mainspring of her adventures is persecution
by the villain, whose sinful desires are underlined by the
unnaturalness of his situation. He is often a father figure, either in a
priestly role like Lewis's Monk or an elderly mentor like Mrs.
Radcliffe's Schedoni and Maturin's Melmoth; in order to satisfy his
impious passions he would have to transgress his religious vows or
ties of blood (in some cases both). The disconcerting transformation
of protector into sexual aggressor is one that heroines experience
with dreadful consistency, from Walpole's Isabella who finds herself
pursued down labyrinthine ways by her bridegroom's father to
Lewis's pathetically innocent heroine Antonia who is drugged and
then raped by her confessor. The pattern of heroine as deceived
victim caught up in an endless series of flights from her persecutor is
so often repeated that we soon realize the close connection between
masochistic fantasy and repressed sexuality, which is as
fundamental here as in Clarissa (though Lovelace is a more subtle
threat than any Gothic villain). The obsessive fear of sex is
dramatized repeatedly, though usually given overtones of Christian
suffering. Just as Clarissa's adversity was her shining time so the
Gothic heroines glory in their sufferings as proof of their angelic
natures and their patient resignation to the will of Heaven. Only
rarely is any attempt made to suggest sexual responsiveness in the
heroine herself. Invariably these attempts, timid and slightly bizarre
as they tend to be, are discounted.
 Mrs. Radcliffe's skill as a writer shows itself undeniably in the
way she portrays the registering consciousness of her characters.
Those characters whose minds she gets closest to are her heroines,
especially when they are in solitude, when we get a freer play of
mind and a kind of anxiety-ridden emotional reverie is revealed,
made all the more intense by their own self-enclosure. Although it is
true that we have no coherent sense of Emily as a personality, her
sensibility does provide the focus for that emotional area where Mrs.
Radcliffe's own sensitivity and skill are most acute: in the detailed
exploration of certain anxiety states which are identifiably feminine
and closely associated with isolation, dependence and sexual fears.
The pretence at setting the story in the late sixteenth century gives
the writer the freedom to choose forms that both embody and
disguise contemporary neuroses, and as Emily pursues her allusive
way through the terrors of a world of romance her adventures are
very evidently an analogue for the predicament of the late
eighteenth century woman. Like the heroines of Richardson or Jane
Austen, Emily is forced to meet a series of challenges which are
social and oral in origin and in which the only guidance in how to act
comes from her own feelings. Under the pressure of isolation and
loneliness she is harassed into acute states of anxiety where her
good sense sometimes gives way to crisis of hysteria and panic, as
is made explicit in her behaviour at Udolpho where she momentarily
loses the ability to distinguish between real and imaginary dangers.
Certain conditions at Udolpho are extreme for Emily is literally
imprisoned there under a tyrant's control. The real-life predicament,
however, is not difficult to see under the romance disguise: Emily is
an unmarried girl, an orphan in her minority, left to the care of an
irresponsible aunt and her aunt's tyrannical husband, who first tries
to strip his wife of her property and marry-off his niece to his own
advantage with a Count Morano. He then takes the two women away
to the secluded castle, where he is the sole arbiter of justice, and
after worrying his wife to death tries to extort the inheritance from
his niece. Put in these terms the book looks concerned with male
exploitation of economically defenseless women, a common enough
theme in sentimental fiction. Certainly the antagonism between
Montoni and Emily has a sexual resonance as well, all the more
neurotic for being treated so evasively and indirectly. All the time
Emily is under Montoni's protection she is obsessed by ideas of vice,
rape and murder, though Montoni himself hardly seems to be aware
of her except as an object to be exploited economically. Sexuality
comes to the surface only on one extraordinary occasion, with Count
Morano's jealous accusation that Emily has refused him because she
is in love with Montoni. However, there is no attempt either by Emily
or by the author to explore the mixed feelings of instinctual
attraction and exaggerated irrational fear that Emily has for Montoni.
There is no overt acknowledgement of sexual feeling in the novel.
There is merely the recognition of a nameless power, which is a
frightening, potentially destructive force capable of assaulting both
the body and the will. This fearful awareness is surely at the basis of
the threats of rape and murder which pervade Gothic fiction but
which for Mrs. Radcliffe hover only as nightmarish forms to torment
the innocent minds of her heroines as they recoil in horror and shake
with dread at the prospect of the villain's remorseless vengeance.
However, even Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, that most discrete of
writers, once makes the suggestion in Udolpho that the heroine is
secretly in love with the villain, though as the accusation comes
from a jealous lover it is easily deniable (which is probably just as
well for the heroine's pride, as the villain himself rejects the idea). In
M.G. Lewis's The Monk, where male fears and guilt connected with
sexuality are the basic stuff of the novel, the innocent heroine is
strangely attracted to the monk, as she confesses: 'I am myself
astonished at the acuteness of my feelings'iii. After a most turbulent
narrative culminating in the rape of this heroine by the monk, the
attraction is explained by the fact that he is her brother, at once
underlining and condemning the ambiguity of the initial feelings.
Tough passionate women with overt sexual appetite are vigorously
condemned, like Signora Laurentini in Udolpho who suffers agonies
in repentance in a nunnery. It was to be expected that as sexual
passion was associated with danger and bestiality its only full
expression in Gothic fiction would be rape, murder, incest or
damnation. However, tentative as they are, the few early examples
of the ambiguity of sexual attraction are interesting forerunners to
the appearance of the Byronic figure in C.R. Maturin's Melmoth
where the attraction of opposites comes to play a significant part in
the development of the love story – though, even there, sex is still
linked with violation, and death not life is its proper consummation.
Charlotte Brontë revolted against these restrictive conventions
for treating sexual love, but even Mr. Rochester still has some of the
devilish fascination of the traditional Byronic hero-villain about him.
Neither Charlotte nor Emily was entirely free of convention in this
respect and the earlier Gothic novelists writing novels of fantasy and
emotional indulgence were more timid than the Brontës. There are
implications of sexuality in a superficial and stylized way: the heroine
is always beautiful and passive, the hero is good looking and
energetic, and the villain's flashing eyes and powerful physique
suggest his passionate nature. The implications are seldom
developed or, if they are, the outcome is inevitably tragic. By this
method convention morality was vindicated while still exploiting the
emotional appeal of what was regarded as immoral.
 The dread of sex that runs right through Gothic fiction is basic
to many of its conventions of anxiety and terror. Gothic heroines
suffer incessantly from persecution mania, and there is a high
incidence of hysteria and madness among them which goes with
much threatened brutality on the part of the villains. However, the
causes of such violent feeling are never adequately explained, for
Gothic novelists flirt with sexuality treating it with a mixture of
fascination and coy withdrawal from its implications. With the
treatment of sex, which we find in Charlotte Brontë, for example,
dread and desire are identified as being two sides of the same coin;
but Gothic novels for all their daring, lack this frankness. They are
full of unresolved conflicts and repression, packed with crises which
are the outward signs of inward tensions, but consistently avoiding
any clear analysis of the relation between startling effects and their
possible causes.
 Chapter Three

Sexual Anxieties

Many of the main ingredients of the genre that was to be

known as the Gothic novel can be found in Walpole's novel, The
Castle Of Otranto. This short novel, set in the thirteenth century,
concerns the efforts of Manfred, a tyrannical Italian prince, to
produce an heir to the title and estate which his grandfather has
usurped. Following the strange death of his son, he decides to
continue his family line by taking his son fiancée Isabella in
marriage. Aided by the gallant peasant boy Theodore (who later
turns out to be the rightful heir of Otranto), Isabella resists, and the
enraged Manfred pursues her through the castle until he mistakenly
stabs his own daughter Matilda to death. Theodore is restored to the
title by the intervention of the gigantic ghost of his ancestor Prince
Alfonso the Good, whose statue had earlier crushed Manfred’s son.
Judged by the standards of Walpole’s successors it is a rather clumsy
production, but it did establish for them a fruitful combination of
themes, motifs and settings: the merciless determination of the
feudal tyrant to continue his family line, the threat of dynastic
extinction, the confinement and persecution of a vulnerable heroine
in a sinister labyrinthine building. His text condensed features from
old poetry, drama and romance and provided the model for future
developments. The mixing of medieval romance and realistic novel
tries to overcome the perceived limitations of both: the latter's
insistence on realistic representation of nature and life cramps the
imagination, while the former is too unnatural and improbable.
Wanting to let fancy roam freely in the boundless realm of invention
and create more interesting situations, Walpole also states his
intention to preserve rules of probability and have his characters
think, speak and act as it might be supposed mere men and women
would do in extraordinary positions.
The novel appears as a text that examines the limitations of
reason, virtue and honour in the regulation of the passions,
ambitions and violence underlying patriarchal and family orders. The
novel's style stimulates emotional effects rather than rational
understanding, thereby emulating the vicious passions of the selfish
and ambitious villain. Virtue is helpless in the face of a tyrannical
father interested only in the preservation of a law of primogeniture.
Confronted with indifference, forced marriage and death, the heroine
seems to suffer and be sacrificed to the persecutions of the
patriarchal power with only the occasional knight fighting for her
honour.
Lewis's The Monk is the most daring, the most shocking and
the most Gothic of the eighteenth-century English Gothic romances.
It is daring in its treatment of sexual fantasy and violence; it is
shocking in the luridly sensational sense as well as in its radical
insights into criminal psychology; and it is Gothic in its presentation
of its dark subterranean world filled with supernatural terrors and
the odors of death. The areas of feeling with which the novel is
concerned go far deeper than the confines of Radcliffean sensibility;
they plunge into the murkier regions of Gothic neurosis, especially
the dangerous and violent excesses of the erotic imagination that
Mrs. Radcliffe had scrupulously repressed. It is a fantasy of the
buried life of passion and instinct, where the wanderings of unreason
are contained and concealed within the gothic cadre of ecclesiastical
architecture. Monastic cells, burial vaults and underground passages
provide a frighteningly extensive area for the tortuous exploration
into forbidden feelings, making the daylight world look pallid and
mediocre. The looming figures in the narrative all belong to the
subterranean world, against which the forces of reason and
humanity are totally ineffectual.
Lewis had studied in Germany and he was a great reader of
German romance and ballads before he wrote his own Gothic
romance. With The Monk we have for the first time a novel by an
English writer which has the German emphasis on fantasies of
sexual brutality and on the horrors of physical corruption. This
corrupt fleshiness is really very un-English: the main influence on
Gothic fiction before Lewis was arguably Shakespearean and
Jacobean drama and indeed the influence of Shakespeare is
pervasive in The Monk as well; there were plenty of murders and
ghosts in the English dramatic tradition but not the emphasis on
sensual horror or the combination of sexuality and diabolism which
Lewis introduced. The Monk is much more overtly concerned with
suffering and horror than anything produced in the English novel
before. Some critics have discerned the shade of the Marquis de
Sade in the novel, but this is no more than a plausible hypothesis.
The obvious model for the main narrative of sexual obsession is
Richardson's Clarissa. There is ample evidence for this not only in
the central enormity of the rape but in details of the action, through
the heroine's terrible resurrection among the tombs (which recalls an
early nightmare of Clarissa) to the dying torments of the villain
(where the physical horrors of Mrs. Sinclair's death are combined
with the frenzies of Lovelace). We might even see the Monk as a
cruder Lovelace pursuing his male fantasies without the impeding of
a woman of Clarissa's caliber.
The skeletal account written on the title page of a pirate
edition of The Monk in 1818 captures the emphasis on sex and
violence that we find in the original, especially the urgency of sexual
feelings and its recklessness. It also focuses on the anticlericalism
and diabolism that are so important in Lewis's creation of a Gothic
underworld of morbid fantasy which pushes inexorably towards
death. But by its sheer crudity of language it transforms The Monk
into a piece of lurid Gothic pornography, totally neglecting the
narrative artifice of the novel together with is wit and range of tone.
Certainly the male sexual fantasy seems to be the informing
principle of The Monk and the pornographic stimulus is clearly there
in the thrill of illicit sex.
The Monk is daring in its treatment of sexual fantasy because
it dares to be explicit about desire as it speculates on the dangerous
connections between the erotic imagination and the darker
instinctual urges towards violence, destruction and death. Like The
Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk was a response to an oppressive
social milieu, but it is much more aggressive than it with striking
extensions into criminal pathology, as Lewis explores male sexual
guilts rather than female sexual fears. Lewis did not write
sentimental fiction illustrating the triumph of female virtue but a
savage story about the forces of destruction. While treating that
conflict between reason, conscience and feeling which is so
characteristically Gothic, he turns the conventional moral structure
on his head presenting us with the disturbing possibility that the
forces of passion and instinct are stronger than the forces of reason
and conscience. All his emphasis is on the power of passion over
judgement, so that the novels registers a keen sense of moral shock
- not only on the part of his characters but on the author's part, too -
at the revelations of the destructive potential contained within the
self. What makes the fantasy so sombre and terrifying is the
claustrophobic sense of imprisonment. In a world which Lewis sees
as base, perfidious and depraved, passion can find no safe place
where tenderness and sexuality could flourish and produce life;
instead, the sexual instincts have to be kept secret, hidden
underground in monastic cells or furtively concealed beneath flowing
ecclesiastical robes where they flourish into a bizarrely destructive
existence, asserting their power in ways attended by the torments of
remorse, guilt and misery. The Monk is about sexual obsession but it
is not erotic: in no other novel is sex presented more forlornly, as
Lewis catches the syndrome of desire, consummation and its
aftermath in all its incessant repetitiveness and frustration.
It is in the figure of the Capuchin abbot Ambrosio that sexual
desire is imaged most frighteningly. Certainly it was no frivolous
choice on the author's part to make his main character a monk, for
monkishness with is rigid polarization of sex and religion and its
contempt for the desires of the flesh strikes exactly the right note for
dark erotic fantasy. Clearly The Monk is anti-Catholic (as most
English Gothic fiction was) but hostility to the tyranny and
repressiveness of monastic institutions is here directed specifically
against their denial of the emotional imperatives of the individual
and it is the vow of chastity that comes in for special attack. Lewis,
like Milton, cannot praise fugitive and secluded virtue; he criticizes
as false the virtue of sexual purity, hence it is only the result of
ignorance and lack of contact with the world. Indeed, the simplest
part of the narrative shows the destruction of this kind of innocence
– as a novice in the monastery who turns out to be woman seduces
Ambrosio. The author is certainly keen to persuade his readers of the
erotic appeal of illicit sex in a monastic cell by moonlight as the
cowls are flung back, but Ambrosio's indulgence carries more serious
overtones as well. Not only does it falsify his public image of sanctity
but it also destroys his fragile self-image, torturing him with guilt and
fear until he actually becomes the hypocritical monster that the
monks of anti-clerical fiction so often are. From being a worshipper
of the Virgin Mary's ideal image, Ambrosio is initiated into the
mysteries of sex by the disguised novice who is really a female
demon with a virgin's face, then by tormented stages he gradually
becomes a criminal psychopath who rapes and murders an innocent
girl after strangling her mother. What is so terrifying to the reader of
this lurid history is that we watch Ambrosio degenerating, totally
blinded to the inevitability of his crises of feeling, consistently
shocked by his own criminal propensities, yet powerless to escape
from his guilt-ridden obsession. To claim that it is finally not
obsession, but demonic possession as the author does is to dodge
the issue about the monk's compulsive behaviour, which is
expressive of repressed desires and fears. Lewis traces the course of
frustrated sexual desire, perverted by monkish repression from its
romantic yearnings and imaginative idealization into a dark
destructive lust for power. For Ambrosio, the sexual impulse has
been so contaminated by deception and guilt that it is productive of
nothing but an inveterate hostility towards women as the betrayers
and humiliators of men. This in turn encourages the dreadful
complicity between him and his first mistress, who is a femme fatale
in the literal sense. Their partnership is much more evil than its
mechanics of diabolism suggest, for it consistently denies and
betrays natural human feeling. The real shock to the reader is not
the thrill of monkish sexuality but the revelation of Ambrosio's
potential of cruelty and violence. In him desire can only find its
consummation in rape and murder in the funeral vaults of a convent,
a terrible image of sexuality dehumanized but not deprived of its
instinctual energy.
Once the Monk has been awaken to the possibility of sex
through his seduction in the monastery, he is caught up in a web of
guilt-ridden erotic fantasy from which he cannot escape, and when
the young girl Antonia comes to him begging for a confessor for her
dying mother, he sees her, whose 'affliction seemed to add new
lustre to her charms as the perfect victim. Though his feeling for her
begins as the most conventional romantic fantasy, the impossibility
of a love relationship with her rapidly transforms tenderness into
desperate lust; to fulfill his ambitions in such repressive conditions
he has to resort to diabolical arts. He goes into an infernal
partnership with his first mistress Matilda and together they plan the
rape of Antonia. From this point on, the sexual fantasy becomes
Gothic, with forbidden feeling driven underground into the regions
inhabited by death to pursue in secret its violent consummation.
The rape of Antonia reads like a demonic distortion of the final
scene of Romeo and Juliet, with Antonia dragged and buried in the
funeral vaults of the convent and resurrected by Ambrosio. Lewis
knew that he could rely on his readers' literary expectations to
respond to the gloomy horror of echoing vaults, funeral trappings
and dimly receding architectural perspectives, just as he could
exploit the common Gothic situation of a beautiful heroine
persecuted by a lustful villain. What shocked his readers out of their
confortable literary horrors was that he went far beyond
conventional Gothic fears to the ultimate assault of rape, showing
both its physical brutality and its dimensions of nightmare fantasy.
There is the authentic Gothic love-among-the-tombs frisson
generated by the image of Antonia's return to life surrounded by
rotting bodies and all the odours of physical corruption:

‘By the side of three putrid half-corrupted Bodies lay the

sleeping Beauty. A lively red, the fore-runner of returning
animation, had already spread itself over her cheek; and as
wrapped in her shroud She reclined upon her funeral Bier, She
seemed to smile at the Images of Death around her.’iv

The strong suggestion of necrophilia is extended in Ambrosio's

tormented fantasies of guilt and desire as, lifting Antonia from her
coffin, he addresses the unconscious girl in a language which clearly
belongs not to eroticism but to sexual pathology:

'For your sake, Fatal Beauty!' murmured the Monk, while

gazing on his devoted prey; 'For your sake, have I committed
this murder and sold myself to eternal tortures. Now you are in
my power: The produce of my guilt will at least be mine. Hope
not that your prayers breathed in tones of unequalled melody,
your bright eyes filled with tears, and your hands lifted in
supplication, as when seeking in penitence the Virgin's
pardon; Hope not, that your moving innocence, your
beauteous grief, or all your suppliant arts shall ransom you
from my embraces.' v

The subterranean vaults define the contours of Ambrosio's

obsession, imprisoning him and Antonia in a world far removed from
the light of day and rational feeling, within which Antonia's terror
merely acts as a stimulus to his mad lust for sexual power over his
victim.
The rape itself is presented as a totally destructive act:

'Can I relinquish these limbs so white, so soft, so delicate;

these swelling breasts, round, full, and elastic! These lips
fraught which such inexhaustible sweetness? Can I relinquish
these treasures, and leave them to another's enjoyment! No
Antonia; never, never! I swear it by this kiss, and this! and
this!
With every moment the Friar's passion became more
ardent, and Antonia's terror more intense. She struggled to
disengage herself from his arms: Her exertions were
unsuccessful; and finding that Ambrosio's conduct became still
freer, She shrieked for assistance with all her strength. The
aspect of the Vault, the pale glimmering of the Lamp, the
surrounding obscurity, the sight of the Tomb, and the object of
mortality which met her eyes on either side, were ill-calculated
to inspire her with those emotions, by which the Friar was
agitated. Even his caresses terrify her from their fury, and
created no other sentiment than fear. On the contrary, her
alarm, her evident disgust, and incessant opposition seemed
only to inflame the Monk's desires, and supply his brutality
with additional strength. Antonia's shrieks were unheard: Yet
She continued them, nor abandoned her endeavors to escape,
until exhausted and out of breath, She sank from his arms
upon her knees and once more had recourse to prayers and
supplications. This attempt had no better success than the
former. On the contrary, taking advantage of her situation the
Ravisher threw himself by her side: He clasped her to his
bosom almost lifeless with terror, and faint with struggling. He
stifled her cries with kisses, treated her with the rudeness if an
 unprincipled Barbarian, proceeded from freedom to freedom,
and in the violence of his lustful delirium, wounded and
bruised her tender limbs. Heedless of her tears, cries and
entreaties, He gradually made himself Master of her person
and desisted not from his prey until He had accomplished his
crime and the dishonor of Antonia.
Scarcely had He succeeded in his design, than He
shuddered at himself and the means by which it was
effectedvi’.

As an account of sexual outrage this comes very close to

pornography, with its excited insistence on the illicit thrills of
monkish sexuality and its attempts to shock us by the display of
physical cruelty. Ambrosio and Antonia are reduced to the level of
rapist and victim, stripped of any other feelings but those directly
related to his act of violation: Ambrosio's tormented rhapsody of the
flesh only acts as a stimulus to his brutal assault, while Antonia, like
a true victim, can do nothing but aggravate his lust by her evident
disgust and incessant opposition. There is no question of
gratification or delight on anybody's part – the characters' or the
readers' – but there is for us the voyeuristic fascination of watching
how far conventional limits can be transgressed, as the Monk dares
to proceed along ways that are forbidden until the rape is
accomplished.
Even after the rape there is no release from the dark fantasy
world for Ambrosio's frenzies of self-recrimination flower into his
nightmarish project to keep Antonia as a prisoner in the vaults so
that he can secretly come to do penance to her in yet another
convolution of his deranged and perverted idealism. There is
deadlock between them until suddenly voices from the outside world
break in and Antonia attempts to escape. However Ambrosio catches
her by her streaming hair and stabs her twice as she clings to a pillar
crying out for help. This stabbing is the only possible ending to such
a nightmare, where sexual desire has been perverted from a life-
giving to a death-dealing force: orgasmic destruction is the
appropriate consummation. Obsessed as it was with sexual feeling
as a forbidden but fascinating area of speculation, Gothic fiction
always leans towards pornography; Lewisian Gothic takes the further
step of making the connection between sex, guilt and death quite
explicit.
The final movement of the novel is also towards death as it
pushes through a labyrinth of Gothic terrors to Ambrosio's
destruction. After his unmasking he is thrown into the prison of the
Inquisition, that place of mysterious persecution which fascinated
not only Lewis but also Gothic novelists from Mrs. Radcliffe to
Maturin. Totally cut off from the outside world, Ambrosio moves
through his nightmare of damnation, tormented in body by the
Inquisition and tempted by Matilda on the plea of their mutual guilt
and danger to sell his soul to the Devil for relief. He signs the
Faustian pact at the very moment that the guards enter to take him
away to be ceremonially burned as a heretic in the conventional
Gothic machinery of sensationalism and diabolism.
By totally alienating Ambrosio from society, the author seems
concerned about any connection between his tormented career and
real-life problems. In his last-minute revelation that Ambrosio had
been the victim of diabolical stratagems from the beginning, he
implies that nothing in the Monk's history relates to sexual or
religious oppression but that it is all-demonic. He actually identifies
the irrational with the supernatural, a shocking instance of authorial
bad faith when we consider that the stuff of the novel has been the
exploration of the buried life of passion and instinct.
Lewis is shocking and subversive in a way that Mrs. Radcliffe
never was in his exploration of the dark irrational hinterland of the
human mind whose glooms and terrors find an appropriate image in
the labyrinthine Gothic underworld. Far from restricting his
imagination, the rhetoric of fantasy gives him the freedom to explore
an extensive range of hidden feelings within the escapist world of
romance. It may even be argued that Lewis’s story-telling in The
Monk consciously exploits the secret appeal of Gothic fiction whose
deliberate mode is to separate passion and instincts from every day
life, so allowing their indulgence but effectively controlling the threat
of the irrational by forcing it back into the realms of fantasy.
Mary-Ann Radcliffe (incidentally not related in any way to Mrs.
Ann Radcliffe) wrote another of the most daring novels, Manfronè; or
The One-Handed Monk, a nightmare full of hallucinatory terrors and
sexual violence presented like a melodrama, lurid and simplistic.
Manfronè is a very interesting novel, possessing an
extraordinary emotional compulsiveness in its displays of neurotic
sexuality. The world of Manfronè is a nightmarish feudal world of
arbitrary tyranny and dark threats, with the narrative interest
focussing on the harassment of the heroine Rosalina. She is the
consistent suffering figure throughout, while the forces threatening
her undergo an astonishing process of metamorphosis. Sometimes
they appear as the malicious prince Manfronè, her rejected lover,
sometimes as a mysterious grey-hooded monk from a neighboring
monastery, once indeed as her father who tries to murder her, and
frequently as the fearful black monk Grimaldi. As the novel works its
devious way to solving the initial mystery of Rosalina's midnight
attacker who loses his hand in a sword fight with her father, there is
little sense of a narrative continuum. This very neurotic novel is in
fact structured like a nightmare, not upon action or character, but
upon two key images: a severed hand which becomes a skeleton
hand with the passing of time, and Grimaldi's black mask which
suggests mysterious evil lurking behind him.
The hallucinatory terrors of Manfronè are based on any
rational morality, but on the heroine's sexual fears. Manfronè must
be classed as one of those rare English Gothic novels, along with
Lewis's The Monk and Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, where female
sexual neuroses and male feelings of aggression and frustration are
actually brought to the surface and enacted, for in the most part of
Gothic fiction the villain's rages and the heroine's morbid fears of
him indicate tensions without actually stating them.
The figure of the One-Handed Monk epitomizes these sexual
neuroses in a way that is at once typical of the Radcliffe-Lewis
pattern and unique in its explicitness. In his dual role of monk and
frustrated lover, Manfronè represents the conflation of superstitious
and sexual fears which are the basic stuff of Gothic fiction. Despite
his gigantic form, Manfronè has no stature as a character;
possessing neither Ambrosio's talent for self-destruction nor
Schedoni's Machiavellian ambition, he functions more as a
ubiquitous threatening force than as a personality. His sinister
machinations, though varied in their forms to include murder,
betrayal and blasphemy, are all directly related to his prime motive
of revenge which in turn is the result of his frustrated passion for the
heroine. The immensely complicated intrigue can ultimately be
reduced to a series of elaborations on Manfronè's sexual frustrations.
The narrative becomes the explicit enactment of sexual
obsession, being the fulfillment of an interrupted nightmare of
Rosalina's described earlier in the novel. As the action accelerates
the focus clears, with the villain at last unmasked. The dark ferocious
features of the Prince di Manfronè, so long supposed dead now
terrify Rosalina as the living man leaps out of the reaches of
nightmare and death to molest her in her waking hours. His sudden
appearances as he strides about the castle where he has her
imprisoned are indeed more to be feared than nightmares or ghosts,
augmented as they are by the real sexual threat of his presence:

' She had proceeded half way down the marble stair, when she
suddenly stopped, for to her terrified gaze appeared, when far
remote from her thoughts, the Prince di Manfronè.'vii

Having tried unsuccessfully to coerce Rosalina into marrying

him, he is finally reduced to physical assault and attempted rape, in
a last crisis scene, which is very reminiscent of The Monk:

'Now, proud fair, I mean to possess the lovely habitation of

your scornful soul; nor longer will I wait to reap the harvest of
my toils.' viii

Here we find the same display of male physical power and

terrified female resistance as Lewis used in the rape of Antonia, the
same dramatic action without dialogue, and the same authorial
reticence about the use of the word rape. Mary-Ann Radcliffe refers
to it as 'the dreadful deed which had long been the subject of his
meditations’ix (a circumlocution which emphasizes the duration of
the sexual threat to Rosalina and indeed validates her own morbid
intuitions).
Mary-Ann Radcliffe follows Coleman's model with only slight
variations (having used the skeleton hand earlier in a different
connection) up to the point where Rosalina is rescued by her lover.
Manfronè is ultimately powerless and dies in this knowledge, gazing
on the lovers. When we consider the sexual basis of his aggression,
the embrace of the two lovers reads like the final blow in the tale of
his frustrated passion. However, the author immediately draws away
from the significance of this climax, turning her story into a moral
fable, for she translates Manfronè's defeat into an example of how
justice always overtakes the wicked at the moment of their greatest
triumphs.
For Gothic sensationalism in both the psychological and the
fictional sense, Manfronè can not be outdone. Even when Mary-Ann
Radcliffe leaves behind her murky fantasy world, returning Rosalina
and Montalto to safe marital bliss and reminding her readers of her
moral intentions, she cannot easily dispel the gigantic shape of her
title figure. Manfronè remains as the most explicit embodiment of
sexual neurosis in Gothic fiction.

Chapter Four

The Hero-Villain – Victimizer and Victimised

 It has been said that the hero-villain is an invention of the gothic form,

while its temptations and suffering, the beauty and terror of his bondage to evil

are amongst its major themes. It is true that the hero-villain necessarily bears the

dual markings of both villain and victim, but, in doing so, he represents not so

much a pure invention as his connection and indebtedness to a number of similar

male figures including Milton’s Satan, the eighteenth century ‘man of feeling’, and

above all, the Byronic Hero. Byron’s description of the characteristics of his

eponymous hero in Lara (1814) in Canto 1 is almost archetypal:

‘In him inexplicably mix’d appear’d

Much to be loved and hated, sought and fear’d;’x

‘There was in him a vital scorn of all:

As if the worst had fall’n which could befall,
He stood a stranger in his breathing world,
` An erring spirit from another hurled;
A thing of dark imaginings…’xi

Exactly the same kind of combination of terms is mobilised in

descriptions of more explicitly Gothic hero-villains both before and
after Lara. William Beckford’s Vathek, for example, possesses a
‘pleasing and majestic figure’ yet ‘when he was angry one of his
eyes became so terrible that no person could bare to behold it’. xii
Lewis’s Ambrosio displays ‘a certain severity in his look and manner
that inspired universal awe, and few could sustain the glance of his
eye, at once fiery and penetrating’ and he is discovered during a
period of his life when his ‘passions are most vigorous, unbridled and
despotic’.xiii Whilst Melmoth’ s face is ‘cold, stony and rigid’, his voice
is ‘melodious’ and his eyes have an ‘infernal and dazzling lustre’.xiv
This contradictory personality is symptomatic of the fact that
all these heroes are, in the first place, cursed by a rebellious impulse
to test and transgress human social and ethical constraints. It is this
consistent and fatal over-reaching which constitutes the core
ambivalence of this figure: both violent, threatening and often
demonic, he is yet at the same time always an outsider in a state of
suffering and an object of persecution. The hero-villain, then, caught
in a double bind himself, simultaneously plays this contradiction out
at the level of his both fascinating and destructive personality. Each
of these characteristics represents a reason why the hero-villain in
the Gothic serves more to throw social and sexual repression into
relief than he does to demonstrate the possibility of legitimate
redress of reform.
The hero-villain has also been of particular interest to feminist
critics and to writers who have been especially occupied with those
characters who have emerged from female imaginations; most
notably characters in whom there is strong romantic investment –
classically Heathcliff and Rochester (Jane Eyre, 1847). Elaine
Showalter has used the term ‘brute hero’ to describe such
characters in the line of Rochester who, horrified contemporary
critics feared, illustrated or possibly excited dangerously masochistic
or rebellious female desires (A Literature of Their Own, 1977).
Showalter interprets these male figures in a literary cross-dressing
exercise in which ‘the descendants of Rochester represent the
passionate and angry qualities in their creators’. Thus women
writers, limited by social and literary conventions, are seen as being
forced to project power, aggression and transgressive desire through
male figures. However such a reading, in understanding all desire in
these novels as female, perhaps risks erasing the issue of gender
difference and desire altogether. This would be the way in which
female writers might mobilise romantic hero-villains less to indulge
forbidden impulses than to stage, and in doing so expose and
implicitly critique, the assumptions behind patriarchal authority,
especially in so far as it regulates male/female relationships, though
not exclusively this domain.
The fascination of that distinctively Gothic knot of feelings,
Love, Mystery, and Mystery, survived all its ardent exponents and
vigorous detractors to find its most powerful imaginative treatment
in Melmoth the Wanderer, published twenty five years after Udolpho
and The Monk. In Maturin’s dark imagination all the Gothic neuroses
are exacerbated: crisis of suffering are embodied in a romance which
marks the high point of extravagant Gothic rhetoric.
The images and vocabulary of Gothic are peculiarly suitable
for accommodating the insights of such a morbidly fantastic
imagination as Maturin’s. E.M. Forster’s description in his essay on T.
S. Elliot in Abinger Harvest, of possible ways of confronting horror
provides a very suggestive framework for defining the quality of
Maturin’s sensibility, while it also offers a way of distinguishing
variations in the range of Gothic fiction to which Maturin’s romances
are related:

‘ In respect to the horror that they find in life, men can

be divided into three classes. In the first class are those who
have not suffered often or acutely; in the second, those who
have escaped through horror into a further vision; in the third,
those who continue to suffer.’xv

Maturin undoubtedly belongs, along with Lewis, in the third

class, whereas Mrs. Radcliffe and the Minerva novelists belong in the
first and Charlotte Brontë possibly in the second. Maturin’s fiction
never escapes beyond the agony of existence, hence the
obsessional insistence on man as a victim and the universality of
suffering and fear throughout human history.
With Melmoth the Wanderer Maturin has constructed a fiction
that gives him the freedom to pursue his speculations into
psychology and morality in the literary form traditionally associated
with fantasy and nightmare. Melmoth is really a collection of tales all
dealing with the wanderings and temptations of Melmoth, an Irish
Faust figure who has sold his soul to the devil and is then given a
reprieve of one hundred and fifty years to find someone to change
places with him in the afterlife. The love affair between Melmoth and
Imalee explores the emotional aspects of Melmoth’s comic despair,
while at the same time translating tragic romantic love into an
emblem of the spiritual condition of mankind. The real interest lies in
the working out of a particular emotional relationship through a
detailed analysis of the fantasies and frustrations contained within
sexual love.
Like all Maturin’s lovers, they are ill fated, for he saw sexual
passion as the supreme paradox of optimism and despair, the most
exquisite form of suffering known to mankind. Lying at the
conjunction of Man’s infinite nature with his infinite longings, love
embodies the essential conflict between human desires and the
prohibitive forces of destiny, so the condition of being in love
inevitably precipitates a crisis of awareness where the lovers try to
escape from human limitations by the only means available to them
– fantasy or death. In common with other Gothic novelists, Maturin
associated sexuality with fears of destruction, so great appeared to
him the power released by instinctual urges; unlike the others he
pushes this fear to its extreme, adding to the usual Gothic mixture of
eroticism and guilt a dimension of metaphysical speculation.
 In Melmoth, tragic love goes beyond the strictly human
situation into one that is fatal by definition. Melmoth is a phantom;
he has already died one hundred fifty years before he meets Imalee,
and he constantly reminds her of the death-doomed quality of their
love:
‘ Who can be mine and live?’
No real unity is possible for these lovers, locked as far apart as
the worlds of life and death in a relationship based on the
consequent emotional torment. It is to this context that the crisis of
fury and rapture belong and in which raging storms, a midnight
wedding performed by a dead priest, and exotic tropical gardens are
the imaginatively appropriate correlatives.
Every encounter between Melmoth and Imalee is a situation of
conflict, made the more intense by the powerful sexual attraction
between them and the inevitable failure of any impulse towards
harmony and union. Melmoth’s last visit to Imalee on her tropical
island is typical of the crises which form the pattern of their
relationship, where the inherent violence frustrated passion gives
Maturin the opportunity for the kind of sensational display of feeling
in which he revelled.
Melmoth can offer Imalee a transcendent love but it will be the
ideal perverted into its demonic opposite – an eternity of loving
celebrated not in heaven but in hell. His later rhapsody of
consummation of love in death far surpasses the usual Gothic
necrophilliac flirtings or even rapes among the tombs: it has the
intensity of paradox energetically pursued to the point where
contradictions are fused in a nightmare vision. He is the death-
bringer and storm and fire are the elements with which he is always
associated. Such imagery has strong sexual as well as religious
overtones, as Maturin simultaneously exploits its double association
to emphasise the dangers inherent in sexual love. The only possible
proof of his love that Melmoth could give would be to abandon
Imalee, which he does when he flings her down senseless on the
sand. The final tableau is the appropriate finale, very theatrical in its
presentation of a love where no future or growth is possible:

‘ Is she dead? ‘ he murmured, ‘ Well, be it so – let her

perish - let her be any thing but mine!’ He flung his
senseless burden on the sands, and departed – nor did he ever
revisit the island.xvi

The love between Melmoth and Immalee shows that attraction

of opposites, which for Maturin expressed the truth about man’s dual
nature. He pursues his speculation on tragic love and desire when
the lovers meet against three years later in Spain, where Immalee
has been transported back to her family (and her name changed to
Isidora) to live a life of ‘ imbecility and mediocrity’. When Melmoth
renews his temptations, he offers her the most dangerous release of
all, a retreat into the dream world of her lost innocence:

‘She has renewed, in these nightly conferences, her

former visionary existence. Her whole day was but a long
thought of the hour at which she expected to see him. In the
day-time she was silent, pensive, abstracted, feeding on
thought- with the evening her spirits perceptibility though
softly rose, like those of one who has a secret and
incommunicable store of delight; and her mind become like
that flower that unfolds its leaves, and diffuses its odours, only
on the approach of night… at night alone she existed.’xvii
 As she sleeps away from life, her romantic world darkens into
Gothic nightmare with her midnight marriage to Melmoth, leading
her through a wasteland of suffering to the prison of the Inquisition
and the death of her child until she dies ‘of a broken heart’. Her
death is the final statement of paradox, for she dies kissing the
crucifix and declaring her love for Melmoth, while the heavenly
paradise which she envisages closely resembles that lost world of
innocence of her Indian island where she had first met Melmoth;
even the movement heaven wards is for Isidora a regression:

‘My daughter’, said the priest, while the tears rolled fast
down his cheeks - ‘my daughter, you are passing to bliss - the
conflict was fierce and short, but the victory is sure - harps are
tuned to a new song, even a song of welcome, and wreaths of
palm are weaving for you in paradise!’
‘Paradise!’ Uttered Isidora, with her last breath – ‘will
he be there!’xviii

Maturin’s agonized sensibility is insistently probing the

mystery of man, ranging widely through a panoramic vision of
history for its examples but always turning inwards on itself to
discover new areas of a psychological theory as vast as Melmoth’s
own vision of hell. That trilogy of feelings Love, Mystery and Misery
assumes new dimensions here: it is no longer nearly the stuff of
emotional crisis but rather spells out the terrible conditions of
human existence. At the end we can only look with horror over the
precipice down into the abyss of death, so that we are left, more like
victims than spectators, ‘trembling on the verge’ at the extreme
limits of morbid Gothic fantasy.
 Epilogue

What is Gothic literature? Is it a plot, a topos, a discourse, and

a mode of representation, conventions of characterisation, or a
composite of all these aspects? Associated with the traditional
Gothic novel is an ivy-covered haunted ruin, a swooning heroine
replete with sensibility, and a tyrannical villain, bequeathed with a
lock, a key and a castle. Constituting and constitutive of
anachronism and counterfeit, the Gothic plot, the proverbial textual
folly, is a mirror diverting us from the Gorgon’s gaze, that is at least
once removed from the source of trauma and taboo. The
combination is a dark yet familiar brew – an uneasy and strange
dialectic between anxiety and desire.
Gothic life, like that of a giant poisonous plant with far
reaching tendrils, has found its sustenance by feeding off the
credulities of its readers. Having taken up residence in its host, the
Gothic replicates itself throughout culture like a virus. While resistant
to the antidote of realism, it persistently conjugates with the dark
side of contemporaneity, at the same time making a textual
negotiation with history. Apart from time there is place. The diaspora
of Gothic writing has led to the emergence of distinct traditions all
over the world.
Notes

1. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Introduction, page 21

2. Daniel Defoe, Roxana, page 52
3. M.G. Lewis, The Monk, page 31
4. M.G. Lewis, The Monk, page 34
5. M.G. Lewis, The Monk, page 57
6. M.G. Lewis, The Monk, page 62
7. Mary-Ann Radcliffe, Manfronè, page 38
8. Mary-Ann Radcliffe, Manfronè, page 41
9. Mary-Ann Radcliffe, Manfronè, page 67
10. Lord Byron, Lara, xvii, lines 289-90
11. Lord Byron, Lara, xviii, lines 313-17
12. William Beckford, Vathek, page 32
13. Matthew Lewis, The Monk, page 47
14. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, page 38
15. T.S. Elliot, Abinger Harvest, page 53
16. C.R. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, page 49
17. C.R. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, page 61
18. C.R. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, page 68

Critical Bibliography

 Botting, Fred, Gothic (London: Arnold, 1996)

 Clery, E. J., The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
 Howells, Coral Ann, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in
Gothic Novel (London: Athlone Press, 1978)
 MacAndrew, Elizabeth, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1979)
 Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (London: W. H. Allen, 1977)
 Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, The Handbook to Gothic Literature
(London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998)
 Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic
Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980)
 The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales

Bibliography

 Horace Walpole – The Castle of Otranto (1764)

 Ann Radcliffe – The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
 Matthew Lewis – The Monk (1796)
 Regina Maria Roche – The Children of the Abbey (1796)
 Mary Ann Radcliffe – Manfronè: or the One-Handed Monk
(1809)
 C.R. Maturin – Melmoth the Wanderer (1820
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