JONES,
Darryl. Horror: A thematic History in
Fiction and Film. London, Arnold, 2002.
CHAPTER 1 - HATING OTHERS: Religion, Nationhood and identity
The Monk, Romantic Gothic, and Britishness.
“Modern
Britain was conceived in horror. The development of the Gothic novel, and thus
of modern horror fiction, in English, in the second half of the 18TH century,
coincides with (is both a component and by product of) the period of the
formation of British national identity. Modern nation’s can be understood, to
use Benedict Anderson’s famous phrases, as “imagined communities”, potentially
disparate political cultural and ethnic groupings willed into unity by acts of
imagination, articulated through narrative, Myth and Symbol (Anderson, Benedict.
1991: Imagined Communities: Reflections
on the origin and spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. London e New
York: Verso). National identities are often formed appositionally, that is in a
Self-other relationship to a (usually neighbouring) rival nation, which embodied
all that is venal, reprehensible, archaic, otherwise rejected. For Britain,
this vilified other was France.” (at several wars from 1689-1815 - Waterloo). See Sage: relation
between Gothic and Protestantism.
Certainly
the Gothic novel is collusive in this enterprise, shoring up the British,
Protestant identity of its readers chauvinistically, through its presentation
of a catalogue of caricatured untrustworthy foreignness these were usually Catholic
Europeans, either actually French, like the Marquis de Montalt in A. Radcliffe’s
The romance of the Forest (1791)
(This trope is still going strong even as late as 1864 in the person of the
grotesque French governess, Mmd. de La Rougierre, in Sheridan le Fanu’s Uncle Silas) or else Italians like Manfred
in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1765) and Schedoni in A. R. The Italian
(1797) or Spaniards like Ambrosio in M.L The
Monk (1796), who had the status, as it were, of metaphoric Frenchman
[Britain could afford being antagonistic towards the Europeans neighbors, not
Portugal because it felt its detachment as an island and could indulge in
militaristic behavior without risking the mass slaughter of its citizens]
The
Marquis de Sade’s famous description of the Gothic novel (writing in 1800 he
was thinking particularly of Lewis’s The
Monk) as “the necessary fruit of the revolutionary tremors felt by the
whole of Europe” (Sade: Idée sur les
romans) seems to me doubly significant in this context, as not only is Sade
referring to what has become a traditional conception of the Gothic novel as an
ideologically and aesthetically radical or revolutionary form in which societal
taboos are examined and violated (that is certainly what Sade himself was
about, and – if his aim was not simply to make money through sensation and
exploitation – may have been what Lewis was doing too), but also to the ways in
which the systems, not government, which were to shape the late 18TH
century political history insinuate themselves into Gothic novels.
Furthermore,
there is a sense in which the non-mimetic, non-realistic modes of the
fantastic, the Gothic, and the grotesque, working through symbolic acts of
inversion and indirection, were the only aesthetic media with which to
represent or respond to current events. Thus, by imaging forth the European
Other as Catholic, superstitions, barbarous, irrational, chaotic, rooted in the
past, the Gothic novel allowed a British audience conversely to identify itself
as protestant, rational, ordered, stable, and modern: Continental Europe is the
domain of fantastic reality,
whereas England is rooted in contemporary realism. Symbolically, the further
one gets from a stable centre-point, the further back in time (and into the
barbarous past) one moves. [Dracula’s
famous passage of the trains (p. 10-11), breakdown of modern technology, the
uncivilized nature of these countries] [Also Northanger Abbey (Henry saying to Catherine: remember the country and
age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians.]
What
Henry is insisting on here is that England is a stable, Modern, lawful
‘imagined community’. Although this is not presented unproblematically there is
allusions the paranoia of the 1790’s (but for the Midland countries of England).
Ambrosio’s
celibacy draws him to the portrait of Madonna. The sinister manipulative Monk
is of course the staple figure of Protestant anti-monastic literature of the
period. Also Radcliffe’ response, Schedoni is presented as pure malevolent
charisma. Incapable of seeing the truth in his face, the revealed truth of
Protestantism, he becomes a victim of his own poison, the inquisition (John
Thorpe reads The Monk as pornography).
Unlike
Radcliffe’s novel which ended up in an “explained supernatural” fashion,
providing a secular, rational explanation for what had seemed to be
supernatural events, it seems that in Lewis they are perfectly right to be
superstitions.
Also
in Radcliffe’s novels, it is important to realize the extent to which the
narrative is mediated through the perceptions of ingenuous and highly sensitive
heroine: as Sage notes, ‘She is often wrong in her judgments: intransigently
orthodox in her beliefs, she suspects ‘superstition’ all around her (Le Fanu,
2000: xxi). This is certainly true, but it should also be noted that, as in
Radcliffe, and as Northanger Abbey also suggests, there is a strong sense in
which the rhetoric of Gothicism and the supernatural is the only means by which
these young heroines, linguistically circumscribed by decorum, can represent
material threats, to their chastity, their life or both.
One
notable way of classing people as uncivilized is to quote them as cannibals.
(relation to catholic Corpus Christi).
Montaigne (1580) discussed this relation between civilized x barbaric in a
culturally relativistic approach. In Gulliver’s travels, the Yahoo’s Catholic
Irish as Indians.
