Criticism (p. 17-20)
The approach of this book has been made possible by recent developments in literary critical and cultural theory. This is no to say, however, that earlier scholarship and critical enthusiasm for Gothic writing has been neglected, far from it. While work of this kind sustained serious interest in forms marginalised, if not forgotten, by canons as curiosities in the history of literary production and consumption, the shift in values in perspective provided by recent theories has significantly altered attitudes to Gothic texts. By challenging hierarchies of literary value and widening horizons of critical studies to include other forms of writing and address different cultural and historical issues, recent critical practices have moved Gothic texts from previously marginalised sites to designated as popular fiction or literary eccentricity. This questioning of boundaries in recent criticism is highly appropriate to studies of Gothic texts.
This introductory volume draws on different issues and perspective informing and structuring critical interpretations and reinterpretations: it is an effect of previous writing, a selective composite of various critical readings which, while referring to no specific critical statement other than those by contemporary reviewers, remains indebted to the history of Gothic criticism. The most informative work on different aspects of Gothic writing and using different approaches is cited in the bibliography. The following overview will indicate the variety of ways criticism has engaged with Gothic writing, engagements which are clearly affected by changing of critical positions. In the early part of the 20th century, from the 1920s, Gothic writing was discussed as a subgenre, of peripheral interest as part of general literary historical surveys discussing the development of the novel. Michael Sadleir's interest was a result of the list of 'horrid' novels cited in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818). In J. M.S. Tompkins's study of popular novel various themes and characteristics of Gothic were situated within a general literary historical context, while Edith Birkhead examined particular tales more closely in terms of their literary merit. More favourable accounts of Gothic novels were offered in Mortague Summers's, and subsequently, in Devendra Varma's, critical histories. The appeal, for them, of Gothic writing lay in opposition to realism and rationalism, in its quest for a realm beyond the empirical and material world, for a realm of the mysterious, mystical and holy. For them, terror and horror are linked to awe and dread as ways of representing a human quest for metaphysical, religious experience in a secular age.While in The Gothic Quest (1938), Summers traced Gothic influences into the 20th century, it is examining the classical Gothic texts and in Romanticism that his work holds the most interest. He initiated attempts at classifying different Gothic texts. Categories of 'supernatural-', 'historical-', 'rational-' and terror-Gothic' have, since Summers, been amended in Varma's work, in G.R. Thompson's collections, and in Robert Hume's and Robert Platzner's debate, in order to account for different Gothic features and effects, especially that of horror.
Much of this critical work focuses on the relation between Gothic and Romantic writing. Broader definition of Romanticism, like those by Eino Railo and Mario Praz, include Gothic writings, but as examples of less ideal themes of violence, incest, passion and agony: Gothic becomes the dark or negative side to Romanticism. In contrasts displayed in Gothic presentations of darker themes, criticism finds an explicit invitation to indulge in the traditional psychoanalysis: Gothic becomes a fiction of unconcious desire, a release of repressed energies and antisocial fantasies. Themes of the divided nature of the human constitution have become established ways of discussing Gothic texts: dualities of mind and body, reason and desire, are repeatedly invoked. Popular Freudianism, assimilated by 19th century notions of human duality, is ubiquitous, informing texts like Robert Kiely's and Masao Miyoshi's on the romantic novel and the divided self.
David Punter's exhaustive survey of Gothic literature is similarly Freudian, though heavily tempered by Marxism criticism. Punter's analysis, like Franco Moretti's accounts of Frankenstein and Dracula, focuses on issues of class by relating Gothic texts to anxieties about aristocratic and bourgeois power, as well as fears abut the monstrous proletariat and forms of alienation. Since Sade's 'reflection on the novel', Gothic has been linked to revolutionary energies, a connection recently examined by Ronald Paulson. With Ellen Moers's notion of 'female Gothic' as a mode of addressing fears about sexuality and childbirth, one of the most significant directions in recent Gothic criticism was laid out. A challenge to, or interrogation of, forms of fiction dominated by patriarchal assumptions, Gothic novels have been reassessed as part of a wider feminism critical movement that recovers suppressed or marginalised writing by women and addresses issues of female experience, sexual oppression and difference.
Extensive interrogations of traditional literary and cultural institutions, related to those enunciated in Marxist and feminist criticism, have emerged in the wake of structuralist theory. Stressing the role of linguistic structures and differences in the formation of cultural meanings, post-structuralist criticism have attended relations of textual sexual and historical production and reproduction. Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's book on GOthic conventions disclosed the textuality of the genre, the play of narrative surfaces and metaphors that undermine assumptions of depth and hidden meaning. The link between textuality, power and desire in Gothic fiction has been theorised by Jerold Hogle, and a recent book, Gothic Writing (1993), by Robert Miles has examined the discursive framworks enabling the production of earlier GOthic writing. Several critical essays on specific Gothic texts have begun to interpret the genre's relation to notions of identity, sexuality, power and imperialism. Indeed, from the 18th century onwards, Gothic texts have been involved in constructing and contesting distinctions between civilisation and barbarism, reason and desire, self and other.
Gothic excesses repeatedly return to particular images and particular loci. Familial and sexual relations, power and suppression, turn of the roles and figures of father and daughter. In villains masculine sovereignty is staged and scrutinised. Old castles, houses and ruins, as in wild landscapes and labyrinthine cities, situate heroines and readers at the limits of normal worlds and mores. Historical events or imagined pasts, also, delineate the boundaries of the normalised present in a movement, an interplay, that leaves neither where they where. In its crossing of boundaries, however, Gothic is a mobile and specific form. For the images and figures that are reiterated constitute a place where cultural fears and fantasies are projected. Thus similar figures have different significances, depending on the culture that uses them. Indeed, this is the pattern of Gothic as a genre that, in generating and refracting diverse objects of fear and anxiety, transforms its own shape and focus. In structuring this book along conventional and chronological lines, cultural and historical discontinuities as well as continuities can be plotted, demonstrating the major shifts in Gothic production as well as the persistence of certain patterns. Drawing on newer critical work as well as earlier studies, this introduction anticipates future examinations of the ways Gothic texts produce, reinforce and undermine received ideas about literature, nation, gender and culture.
