Abstract
The gothic is always with us. Certainly, it was always with the Victorians: all that black, all that crepe, all that jet and swirling fog. Not, of course, that these are gothic as such, although we do think of such figures as manifestations of nineteenth-century Englishness. These and other phenomena, such as the statuary found in Victorian cemeteries like Highgate are discernible as being the fragments and manifestations of a haunting and, equally, haunted, ‘gothicized’ sensibility. If there is, as I argue in the Introduction, a transition in the nature of gothic from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, an irreversible movement from genre to trope, from structural identity to that which haunts the structures of narrative, it is marked by an inward turn perhaps, an incorporation which is also a spectralization. There is a constant return of the gothic as that which marks national identity without being fixable as a paradigmatic definition of that identity.
It is the fear one needs: the price one pays for coming contentedly to terms with a social body based on irrationality and menace.
Franco Moretti
Gothic novels are technologies that produce the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body.
Judith Halberstam
A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of a man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.
Charles Dickens, The Haunted Man
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Notes
James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), 33.
Antony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 161.
H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 110.
See also Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 106–20 on the monstrous and Dickens’ gallows humour. Baldick discusses the comic references to galvanism, from Sawyer and Allen forward, and also to the ‘animation of the apparently inanimate’ (107). He also considers how the comedic effect is achieved through a dark exuberance on the author’s part, discussing as well the question of dismemberment and dissection. Baldick argues that there is ‘more to all this ghoulishness than a gratuitous frisson; it is of a piece with Dickens’ synecdochal, Carlylean representation of character and of the fragmented body’ (110). Furthermore, for Baldick Dickens maps monstrosity onto the body as a product of ‘crushing social pressures’ (112). This may be true in part, but there is a certain distortion in Baldick’s argument inasmuch as he takes the issue of fragmentation as directly Carlylean — Dickens’ productions being a manifestation akin to the anxiety of influence perhaps — rather than seeing Carlyle’s writing as similarly produced, and not the original source as Baldick seems to assume implicitly. Arguably, the ‘contamination’ of fictive discourse with traces of scientific, anatomical and gothic textuality speaks of the general historicity and materiality of Dickens’ text, in which materiality Carlyle is also enfolded. The gothic as genre provides Dickens with a recognizable form of bourgeois entertainment which misshapes and in turn is distorted by contemporaneous discourses of the period.
Harry Stone, The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 77–9.
On flesh, fatness, and their carnivalesque relation to the erotic in Pickwick, with particular attention to the Fat Boy, see James R. Kincaid, ‘Fattening up on Pickwick’ in Annoying the Victorians (New York: Routledge, 1995), 21–35.
James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 10–13, Kincaid argues that the stories we tell today concerning child abuse are, in their structures and circuitry, essentially gothic narratives, filled with so much terror that we become paralysed by them, unable to act. From this perspective, what is perhaps particularly terrifying in Dickens’ gothic reinventions is that he is able to invest the gothic with humour. The spectralized gothic mode can be read as being put to use as a revenge, rather than a return of, the repressed.
José Gil, Metamorphoses of the Body, trans. Stephen Muecke (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 99.
James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 95.
For a full-length study of mesmerism and its popularity as a form of entertainment, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
As I have argued elsewhere, Todgers’ boarding house serves as a synecdochic figure for the condition of London; Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1998), 167–9. This symbolic and structural relationship, in its play between domestic architecture and urban topography, provides a suitably gothic space. This is intimated in the passage above with regard to Todgers, while Kelly Hurley has argued that Dickensian narrative ‘figures the urban space... as a gothic one’ (Hurley, Gothic Body, 165). Certainly this is true in Dickens’ city narratives, where boys can be kidnapped, women frightened, and men stalked.
John David Moore, ‘Coleridge and the “Modern Jacobinical Drama”: Osorio, Remorse, and the Development of Coleridge’s Critique of the Stage, 1797–1816’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85:4 (1982), 443–64; 444.
Clery writes: ‘In Gothic Fictions, smugglers and bandits opportunistically inhabit spaces... [such as] the deserted wing of the castle, the ancestral crypt. Like spectres they are of necessity creatures of the night and they exploit this kinship by using popular superstition as a cover for their illegitimate activities’; E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 133–4. I am not suggesting that Bailey is either supernatural or criminal, merely that Dickens brings together in the boy’s performance, in his names and acts, the discursive kinship discussed by Clery and frequently exploited in Gothic narrative.
Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 32.
Adrian Poole, ‘Introduction’, in Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London, 1997), ix.
Joseph Andriano, Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 139.
Andriano cites both Jackson and Warren on this point. Jackson suggests that ‘the history of the survival of Gothic horror is one of progressive internalization and recognition of fears generated by the self’, while Warren states that ‘the phantom lady is essentially the man’s most vital spirit’ (Jackson and Warren cit. Andriano 2 n.3). The works to which Andriano refers are Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1988)
Barbara Warren, The Feminine Image in Literature (Rochelle Park: Humanities Press, 1973).
Malcolm Andrews, Dickens and the Grown-Up Child (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1994), 89.
Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994), 5.
Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 74. In establishing the conventions of the gothic for a reading of Walter Scott, Robertson highlights the ways in which there is narrative and architectural correspondence in gothic novels, where passages, in both senses of the word, lead nowhere. Jenny’s fantastic transport also promises to lead nowhere, strictly speaking.
J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth Century Writers (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 65.
See, for example, the well-known cartoon by John Tenniel, ‘The Irish Frankenstein’, published in Punch (20 May 1882), where in a typical conflation between the name of the creator and his creature, the Irish are represented as monstrous, bloodthirsty, masked creatures. H. L. Malchow’s Gothic Images provides what is to date the most sustained consideration of the relation between the aesthetics and politics of representation, from Frankenstein to the fin-de-siecle. On related matters of race and the connections made between ‘foreigners’ and women see Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); also on the issue of race and degeneration, see
William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, trans. Don Barry et al., Afterword Wlad Godzich (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 93.
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© 2002 Julian Wolfreys
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Wolfreys, J. (2002). ‘I wants to make your flesh creep’: Dickens and the Comic-Gothic. In: Victorian Hauntings. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1358-6_2
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