masculinity into a union with the heroine, whom he frees from the father and the villain to join him in a bracing, if muted, conclusion.
Discussions of 'female Gothic' have often centered on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). I will discuss that novel in a later section of this chapter, but it will be helpful here to mention some recent feminist readings of Frankenstein by such critics as Kate Ferguson Ellis, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Barbara Johnson, and Mary Poovey. They have suggested that Shelley's tale has as much to do with female as male desire and that Victor Frankenstein's imaginative aspiration and his ungainly creation are by no means a celebration of male creativity. For Ellis, Frankenstein is a critique of bourgeois family life and an attempt to show that the «guilt-imposing» home is as nefarious as the public world of male domination. Gilbert and Gubar see the creature as a reflection of the silencing and oppression of the female in patriarchal culture, and they hear the creature's pleas as the entreaties of the author herself from within a marriage that was by no means 'liberating.' Johnson argues that the novel expresses the anxiety of motherhood and the horror of maternal responsibility that Shelley herself experienced. Finally, Mary Poovey suggests that the novel is about the conflict between the codes of Romantic «originality» and Victorian 'female domesticity' and becomes 'a troubled, veiled exploration of the price [Shelley] had already begun to fear… egotistical self-assertion [as an author] might exact.' These are only a few of dozens of feminist readings that the novel has received, but they begin to demonstrate how rewarding such analysis can be.
All these critics seem to suggest that 'female Gothic,' while it hardly -231- freed women from the limitations placed on them in contemporary culture, at least suggested ways in which their victimization-in the world outside Gothic fiction as well as within it-could be subverted both to turn patriarchal violence against itself and to claim a space for women. As Michelle Massé explains in her excellent chapter on Gothic masochism, many things can be named as sources of conflict in Gothic fiction, 'but all point, in the best Gothic tradition, to something more ominous.' In her analysis, that «something» is 'the refusal of the heroine's existence as subject.' That is why the idea of female space is so fraught in these works, both haunted and supported by the spectral mother who challenges patriarchy with the threat of undomesticated female power. Even the more «shocking» of these novels, such as Manfroné, insist on a resilient and even at times intrepid heroine. The thrill of survival is complemented, what is more, not by a paternal suitor who will protect but rather by a feminized hero who will join the heroine in her experience of the world and its vicissitudes. Admittedly, this seems little better than the brutally patriarchal closure that seemed inevitable in novels by the 1790s. But even this 'little,' I believe, begins to explain why 'female Gothic' became popular for women in the later eighteenth century and remained so for ensuing genserations.
Imps of the Perverse The simple air of sexual violence in The Castle of Otranto — in which, because of Manfred's desire, his son Conrad is 'dashed to pieces,' his son's fiancée is brutalized, and his daughter is sacrificed to his unbridled lust-is raised to an eloquent expression of sadomasochistic, incestuous, homoerotic, and otherwise perverse transgression in a series of works that take their inspiration from the more sensationalistic imitators of Walpole. Among the first of such imitators is William Beckford, whose Vathek (1786), although not strictly a Gothic novel, provided a model for erotic brutality in fiction that became immediately available to Gothic writers. Such writers emphasized the horrific and sensational details of Gothic narrative at the expense of historical or even narrative credibility. As diverse in their specific concerns as any group of writers is likely to be, these authors all took such delight in moments of sexual intrigue, physical abuse, or monstrous psychological torment that any didactic aim of fiction was seemingly lost. What they shared, however, and what still attracts their audiences, was their willingness to -232- confront areas of experience that were traditionally ignored. Inspired perhaps by the convention of the 'imp of the perverse' sent from the devil to tempt hero or heroine with pleasures of the flesh and other modes of infernal seduction, these writers explored various forms of «perverse» or transgressive sexual practice: sadomasochism, incest, miscegenation, cannibalism, necrophilia, and homosexuality. They treated these issues as intelligently as they were treated anywhere at the time, including in medical literature or social science.
Vathek (1786) is more an «Oriental» tale than a Gothic novel. Concerned as it is, however, with necromancy and sensual indulgence, it has earned a place for itself in discussions of Gothic works. The title character, 'ninth Caliph of the [proverbially pederastic] race of the Abassides,' is an Eastern Faust, who has his own Mephistopheles in the form of Giaour, a monstrous emissary of the devil who goads him on to ever more energetic perversion. Various examples of what Beckford's own society would have considered sexually grotesque find praise in the novel. Vathek's appropriately named Palaces of the Five Senses, for instance, seem in themselves blissfully innocent, and it is only when the hero turns from physical satisfaction to intellectual pursuits that his desires begin to seem corrupt. An 'insatiable curiosity' for knowledge leads him from the delectable pleasures of the flesh to the frustration of secret knowledge, until he is ready to sacrifice everything for the ability to know.
Vathek's approach to the world of forbidden knowledge is littered with corpses and animated with hatred. Children sent to celebrate his munificence are cast into the maw of his desires, and subjects who try to save him from a fire are consumed by the power of his will. Vathek's destructive self-indulgence and his desire for nefarious satisfaction may seem like an unconscious exposure of the author's own pederastic fascination. His appetites, after all, are a source of positive energy and could even save him from destruction, just as love seems to offer him freedom from the confines of morality. But instead both desire and love cause Vathek to feel that he is already damned, trapping him in a position of concupiscence and shame. This paradox the novel tries not so much to resolve as to bring into vivid relief: when Vathek achieves final damnation, his «burning» heart suggests that his very desire has consumed him.
In the continuation of Vathek that Beckford planned but never executed, other damned souls were to share with the caliph in the Halls of Eblis fully developed stories of pederasty, masochism, necrophilia, and -233- incest. They were going to tell, that is, Gothic tales of their own damnation, which would defy the silence that culture imposes on such 'perversity.' Beckford himself knew the cost of violating that silence: he was hounded out of England on account of a handful of love letters penned to a young nephew. In a sense, Vathek is his own history of perversity, his own refusal to settle for the terms that culture offers.
In other novels that involve soul-selling, such as Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or, The Moor (1806), sexual desire is equally central to the damnation of the individual. In this novel, Dacre tells the story of the proud Victoria, who finds herself attracted to her husband's brother's immense servant Zofloya, who lures her with compliments and flattering asides. In a carefully constructed tale of gradual dissipation, Victoria sacrifices her relations to satisfy her seemingly insatiable desire, only slowly realizing that Zofloya alone can soothe her soul. Even at his first appearance in the novel, she finds herself obsessed with the darkly handsome servant. 'Why he should be connected with her dreams, who never entered her mind when waking, she could not divine: but certain it was, that his exact resemblance, though as it were of polished and superior appearance, had chiefly figured in her troubled sight.' Later, when he has encouraged her to murder her husband, attempt the seduction of her brother-in-law, Henriquez, and imprison and torture his fiancée, her relations with the Moor become more explicit. After Henriquez has killed himself, and Victoria is fleeing the authorities, she meets Zofloya in the mountains. Here she sees the Moor in 'his proper sphere':
Dignity, and ineffable grace, were diffused over his whole figure;-for the first time she felt towards him an emotion of tenderness, blended with her admiration, and, strange inconsistency, amidst the gloomy terrors that pressed upon her breast, amidst the sensible misery that oppressed her, she experienced something like pride, in reflecting that a Being so wonderful, so superior, and so beautiful, should thus appear to be interested in her fate.
The implications of creating an 'imp of the perverse' who is a seductive «Moor» has vast cultural and psychological implications. Anyone familiar with eighteenth-century literature knows that miscegenation was as frightening a «perversion» as incest or homosexuality to the cultural imagination. In the context of the present discussion, however, it is easy to see how Victoria's «desire» for Zofloya is precisely what leads her to destroy herself as she does. Her desire for the «Moor» falls out-234- side what is socially acceptable and therefore subjects her to the Law that marks her as an aberration. In killing her husband and throwing herself at her husband's brother, Victoria is only playing out what desire itself has already rendered inevitable. External evil, in the form of
