The Columbia History of the British Novel

parricide brings the Superior and other monks to witness the depravity: 'we burst into the cell. The wretched husband and wife were locked in each others arms. You may imagine the scene that followed.' -238-

The convent's Superior, 'who had no more idea of the intercourse between the sexes, than between two beings of different species,' is so horrified at this spectacle of 'two human beings of different sexes, who dared to love one another,' that his own sexual proclivities may be called into question. If they are; if, that is, he represents the «homosexuality» implicit in monastic life, he also helps to explain how what is transgressive in one context becomes the very agent of cultural control in another. The kind of surveillance that comes «naturally» in a convent- religious life builds surveillance into its communal system-here has had the salubrious effect of ferreting out heterosexual desire and extirpating it from the society in question. Such surveillance succeeds by employing those who would otherwise find themselves in violation of the Law they are so desperate to serve.

What does happen is that these lovers are lured, as they try to escape, into the underground passages of the convent and are trapped there by the parricide in a chamber that is nailed shut and from which they can never escape. Before long they turn on one another, and before the narration ceases, the husband sinks his teeth into the wasted flesh of his mate. This cannibalistic conclusion to a tale of sexual transgression is not unique to Maturin, but it is presented here as a deft reminder of the relativity of desire. Love becomes literally an appetite, and desire becomes indistinguishable from murderous aggression. By walling these young lovers up in the subterranean passage and listening to their moans, the parricide acts out the cultural mechanism that the Gothic harbors at its core.

If male homosexuality is one of the secrets of Gothic fiction, as it seems at first to be in the scene just cited, and as it is in Vathek and The Monk as well as in Frankenstein and in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which I shall discuss, it includes the subversive potential of desire that is not subject to the Oedipal fantasy that patriarchy has provided for the control of relations. What has happened in these works is that a particular version of cultural subversion has been codified, with the result that desire itself becomes a cause for the particular forms of cultural hysteria suggested in repeated scenes of mob violence, brutal beatings, and even murderous conflagrations. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued that identification and desire are inextricable in «homosocial» relations. Where she sees male heterosexual empowerment, however, I think it is also possible to discern the beginnings of an organized «homosexual» protest against the status quo. For -239- it is not just that the relations among men tend to exclude women, but also that the desire that is articulated between men seems only to be expressible in terms of violence and abuse. Gothic fiction is at least partly about 'homosexual panic,' the fear of acknowledging those forms of desire that threaten society's regulation and control of sexuality. But it is also, in the cases I outline, about the debilitating quality of that control. The force of cultural subordination is itself a Gothic nightmare, and these novelists are as ready as anyone to acknowledge that force and perhaps to defy it.

What is powerful about these works is their ability to articulate this «horror» without flinching at its cultural implications. In Maturin's account especially, the values of the culture, the force of 'good,' is represented by a man who has murdered his father. The Law of the Father, in other words, is a self-victimizing law, a system that inevitably defeats itself. Gothic fiction looks at how that defeat occurs and posits an anarchy of desire outside of social control. Or at least it tries to posit such desire, for of course in an ideological system such as that flourishing in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as in our own, there is no 'escape.'

Double Vision

The relation between an individual and the cultural constraints that define her or him is most vividly portrayed, both within Gothic fiction and without, in the figure of the evil twin, the alter-ego, the double. Doubles appear often enough in Gothic novels to be thought of as the sine qua non of the genre. This last section discusses the conventions of the double as they are employed in three more works of Gothic fiction.

Sedgwick argues persuasively in Between Men that a certain strain of Gothic fiction finds an analogy in Freud's case history of Dr. Schreber, the state judge who published an account of his own bizarre psychological experiences that was later studied by Freud. For Sedgwick it is clear that 'paranoia is the psychosis that makes graphic the mechanisms of homophobia.' Sedgwick describes a 'large subgroup' of classic Gothic novels, 'whose plots might be mapped almost point for point onto the case of Dr. Schreber: most saliently each is about one or more males who not only is persecuted by, but considers himself transparent to and often under the compulsion of, another male.' In Freud's case history Schreber tells, with shame but without equivocation, of his sense that -240- an ever-watchful God has chosen him for a special communication. In order to receive this communication, which would come in the form of divine rays preferably through his anus, Schreber felt that God insisted on his dressing in woman's underwear in order to create the «voluptuousness» appropriate to the «wife» of God. Freud interprets Schreber's paranoia as an elaborate displacement in which Schreber avoids confronting his own homosexuality.

Ignoring the homophobia that is rife in Freud's own text, I find two things useful for my argument here: first, he has made explicit the connection between paranoia and sexuality, and, second, he shows how, in the Schreber case, the source of patriarchal law becomes the very agent of sexual transgression. Schreber «loves» the very God who is watching and who will punish him. Surveillance and desire, in other words, are inextricably bound in the workings of Schreber's private 'nightmare.' But Schreber's private nightmare is, in fact, the nightmare of culture itself. God, authority, and Law become the brutal, victimizing «top» in a sadomasochistic configuration of desire.

In Caleb Williams (1794), William Godwin portrays such a configuration. The novel tells of the personal obsession of a young man for the elusive secrets of an older, mysterious benefactor. James Thompson suggests that the novel is a story of 'surveillance,' in which psychology and politics are both at work and in which paranoia becomes a political as well as a psychological condition. 'To put this as simply as possible,' Thompson says, 'surveillance in Caleb Williams should be seen not merely in terms of the function of an authoritarian state, the professionalization of the police force, and the development of the penitentiary… As an anarchist, Godwin was vitally interested in the mechanisms by which the state extended its influence of power into the lives of individual subjects.' Lacan says that 'desire becomes bound up with the desire of the Other, but that in this loop is the desire to know.' Desire/Other/Knowledge: this figure emerges repeatedly in Gothic fiction as the figure of haunting. The double stands precisely at the «junction» of desire and knowledge, which, for Lacan, is the 'junction… out of which revolutions come.'

Caleb Williams anticipates this triad in a vivid portrayal of male-male desire. Caleb's obsession with his master, Falkland, and the history of Falkland's relation with his enemy Tyrrel form the dramatic center of the work. The socially fraught relations between these three men are sexualized in various ways: Caleb's interest in Falkland has sexual over-241- tones from early in the novel, and he talks openly, even aggressively, about his «love» for his benefactor; Falkland, who in turn is described as having 'polished manners… particularly in harmony with feminine delicacy,' becomes locked in rivalries with both Caleb and his uncouth neighbor Tyrrel; Tyrrel mocks Falkland 'as an animal that was beneath contempt' and clearly displays his jealousy of this ladies' man; Falkland in a fit of rage stabs Tyrrel from behind; and so on. Sexuality itself is understood in terms of power in each of these relations. Desire personalizes power inequalities in a way that makes the police state an inevitability, as Thompson argues. For the minute that Caleb finds his master interesting enough to 'know,' Caleb's entire story falls into place. He seeks knowledge and then he is sought by it. When Falkland becomes the hunter, with Law on his side, Caleb is doomed. Once drawn into the ideological structure that is figured in the triad Desire/Other/Knowledge, in other words, he is trapped in the structure of the Law itself, from which there is no escape.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) tells the tale of a very different young man, but one with similarly «unspeakable» longings: 'It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn,' Victor Frankenstein tells us. In his 'fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature,' Frankenstein articulates a desire that is not a mere physical response to people in the world, but rather an intellectual response to the physical workings of the world itself. It is strange, therefore, that the terms in which his desires are worked out are so strikingly familiar; the challenge to authority and the incestuous terms of his project are established by methods almost identical to those used in other works I have considered.

Victor Frankenstein creates a second self out of the assorted body parts he finds in his assiduous trips to graveyards and charnel houses. When he first encounters his creation, however, he greets it with something less than pleasure: