The Columbia History of the British Novel

I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed: when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks.

This passage centers itself, as all of Gothic fiction does, on the confrontation with the horror that is oneself, the horror that one's relation -242- to the world is painfully inappropriate and distorting to the privacy of self and that the life that one wants so desperately is really only a death that one can barely escape. Moonlight is used here to create a world between light and darkness and to suffuse the scene with its unsettling glare. Just as the animated corpse seems a figure of death-in-life, so the moonlight is a light that suggests darkness-later it becomes metaphorically associated with the creature. Here, it 'forced its way through the window shutters,' as a way of suggesting that Frankenstein cannot shut out the light of knowledge he has discovered; nor can he himself hide from the pursuit of his creation, who here peeps into the bed where he has sought refuge. A waking dream? The detail of observation-the eyes, the grin, the hand-all suggest the grotesque reality of this vision. The personal pronoun «I» is the real center of attention, and the creature exists as an object, to be observed, to be feared, and to be rejected. Desire/Other/Knowledge: Victor Frankenstein has worked hard to take control of the forces of this triad. In doing so, he has created the myth that is a part of modern culture, and he has given his name to that myth. Frankenstein and his creature have become one in the popular imagination because culture makes certain that Frankenstein's desire is turned back on himself.

James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) dramatizes the haunted relationship between Robert Wringham and his satanic double Gil Martin. In the first of the novel's two parts, 'The Editor's Narrative,' the bookish and lonely Robert Wringham forms an emotional attachment to his lively and athletic older stepbrother, George. Gradually Robert, variously described as 'devilishlooking,' 'moody and hellish looking,' with 'a deep and malignant eye,' becomes a kind of «shadow» to George, who tries in vain to avoid the inevitable physical confrontation that leaves Robert a bloodied victim, symbolically castrated and feminized. George begins to see Robert as a 'limb of Satan' and starts to feel that he is haunted by 'some evil genius in the shape of his brother.' Shortly later, George is struck down (from behind) and Robert, after various complications, disappears.

In the second part of the novel, 'Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Sinner, written by himself,' Robert tells the story of his own haunting by a double. In a narrative that suggests a paranoid relation to the world, he admits seeing the 'beauty of women… as the greatest snare to which mankind are subjected.' Isolated in his particularly virulent misogyny, he becomes «open» to the seduction of the mysterious Gil Martin, who teaches Calvinist «justification» as a creed that legitimates -243- the acting out of suppressed desires, and which leads Robert into a series of self-justifying acts of violence against other men. Not surprisingly, the only relations charged with emotion are those between men: Hogg is exposing the inner workings of a culture that objectifies women and places male relations under strict scrutiny. 'I had heart-burnings, longings, and yearnings, that would not be satisfied,' Robert Wringham tells his readers: his desire literally consumes him, and his alterego has become a function of ego itself.

In her discussion of this novel, Sedgwick says that 'As [Robert] pushes blindly, with the absurdly and pathetically few resources he has, toward the male homosocial mastery that alone and delusively seems to promise him a social standing, the psychologized homophobic struggle inside him seems to hollow out an internalized space that too exactly matches the world around him.' The double works as an effective fictional representation of this replicated vision. Gil Martin has an intimate knowledge of his «subject» because internal paranoia and cultural conditioning are one and the same. The paranoia Robert Wringham expresses, in other words, is the paranoia that culture breeds in those among its members who are tempted to transgress the narrow limits of the 'normal.' As a «late» Gothic hero, Robert Wringham recognizes that the guilt he feels, as well as the special justification he claims, are the prices that culture exacts for offering him even his tentative place at its margin. In this novel, then, subjectivity itself is the source of the haunting. «Transgression» and «perversity» have been planted within the individual psyche in order to do the work of culture more effectively. Gothic fiction has dramatized this transition and has decried its effects in various ways, but nowhere more effectively than in these double visions.

Gothic Success/Gothic Failure

In the eighties and early nineties, there has been a resurgence of critical interest in the Gothic, which at the time of this writing shows no sign of waning. Excellent studies, such as those listed in the bibliography, and others by Margaret L. Carter, William Patrick Day, Annie LeBrun, Ellen Moers, David Punter, Joseph Wissenfarth, and Judith Wilt, have moved the Gothic from the margins of literary history and criticism to the center of the debates on cultural, psychological, social, and political criticism. At least one critic, however, argues that Gothic fiction is a failure: Elizabeth Napier claims that 'the imprecision and -244- extremes to which the Gothic has been subjected are in part a result of instability and cross-purposes in the form itself.' It is important to understand, however, that the instability of Gothic «form» is a function of Gothic content. For if I am right in describing the Gothic as the scene of conflicted emotion, «aberrant» desire, social torment, public transgression, and patriarchal victimization, then no 'formal stability' could represent the implicit contradictions, inconsistencies, and subversive impulses that give Gothic its energy of resistance.In Gothic fiction, writers, readers, and critics are engaged, to some degree in spite of themselves, in an enterprise that breaks fictional codes in order to bring into high relief the inconsistencies of normative culture. That it can be neither systematically described nor legally codified is one of its strengths. For Gothic fiction both reflects and reacts to the increasingly ruthless limitations that 'cultural subordination' imposes. Maternal specters, incestuous desire, intrafamilial aggression, sadomasochistic relations, romantic friendship, homosexuality, necromancy, or necrophilia-all signify resistance to the culture's impulse to define and deny 'perversity.'In Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form, I described the attempt of Gothic writers to find in the «tale» the appropriate affective form for the expression of private obsessions. But in their frenzied brutality and uncensored sexual explicitness, in their broken narratives and strings of «local» effects, Gothic novels refuse to subscribe to the cultural «narratives» that were being written to control and contain private desire. However conventional they are, or however predictable in their horrors they become, Gothic novels resist the mechanisms of repression and work to subvert literary expectations and cultural assumptions. If this is their perversity, it is also their power.

George E. Haggerty

Selected Bibliography

Ellis Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Foucault Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1980.

Gilbert Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer -245- and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.

Haggerty George E. Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.

Johnson Barbara. 'My Monster/My Self.' Diacritics 12 (1982): 2 -10.

Kahane Claire. 'The Gothic Mirror.' In Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Springnether, eds., The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Keily Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Lacan Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.

Lévy Maurice. Le roman «gothique» anglais, 1764–1824. Toulouse: Associations des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Toulouse, 1968.

Massé Michelle A. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Women Reading Women. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Napier Elizabeth R. The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an