Table Of ContentGothic Stories Within Stories
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Gothic Stories Within Stories
Frame Narratives
and Realism in the Genre,
1790–1900
C C T
layTon arlyle arr
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-6748-5
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-2820-2
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© 2017 Clayton Carlyle Tarr. all rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
front cover image: limbird’s british novelist engraving for
e Mysteries of Udolpho, london, 1826
Printed in the united States of america
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1. a “frame of uncommon size”: ann radcliffe and
the Sublime real 21
2. Go forth and Prosper: Mary Shelley’s Monsters unbound 45
3. loose ends: Melmoth the Wanderer and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner 63
inTerlude. The fabric of reality: Sartor Resartus 83
4. The “science of human brutality”: Wuthering Heights
and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 91
5. The “romantic side of familiar things”: The Old Curiosity
Shop and Bleak House 109
6. The descent of Man: Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula 130
Coda. Glory in a Gap: The Turn of the Screw and Heart
of Darkness 153
Chapter Notes 165
Bibliography 191
Index 205
v
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introduction
i show rabelais in the history of realism. Perhaps i am
mistaken, but i believe that i have added a new page to
the history of realism. The term “Gothic realism” did not
previously exist in french or russian literature. nobody
would be able to cite any examples of anybody, anywhere,
at any time writing about Gothic realism. i have enriched
the history of realism.
—Mikhail bakhtin
on 5 november 946, the academic Council of the Gorky institute
convened in Moscow to hear bakhtin defend his dissertation, “rabelais
and the history of realism.” The meeting was famously contentious, and
bakhtin was ultimately conferred the degree of Candidate rather than
earning the higher rank of doctorate. one of the many points of debate
concerned the suitability of bakhtin’s “Gothic realism.” at the insistence
of the committee, bakhtin revised the term to “grotesque realism,” which,
together with his model of the carnivalesque, became the focus of his 965
book Rabelais and His World. in spite of the revision, bakhtin’s concept
of the grotesque remains intimately connected with the Gothic. he argues
that the romantic grotesque is a “terrifying world, alien to man. all that
is ordinary, commonplace, belonging to everyday life, and recognized by
all suddenly becomes meaningless, dubious and hostile. our own world
becomes an alien world. Something frightening is revealed in that which
was habitual and secure.”2bakhtin suggests that the grotesque triggers a
supernatural terror that destabilizes perceptions of reality. The Gothic
accomplishes the same effect, but to an even greater degree. from its
inception with horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto(764), the Gothic
novel accessed hidden psychic realms—what bakhtin calls the “interior
infinite of the individual”—and revealed the supernatural hidden in the
natural world.3Perhaps most important to this study, however, is bakhtin’s
claim that “form and content in discourse are one.”4 for the distinctive
2 introduction
thematic effects of the Gothic novel are, in great part, the result of the genre’s
formal attributes—namely its prevalent and dynamic narrative frames.
The Gothic has often been considered reactionary anti- realism, an
attempt to counter “things as they are” by imagining “things as they are
not.” yet, from the beginning, the Gothic aligned itself alongside realism,
rather than advertising its opposition. Walpole, for example, famously writes
that Otrantowas an “attempt to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient
and the modern. in the former, all was imagination and improbability; in
the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied
with success.”5Similarly, the initial title of William Godwin’s Gothic thriller
Caleb Williams (794) was “Things as They are,” and Wordsworth and
Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (798, 800, 802, 805) was, according to the lat-
ter, to be “composed of two sorts”: “persons and characters supernatural”
and “incidents of domestic or ordinary life.”6 in bakhtin’s words, “[t]wo
types of imagery reflecting the conception of the world here meet at cross-
roads.”7 indeed, bakhtin’s distinction between “classical realism” and
“grotesque realism” demonstrates that several genres share “realism road.”8
for the principal discrepancy between realism and the Gothic is a matter
of differing perspectives on what is “real.” Whereas realism shows the world
reflected in a mirror, the Gothic looks througha glass darkly to suggest the
hidden realms of the human experience. This effect—the unveiling of an
alternate “reality” and the horror that comes with it—is reliant on the formal
properties and distinct function of narrative frames.9
Gothic novelists have long employed framing devices both around
and within their novels. in a manner similar to what Jacques derrida con-
ceptualized with his model of the parergon, Gothic frame narratives blur
narrative and cognitive boundaries, producing a destabilizing effect that
challenges rational epistemology and suggests a deeper “reality” than
the realist novel can possibly achieve. This “reality” can be understood
through both immanuel Kant’s realm of das Ding an sich (“the thing in
itself”) and Jacques lacan’s concept of the real, the chaotic welter of pre-
symbolic life that dissipates all forms of logic. although Gothic novels
can never represent the real, they do suggest its existence through hor-
rifying, yet attractive figures—monstrosities that can be articulated
through symbolic devices that are best explained by Julia Kristeva’s theory
of abjection. These implications of the real draw readers closer to a deep
reality while simultaneously screening them from the horror that is at the
core of being. i argue that they achieve their distinctive and disturbing
status in Gothic novels as a result of the dynamic process through which
the central narratives interact with their frames. although Gothic frames
Introduction 3
seem to serve as boundaries, they in fact function as thresholds between
the central narrative and the reader’s reality, which are often articulated
by objects like veils. When monstrous abjections transgress narrative
frames, the novel’s narrators and readers are forced to face the horror that
they have worked to reject. This argument has several steps, and i will
make them more coherent below both by expanding on theoretical con-
cepts and by engaging literary examples, which conclude with a brief read-
ing of Walpole’s Otranto—the first text to call itself a “Gothic Story.”
but first, it is prudent to address not only the aims of this book, but
also to acknowledge its potential limitations.0Scholarship on Gothic lit-
erature, in all its forms, is rich and rewarding, perhaps more so than any
other genre. due to the deep, complex nature of the Gothic, critical
approaches line the theoretical spectrum.To propose a reading of Gothic
literature based primarily on psychoanalytic principles, whether inspired
by freud, lacan, Kristeva, or others, is not a new approach. in fact, the
productive history of such readings only continues with two recent,
equally invigorating, contributions, and no doubt there will be many more
to come.2This book, however, does not attempt to supply comprehensive
psychoanalytic readings of canonical texts. nor does it aspire to consign
authors, characters, or even readers to the analyst’s couch. rather, it
engages select psychoanalytic models to articulate one distinct set of for-
mal attributes pervasive to Gothic fiction. and it does so not only with
assistance from other theoretical approaches, including deconstruction
and narratology, but also with the backing of contextual documents, rang-
ing from letters and journals to records and reviews. no text is placed in
a psychoanalytic vacuum. and no author is subject to posthumous diag-
nosis. but this does not mean that i wish either to disparage psychoanalytic
approaches or to undermine my own readings. for the Gothic and psy-
choanalysis are so closely intertwined that to unravel them would be not
just fruitless, but potentially irresponsible.3Writing of Sigmund freud’s
relation to the Gothic, William Patrick day observes:
The Gothic is not a crude anticipation of freudianism, nor its unacknowledged
father. rather, the two are cousins, responses to the problems of selfhood and iden-
tity, sexuality and pleasure, fear and anxiety as they manifest themselves in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Gothic arises out of the immediate
needs of the reading public to escape from conventional life and articulate and
define the turbulence of their psychic existence. We may see freud as the intellec-
tual counterpart of this process.4
Gothic literature and psychoanalysis are cooperative, though sometimes
combative, participants in the human drive to unlock the secrets of the
