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European Romantic Review

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History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature

1764–1824 Gothic Romanticism:
Architecture, Politics, and Literary
Form Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the
Uncanny in the European Imaginary,
1780–1820
a
David Punter
a
University of Bristol E-mail:
Published online: 06 Jul 2012.

To cite this article: David Punter (2012) History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824
Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the
Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820, European Romantic Review, 23:4, 479-485, DOI:
10.1080/10509585.2012.694652

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2012.694652

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 European Romantic Review 479

organism. His treatment of puberty in Byron shows just how soft sexual identity
becomes when it acknowledges its irreducibility to a material body undergoing constant
transformation. In both cases Sha celebrates dynamic embodiments that seem to me
irreducible to purposive form, however divorced it may be from reproductive function.
A trenchant critic of sexual identity runs throughout Perverse Romanticism. When
sexual pleasure exceeds function, reducing it to identity only betrays its potential.
Implicit in Sha’s whole project is a call to recreate the human body, to transform it,
to incite its physical transformation. That is the greatest possibility and largest
challenge of Perverse Romanticism: not a sexually perverse body, but a materially
better one.

Paul Youngquist
University of Colorado at Boulder
Downloaded by [Stony Brook University] at 08:40 17 October 2014

Email: Paul.Youngquist@Colorado.edu
# 2012 Paul Youngquist
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2012.694651

History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824, by Carol Margaret Davison,

Cardiff, U of Wales P, 2009, xviii + 368 pp.

Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form, by Tom Duggett,

London, Palgrave, 2010, xii + 219 pp.

Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820,

by Diane Long Hoeveler, Columbus, Ohio State UP, 2010, xx + 289.

Carol Davison’s Gothic Literature 1764–1824 is part of a series of books from Univer-
sity of Wales Press which, between them, seek to provide a concise history of the
Gothic from its supposed (but contestable) inception in the 1760s to the present day.
As the volume which covers what is usually regarded as the heartland of early
Gothic fiction, Davison’s contribution bears a heavy responsibility, and she addresses
this task with weight and dignity. She has things to say about all the major Gothic
fictions of the period, from Horace Walpole to C.R. Maturin, and indeed takes this
further into some interesting thoughts on Victorian Gothic. As an introduction to
these novels and stories, this will undoubtedly be a useful text for scholars and students
alike, and arguably it fulfills its remit admirably.
The history of Gothic fiction has itself, of course, in a sense no beginning, for the
very nature of the Gothic is that it is always a recapitulation, a set of distorted memories
of prior arrangements of things, whether they be related to a remote past or to events
and trends far more recent. Davison begins, as one should, with the Enlightenment,
and with the complex dialectic which produced an awareness of dark forces even
while proclaiming their permanent banishment from polite society. She then proceeds
to a specific examination of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto: her approach is illuminating
on the text itself, but more so on the mix of cultural traditions and counter-traditions
from which it was born. It is indeed strange that a work of such apparently limited
appeal and indeed ambition should have become regarded, both in its time and later,
 480 Book Reviews

as the progenitor of so much; but perhaps this historical anomaly is itself of the very
essence of the Gothic, where nothing is straightforward, where dimensions are
always strained and skewed.
Davison moves on in her third chapter to a consideration of the “female Gothic,”
and here the focus necessarily is on Ann Radcliffe; but again, the argument is deepened
and widened by reference not only to Radcliffe’s own novels, but also to some of the
hundreds – or perhaps thousands, as Davison says – of novels which were published in
the aftermath of her critical and popular success. As Davison points out, there is in the
world of the Radcliffean novel a curious doubleness: a stance which may on the surface
seem perfectly conservative, or conservatively perfect, in its redemption of the good
and its punishment of the recalcitrant, turns out on closer inspection to bear seeds of
a true radicalism in terms of women’s social roles; perhaps it is indeed the case that
it is this doubleness which has kept the relation between Gothic writing and gender
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politics alive over succeeding centuries.

In chapter 4, Davison turns more directly to the political world, and inspects the
various – and in some cases widely different – connections critics have made
between the emergence of the Gothic novel and the social turmoil of the relevant
decades. But she goes further than this, for the later years of the eighteenth century
and the early years of the nineteenth were not only years of social and political
unrest culminating in the specter of revolution; they were also years of technological
change, and what Davison suggests here, as she will continue to do in later parts of
the book, is that there is a surprising but clear connection between Gothic and emerging
forms of technology. Although it is beyond the historical remit of this book, the out-
standing case would be Bram Stoker’s Dracula which, read from one perspective, is
a catalogue of communications gadgetry for the modern man (and, just possibly, the
modern woman).
Chapter 5 returns us to the female Gothic, looking specifically at Mary Wollstone-
craft’s Maria, or, The Wrongs of Woman, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or, The Moor, and
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. The focus here is on the relation between “real” or
“imagined” terrors, although of course the boundary between these two apparent
categories cannot be neatly drawn. At all events, we are here reminded that even the
wilder excesses of the Gothic representation of the persecution of women had its
“real-life” correlative, and that Gothic has its social and political function to
perform, even if its techniques and methods may be very different indeed from the
techniques and methods of social realism.
Chapter 6 deals with the profound influence which Gothic had on the canonical
romantic poets, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron principal among them; here is also
the place to bring on stage that strange half-Gothic novel, Frankenstein. Moving
now towards the 1820s, chapter 7 introduces us to three late masterworks of the
“original Gothic”: C.R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Thomas De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner, while the final chapter suggests to us some of the
many ways in which Gothic conventions and preoccupations continued to exert
influence well into the nineteenth century.
This, therefore, is a very valuable book: if I have a criticism, however, it is that it
thrives to a considerable extent by rehearsing and commenting on the views of previous
critics. We learn in the course of reading a great deal about scholarly discussions of the
genre, and particularly about those that have come from feminist critics, and I
sometimes felt that space was expended on these discussions at the expense of detailed
 European Romantic Review 481

consideration of the texts themselves. Obviously this is partly due to the remit itself, and
also to the enormous body of criticism which has been published on the “original”
Gothic over the last thirty years; yet it is possible within this format to mount a more
distinctive approach to the texts, a view which is admirably demonstrated in another
volume in the series, Charles L. Crow’s excellent American Gothic.
However, the reader will certainly find here summaries of critical approaches to all
the major novels of the period. S/he will also find, by way of the annotated bibli-
ography, fine accounts of many of the critical books which have been published
about them. Everything of note is mentioned in the annotated bibliography and in
the bibliography proper; but perhaps the seventy pages of close-packed notes indicates
that the book has gone for comprehensiveness rather than distinctiveness of approach,
which can make at times for some fairly heavy reading. There is also a certain didacti-
cism present, especially, again, in those areas which abut onto the complex issues sur-
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rounding the “female Gothic”; it feels as though Davison is arguing for a clear and
definitive approach to what does and what does not constitute female Gothic,
whereas it is possible that a more flexible argument, admitting that such categorizations
are themselves relatively flimsy and changeable, might have been more productive.
Tom Duggett’s Gothic Romanticism is a monograph with a more limited objective,
or perhaps one should say set of objectives, which can be helpfully adumbrated by
citing the titles of the chapters: “Romantic Poets and Gothic Culture”; “Radical
Gothic: Politics and Antiquarianism in Salisbury Plain”; “‘By Gothic Virtue Won’:
Romantic Poets Fighting the Peninsular War”; and “Wordsworth’s Gothic Education.”
The main focus here is far from Gothic fiction: it is rather on the Gothic as a major
cultural influence which spans the period of the so-called Enlightenment and the
period of what we know as Romanticism. What Duggett seeks to get to grips with is
the vexed question of the various identifications, political and cultural, of the Gothic
with “Britishness”; central here is the concept of the “Gothic constitution,” the
notion – which is still deeply operative in English public law – that a set of precepts
which has emerged from history or tradition may be deeply preferable to one which is
laid down by prescription.
There are obvious shades here of the Burke/Paine debate; but Duggett’s real center
of interest and attention is Wordsworth, and particularly on how, in the light of these
evolving notions of the Gothic, one may look afresh on those changes in Wordsworth’s
thinking which have so frequently been regarded as a kind of apostasy. This perspective
is an important one: the Gothic did not spring fully-fledged from the mind or pen of a
Walpole or a Radcliffe, neither did it, in its “origins” (whatever those may have been)
initially relate to the supernatural in any of its more popular senses. On the contrary: it
emerges towards the end of the eighteenth century as a concomitant of discussions
about national destiny and artistic form which had been proceeding throughout (at
least) the eighteenth century and which were shot through and through with political
argument and particularly with argument about the nature (and supposed supremacy)
of the British constitution and the British way of life.
For there is a strange duplicity in the Gothic, which is to do with its mapping of the
world, or at least of those parts of the world of which it was aware. Continually in
Gothic fiction we find other nations, most particularly those of southern Europe,
being apparently mocked for their submission to tyranny and their absence of demo-
cratic judicial recourse; these apparent failings are linked consistently with the power
and implied corruption of the Catholic Church. A further link in the chain is then to
a variety of “Gothic” architecture, namely the great cathedrals, monasteries, and
 482 Book Reviews

convents of Spain and Italy, which are often seen as repositories of greed, lust, and
crime. Thus far, thus “Gothic,” and something of the imagery of the Gothic which sur-
vives to this day is connected with an anxiety, or even fear, of those dark, sequestered
spaces. Yet alongside this, Gothic stood for the very opposite: for an everyday, cheer-
ful, practical cast of mind which set its rugged chin firmly against southern European,
Catholic precepts and allowed for the emergence of democratic forms. So what if the
English constitution was not merely unwritten but probably unintelligible? This
merely proved – through its longevity – its pre-eminence over the petty attempts of
radicals and revolutionaries to frame a constitution which would seek to corral
human nature – whereas the “Gothic,” considered in its northern European, Germanic
sense, was a natural outcropping of said “human nature” – perhaps ugly, perhaps gro-
tesque, but to be hugely valued and prized because it acted as a bulwark against the
forces of mystification.
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What Duggett reminds us of, in this context, is that one of the major manifestations
of Gothic was, and remained throughout the nineteenth century, in terms of architec-
ture, that unique mixture of public and private aesthetic form: we still, after all,
regard a major work of the architectural Gothic, namely the Houses of Parliament, as
the principal guarantor of our (Gothic) democracy. But what he also does – and this
is brought to a head in his marvelously suggestive conclusion – is to help us to
think about Gothic and the visual. By this I do not mean – and Duggett does not
mean – simply thinking about the romantic visual arts, important though that may
be; he means more to reflect on the ways in which Gothic is intimately bound up
with habits of looking, of “staring” as he puts it, and this of course will be a route
that will take us once more back into the intricacies and difficulties of the sublime.
What do we gain by looking at things? What do we gain from looking at, for
example, Botticelli’s Primavera? Furthermore, how long should we spend looking at
it? What would be an adequate psychic recompense for staring at a master-work –
and how would it demonstrably differ from spending the same length of time staring
at a reproduction, except that in the case of the reproduction we would probably be
able to have a gaze uninterrupted by other viewers? Of course, there are notions of sco-
pophilia at stake here, but they are, I think, troubled ones, guilty ones, perhaps even
embarrassed ones. For we are perhaps looking at a “show”: not at the thing in itself,
never at the thing in itself, but always at a representation of the “thing,” which is
constantly withheld; even as Wordsworth’s apparent desires may always have been
thwarted, may always have fallen short of the impossible moment of capture.
Perhaps, reverting to the Gothic, one might suggest that this was indeed Horace
Walpole’s great triumph: to gain our readerly appreciation for a work which not only
was of pure surface, but professed itself to be so, with no apology; and which thus
forgave us, even before we read it, for our own self-indulgence.
These reminders that the ramifications of the Gothic run well beyond a particular
form of fiction are also taken up in Diane Hoeveler’s Gothic Riffs. This is an excellent
book; it was recently joint winner of the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize, awarded by the Inter-
national Gothic Association for the best work on Gothic of the preceding two years. Its
major strength is its willingness to think outside the box. Hoeveler’s centre of attention
is on pretty much exactly the same period as that covered by Davison (and, to an extent,
addressed by Duggett); but the picture she forms and presents is very different. Her
epigram is taken from the OED’s definition of a “riff”: “a simple musical phrase
repeated over and over, often with a strong or syncopated rhythm, and frequently
used as background to a solo improvisation.” The writings of Walpole, Radcliffe,
 European Romantic Review 483

and Maturin, or of Wordsworth and Coleridge, are, we might say, among those solo
improvisations, although in some cases they are also significantly repetitions; what
Hoeveler seeks to do is to look more deeply into the general cultural motifs which
are re-enacted and developed in these works of the great virtuoso artists.
In doing so, she covers a remarkable amount of territory. In particular, she looks at
Gothic as it occurs in the forms of opera, drama, melodrama, ballad, and chapbook, and
in doing so addresses key areas of both popular and elite culture which have often been
passed over in favor of the more enduring shape of the Gothic novel. What she shows is
that Gothic was a deep-seated and deep-rooted “background” which we need to see in
all its complexity and range before we can approach those isolated works through
which its dominance has been transmitted to the present age. The depth of reading
and familiarity demonstrated is astonishing; to this I must add that this is a book
which is singularly well-written, and engaging from beginning to end. It is also
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especially strong in its insistence that it is not truly possible to view Gothic as an
entirely “British” phenomenon (although of course this does not undermine Duggett’s
correct claims as to its particular formation within the “British” political landscape);
rather, what we have here is at least a Europe-wide phenomenon, and this is a claim
which substantiates those brief but pregnant remarks of de Sade on the Gothic and
its relation to notions of revolution, but which goes much further in looking at the
transnational contexts of, for example, the Gothic ballad.
The key to the book lies in the subtitle: what Hoeveler is writing is a version of
“secularization,” but this is a complex and problematic idea. Even while professing
to engage the reader – or watcher, or viewer, or, in Duggett’s terms, the “starer” –
in matters to do with ceremony, nonetheless there is a certain “debunking” going on
in the Gothic, which means that our stance in terms of belief is constantly challenged
and, in many ways, undermined. Gothic is often thought of as deeply involved with the
supernatural; and indeed it is. But it is not that we are required to place an unquestioning
allegiance in matters which might lie beyond the ken of rationality; it is rather that we
are required to “recognize” – in all the ramifications of that term – the supernatural and
to bring it into alignment with common and popular assumptions. For had the Gothic
been merely “strange,” then no doubt it would have been in some sense unrecognizable;
but the discourse of Freud on the “uncanny,” as that which continually brings the unrec-
ognizable back to a re-understanding of the familiar, brings us too back to a sense of
how the Gothic is underpinned by a continually evolving popular sense of how to
deal with, treat with, and represent unusual occurrences and how to frame and
reframe them within common assumptions.
Above all, Hoeveler reminds us that Gothic, in its original formulations and later,
was a matter of circulation. Key motifs, themes, and legends get picked up and trans-
mitted across a variety of genres and media. Although there is no reference to Jung in
the index, I was nonetheless reminded of some of Jung’s works in two ways: first
through the extraordinary range of reference Hoeveler deploys, and second in the
continual recurrence of specific themes – Jung would have called them archetypes –
within the material discussed. Culture is always a matter of circulation and recircula-
tion: there can be, one extreme view would have it, nothing new under the sun. Just
so, ideas and tropes circulate and recirculate across the various different forms,
picking up accretions here and there, responding to historical circumstance in this
way or that way, but always circling around a common set of preoccupations.
Hoeveler’s view, if we were to extrapolate it more widely, would be a valuable cor-
rective to the prevalent notion of the “anxiety of influence”; for those who are anxious,
 484 Book Reviews

or over-anxious, about the problem of influence, or of being seen to have been influ-
enced so extremely that their originality is called into doubt (Coleridge and Words-
worth will no doubt recur to mind here), will be those who have it before them to
make a name for themselves; but most of those who create art, drama, literature,
have no such goal: they are more appropriately considered as nodes in the membrane
of the circulation of narrative and character. They are those (somewhat to distort
Hoeveler’s governing trope) who play the background music; they are, we might
say, the session musicians – quite probably just as skilful as the front-men, but
without the urge to put themselves forward, to describe themselves as virtuosos.
Although sometimes, as we know, they are the better musicians; their control over
the mechanisms of self-publicity is, however, less apt.
Hoeveler also talks about technology; about changes in the apprehension of the mar-
velous; and thus about the complicated context within which Gothic took its roots – and,
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presumably, continues to find good soil in our relations with scientific development. I was
reminded of an excellent book by Andrew Bennett on poetry and ignorance; I would
hesitate to summarize his argument, but it is undoubtedly the case, as he points out,
that as “the age” has proceeded to greater and greater heights of presumed understanding,
so the scope for our individual ignorance of practically everything has increased
exponentially. I would similarly hesitate to quote Donald Rumsfeld, but nonetheless
his categorizations, including ones of “the known unknown” and “the unknown
unknown” are probably, although I hate to say it, extremely prescient. What is it that
we are aware of that we do not know? What would it mean even to write such a sentence?
Hoeveler’s book, at least in my mind, sparks off such thoughts and worries: how do we
deal with an apparently spreading lack of explanation?
So what these three books demonstrate between them is that, as one looks at the
Gothic, so its ramifications spread and indeed sometimes explode before our eyes. Of
course Gothic does have to with the supernatural, and Davison, Duggett, and Hoeveler
treat this connection in very different ways; but each of them show – again in different
ways – that the supernatural cannot be simply treated as some kind of extra-historical
manifestation of the uncanny. On the contrary, the supernatural, even as it seeks to
escape, relativize, or invert history, nonetheless remains deeply and essentially responsive
to the particular historical moments within which it is formed and re-formed (Terry
Castle’s The Female Thermometer remains a key text here). Whether, and to what
extent, “Gothic” is the term we might use, in an ideally shaped cultural world, to describe
the ongoing corpus of work which addresses these issues is obviously contestable, and
contemporary scholarship, such as Glennis Byron’s on the “global Gothic,” brings
these issues into sharp focus; but the world we live in is not thus neatly shaped, and
we still need to confront the spreading, perhaps rhizomatic, inflections of the Gothic
not only with clear textual understanding but also with a delicate, culturally specific
apprehension of the large political, cultural, and aesthetic issues which the Gothic
raises – and which appear to show no signs of being laid to rest. In their very different
ways, these three books help us to re-examine these issues.

References
Bennett, Andrew. Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009.
Print.
 European Romantic Review 485

Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.
Crow, Charles L. American Gothic. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2009. Print. Gothic Literary Studies.

David Punter
University of Bristol
Email: David.Punter@bristol.ac.uk
# 2012 David Punter
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2012.694652
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The Dark Enlightenment: Jung, Romanticism, and the Repressed Other, by D.J.
Moores, Madison, Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010, 224 pp.
Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism, by
Elizabeth Eger, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, xii + 275 pp.

These two new critical studies showcase, through vastly different critical methods, the
cultural influence of the European Enlightenment. While Elizabeth Eger provides a
cultural history of the women writers who comprise her focus in Bluestockings:
Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism, D.J. Moores uses a Jungian
psychological approach in The Dark Enlightenment: Jung, Romanticism, and the
Repressed Other to illuminate his literary subjects. Despite the dissimilarities in critical
method, however, these studies offer some comparable conclusions. Specifically, they
both gesture to Romanticism’s uneasy relationship with femininity, both in its treatment
of women writers and the theme of the female Other.
Focusing particularly on the theme of the repressed Other in Romanticism, Moores
claims that the artist speaks for all of his society and is in touch with the symbols that
give expression to its deepest concerns – that the collective unconscious speaks
“through the artist” (185). What it says in Romantic texts, according to Moores, is
that the Enlightenment fractured the self through its scientism and patriarchal perspec-
tive, which created a host of Others that required recognition for the Romantics, such as
evil, natural, instinctual, and female Others. In short, central to Moores’s discussion of
psychic imbalance in Jungian terms is “alterity” (14), which the critic describes in terms
of the “dark” Other – a kind of evil self – or as the feminine projection of self. Moores
thus reiterates the popular notion that the Enlightenment was soul-crushing in its
mechanistic worldview.
More challenging is Moores’s method of inclusion regarding the writers he studies.
Because Moores is inclusive in his definition of “Romantic” – a term that he uses to
describe several of the usual British suspects, as well as four later nineteenth-century
American writers – his rejection of William Blake is surprising. The mystery
deepens when he delineates his focus on the “repressed contrasexual other and thus
a yearning for a resolution of the anima/animus complex . . . [or] what Jung called
the ‘syzygy,’ the union of opposites” (28–29). All of Blake’s prophecies would
provide (too) much food for thought in this context, but, in particular, Blake’s The
Four Zoas demands inclusion (or an explanation for why Moores does not explore
Blake’s work). In this prophecy, Blake develops explicitly his complex mythology