Sensibility, Early Gothic and Nineteenth-Century Gothic Texts Are the Focus
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
DEVOURING THE GOTHIC: FOOD AND THE GOTHIC BODY Elizabeth Andrews Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy English Studies University of Stirling January 2008 Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work and that all critical or other sources (literary and electronic) have been specifically and properly acknowledged, as and when they occur in the body of my text. Signed Dated Abstract At the beginnings of the Gothic, in the eighteenth century, there was an anxiety or taboo surrounding consumption and appetite for the Gothic text itself and for the excessive and sensational themes that the Gothic discussed. The female body, becoming a commodity in society, was objectified within the texts and consumed by the villain (both metaphorically and literally) who represented the perils of gluttony and indulgence and the horrors of cannibalistic desire. The female was the object of consumption and thus was denied appetite and was depicted as starved and starving. This also communicated the taboo of female appetite, a taboo that persists and changes within the Gothic as the female assumes the status of subject and the power to devour; she moves from being ethereal to bestial in the nineteenth century. With her renewed hunger, she becomes the consumer, devouring the villain who would eat her alive. The two sections of this study discuss the extremes of appetite and the extremes of bodily representations: starvation and cannibalism. Contents Introduction______________________________________________________________ i Food and the Body: How Appetite Gothicises the Body ______________________________ vii Starvation__________________________________________________________________ xii Gothic Food ________________________________________________________________ xv Cannibalism _______________________________________________________________ xvii Food and the Gothic: Metaphors of Reading a Literalising Mode_______________________ xix ‘Lasses, young and old…they devour my leaves’: The Gothic’s Female Audience _______xxviii Part One: Representations of the Starving Heroine in Sensibility, Early Gothic and Nineteenth-Century Gothic ________________________________________________ 1 Introduction: ‘The luxury of eating’ ______________________________________________ 1 Sensibility __________________________________________________________________ 7 Early Gothic_________________________________________________________________ 8 Nineteenth-Century Gothic ____________________________________________________ 10 Chapter 1: From Sensibility to Starvation: The Heroine’s Gothic Embodiment 14 Women and Sensibility _______________________________________________________ 14 Sensibility’s Moderation and Early Gothic’s Unnatural Food__________________________ 26 Elements of Sensibility in Early Gothic: the Early Gothic Interpretation of Sensibility’s Body Ideal _____________________________________________________________________________ 34 Differences in the Representations of the Starved Female Body in Texts of Sensibility and Early Gothic _______________________________________________________________________ 39 Fainting Dead Away: The Early Gothic Heroine’s Abjection of Food and the Body ________ 55 Maternal Deprivation Literalised in the Representation of the Starved Body ______________ 60 Chapter 2: Repossessed: the Female Body as Gothic Subject in Nineteenth- Century Texts __________________________________________________________ 68 Masculine Women: ‘Conscience, turned tyrant’ ____________________________________ 75 Gothic Episodes _____________________________________________________________ 98 Ill-Fitting Bodies ___________________________________________________________ 108 ‘Food, sweet and strange’: Lucy Snowe’s Unnatural Appetite ________________________ 116 Cleopatra and Vashti: The Consumption of Female Bodies __________________________ 127 Consuming Men and The Problem of Marriage: ‘We must become one flesh’____________ 131 Conclusion: The Bliss of Starving ______________________________________________ 139 Part Two: The Body as Food: Fantasies of Cannibalism and Eaters of Human Flesh 141 Introduction _______________________________________________________________ 141 Chapter 3: ‘Distended like the jaws of an ogre’: The Eighteenth-Century Villain’s Gluttonous Appetite ____________________________________________ 152 All Mouth: the Villainy of Ambrosio, Joshua and Maturin’s Parricide __________________ 158 Eaten Alive: the Fate of the Gothic Villain _______________________________________ 165 Chapter 4: ‘A Deed Without a Name’: The Unspeakable Cannibal Scene __ 174 The Aftermath: Literal and Metaphoric Cannibalism _______________________________ 175 ‘Chunks of Something’: Attempts to Describe Human Meat__________________________ 180 Delighting in the Cannibal Scene_______________________________________________ 189 Mythologizing the Cannibal___________________________________________________ 194 Chapter 5: Male Fantasies of Cannibalism: ‘A Touch of Fantastic Vanity’__ 201 The Vagina Dentata in Red Dragon and Winter Hunger_____________________________ 204 Vagina Envy in Winter Hunger: ‘his penis was constructed on the wrong principle’ _______ 216 Filling the Void ____________________________________________________________ 219 Self-Preservation: Perfume, Silence of the Lambs and Winter Hunger __________________ 224 Consuming Fantasies ________________________________________________________ 232 Chapter 6: Becoming Woolly and Toothy: the Female Cannibal’s Animal and Monstrous Appetites ___________________________________________________ 238 Taking Animal Form: ‘Something Enormous Was Stirring’ __________________________ 244 Cannibalism Can Fill You Up: The Hunger’s Sarah and Empty Love __________________ 251 ‘He is Only a Wreck of Himself’: The Beetle’s Paul Lessingham and Dracula’s Jonathan Harker under the Female Cannibal’s Emasculating Power __________________________________ 256 Transformation: ‘The Familiar Face Shifted into Ferocity’___________________________ 268 Coda: All the Same Under the Skin__________________________________ 274 Conclusion _____________________________________________________ 278 Bibliography ____________________________________________________ 280 Primary Texts: _____________________________________________________________ 280 Secondary Texts: ___________________________________________________________ 283 Acknowledgments I would firstly like to thank my supervisor Professor Glennis Byron for all of her help, time, guidance and support. Dr Dale Townshend’s suggestions and comments were also invaluable. My partner Andrew Wilson has been an unfaltering support. To the Stirling University’s Library staff, the staff in the National Library of Scotland and the British Library, I offer my thanks for their patience and knowledge. I must also thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council without whose generous assistance I would have been unable to undertake this study, and Stirling University’s English Department for funding numerous conference attendance and research trips. Introduction The fact remains nevertheless that all food is liable to defile (Kristeva 1982, p. 75) Eating is at once a ‘trivial and ordinary want’ (Melmoth, p. 213), as it is described by the parricide from Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and also an act that can potentially transgress the most extreme of taboos.1 The Gothic text is defined as a consumable and once devoured, threatens to pique a transgressive appetite. The reception of the Gothic and the critical debates, which condemned it and feared the influence of the mode in the eighteenth century, frame this study. This reception and the repeated use of metaphors of food and eating that are used to describe the mode 1 A taboo, Mary Douglas explains in Purity and Danger (2002), is that which is called ‘dirty and dangerous’ (Douglas 2002, p. xi); Douglas suggests that taboos are what we must guard against in order to classify the universe. According to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982), food ‘designates the other’ and ‘penetrates the self’s clean and proper body’ (Kristeva 1982, p. 75). It is thus aligned with the taboo because it crosses the border between the inside and outside and conflates these classifications. i are engaged with below. The mode itself is obsessed with ‘morbid eating’2 and starvation. It is also a literalizing mode that graphically represents thematic lack in the emaciation of the body and excessive desire as cannibalism. The anxiety over Gothic reading is embodied in the gluttonous villain whose desires eat him alive – they thus embody excess – and the disgust of female appetite (and her appetite for reading) is manifested in skeletal female characters. In Evil Sisters: the Threat of Female Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Culture (1996) Bram Dijkstra’s discussion of the cultural representations of women engages with how ‘Metaphors do the dirty work of ideology. They telescope complex ideas into simple imagery and encourage us to see others not as persons but as patterns’ (Dijkstra 1996, p. 311).3 The Gothic breaks down these metaphors. It disentangles these complex ideas, creating scenarios and characters in which they can be realised. The Gothic thus actualises sensibility’s metaphoric rejection of the body in figures of starving and forsaken women; the nineteenth-century’s bestial woman is embodied in the man-eating cannibal and the power hungry villain is literalised as a gourmand. However,