Power and Identity in Three Gothic Novels: the Mysteries of Udolpho, Caleb Williams, and Melmoth the Wanderer
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2011 Power and Identity in Three Gothic Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho, Caleb Williams, and Melmoth the Wanderer. Jerry Jennings Alexander [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Alexander, Jerry Jennings, "Power and Identity in Three Gothic Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho, Caleb Williams, and Melmoth the Wanderer.. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2011. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/1164 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Jerry Jennings Alexander entitled "Power and Identity in Three Gothic Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho, Caleb Williams, and Melmoth the Wanderer.." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Nancy M. Goslee, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Amy Billone, Jenny Macfie, John omchickZ Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Power and Identity in Three Gothic Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho , Caleb Williams , and Melmoth the Wanderer A Dissertation Presented for The Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Jerry Jennings Alexander December, 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Jerry Jennings Alexander All rights reserved ii Dedication For my partner, Marc Fiori iii Acknowledgments I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Nancy Goslee for her support and direction during my tenure in graduate school and for her guidance with this dissertation. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee members, Dr. Amy Billone, Dr. Jenny Macfie, and Dr. John Zomchick, for their dedication and assistance. I am grateful to Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC, for providing me with a two-year leave of absence and financial support to pursue my doctoral degree. I would also like to thank the members of the Presbyterian College English Department for their encouragement and support. Finally, I am grateful for the love and support of my family, especially my partner, Marc Fiori, and my friends, especially Lyn Isbell, whose own graduate studies served as an inspiration. iv Abstract This study examines the connection between power and identity in three Gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho , William Godwin’s Caleb Williams , and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer . Following the identity theories of Erik Erikson, I argue that identity has biological, psychological, and social aspects that are subject to change over time. As individual agency—the ability to function as a person—depends on a relatively certain and stable sense of personal identity, Gothic villains—both individuals and institutions—gain and maintain their power by disempowering their victims. In order to do so, they work to compromise these victims’ sense of personal identity, causing them to suffer identity crises that greatly reduce their ability to function. Employing various means—including threats of rape, destruction of reputation, imprisonment, forced exile, denial of freedom of thought, torture, and others—Gothic villains attempt to weaken their victims by placing them in situations that cause the fears that Erikson argues all people share to become paralyzing and debilitating states of anxiety, states in which the victims suffer from a temporary, or, in extreme cases, permanent loss of agency. These Gothic victims’ paranoia, identity crises, and subsequent loss of agency underscore the importance of individuals’ identity and constitute the horror that is at the heart of Gothic fiction. v Table of Contents Chapter I: Introduction ……………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter II: The Mysteries of Udolpho ………………………………………………………28 Chapter III: Caleb Williams …………………………………………………………………80 Chapter IV: Melmoth the Wanderer ………………………………………………………..128 Chapter V: Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………..187 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………………..205 Vita …………………………………………………………………………………………213 vi Chapter I Power and Identity: An Introduction When is power legitimate and when is it illegitimate? To what extent are people allowed to use their power without abusing it? In what ways do humans gain and maintain power? To what extent is power related to humans’ sense of their identity? What comprises such a sense of identity? These were important questions that were being asked during the transitional period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England, a time when the old order, represented by a patriarchal hegemony, aristocratic rule, and church authority, was under threat by the continued fight for women’s rights, democratic reform, and freedom of thought; and no other literature was better equipped to address these questions than the relatively new genre of the novel. As Michael McKeon persuasively argues in The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, the novel emerges in the eighteenth century as a genre well-suited to engage questions of truth and virtue. Although truth during the middle ages rested largely in the authority of the ancients and the church, from the Renaissance forward, the new scientific method and the religious skepticism that such a method engendered brought such ancient authority into question. Likewise, the church, the wisdom of the ancients, and the aristocracy, who were most intimate with both, were by the eighteenth century no longer the sole voice of virtue: individuals who had no knowledge of Greek or Latin, who were not directly associated with the church, and who had no claims to aristocratic authority, could have just as strong a sense of virtue as anyone. As Samuel Richardson argued implicitly in Pamela , a poor serving girl could prove to have a much firmer sense of virtue than her aristocratic master; likewise, a vulnerable female like Clarissa 1 Harlowe (Richardson’s Clarissa ) could prove to be nearly saintly when compared to her nemesis, the corrupt and debauched aristocratic Lovelace. In Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews , young Joseph, despite his humble origins and limited formal education, proves to be much better equipped to deal with the realities of his world than the classically trained Parson Adams, whose beloved copy of Aeschylus and his saddlebag full of his own unpublishable sermons, symbols of the ancients and the church, respectively, prove to be useless: Joseph’s common sense and seemingly innate sense of right and wrong make him far more capable of surviving in the corrupt world of eighteenth-century England. Likewise, in Frances Burney’s Evelina , though she is of aristocratic lineage, the eponymous heroine enters the public sphere uncertain of her parentage, vulnerable as a naïve female thrown into a world populated by corrupt “gentlemen” and vulgar middle-class relatives, yet she proves to be capable of maintaining her virtue and outwitting her opponents while negotiating the unknown using her own morals and intelligence as a guide. Within this milieu of realist novels emerges a subgenre that more directly examines how power is connected to truth and virtue. The assumption that power does and should rest with those who know the truth and are most virtuous is brought into question once the lack of virtue of those individuals in power is exposed in the Gothic novel. From the Gothic novel’s inception in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto , the authority of male aristocrats, represented by the villain Manfred, is brought into question. Even the legitimacy of his position as master of Otranto is questioned: he has usurped Otranto from its legitimate possessor, covering up such truth and showing an utter lack of virtue. Yet, for a while, due to his usurped position, he has power—over his feeble son, Conrad, whom he tries to force into a marriage against his will for political gain; over his wife, whom he threatens to divorce to marry his own deceased son’s fiancé for the same political gain; and, most clearly, over his daughter, Mathilda, of whom he, as 2 her father, has complete ownership. If power should legitimately rest with the keepers of truth and virtue but the very source of such truth and virtue is questioned, then those in power, like Manfred and the ruling class that he represents, come under scrutiny as well. Though Walpole and his followers all indirectly explored such issues, it was the Gothic novelists writing during the French Revolution and the subsequent English struggle for reform who most directly addressed questions of truth and virtue by questioning the legitimacy of the power that rested in the male aristocracy and the Christian church. To do so, these novelists began with an implicit understanding that an individual’s power rests in a sense of his or her identity. As David Punter notes, Gothicists, more than the realist writers like Fielding, “question the boundaries on which individual identity depends” ( Literature