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The Use of Space in Gothic Fiction Master’S Diploma Thesis

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The Use of Space in Gothic Fiction Master’S Diploma Thesis Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Veronika Majlingová The Use of Space in Gothic Fiction Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Bonita Rhoads, Ph. D. 2011 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Bonita Rhoads, Ph.D., for her kind help and valuable advice. I am particularly grateful for her swift feedback, which made finishing this thesis considerably easier. Table of Contents 1. Introduction...............................................................................................................1 2. Gothic Origins – Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Gothic Revival ...................4 3. The Division of Literary Space ................................................................................13 4. The House ...............................................................................................................20 5. The Castle ...............................................................................................................32 6. The City ..................................................................................................................40 7. Conclusion ..............................................................................................................53 8. Bibliography............................................................................................................55 9. Résumé ...................................................................................................................59 10. Resumé..................................................................................................................61 1. Introduction "They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements" — Susan Hill Gothic fiction as a genre is very complex and not easy to define. For many decades it was derided by critics as worthless reading for the masses; however, it survived and evolved and finally rekindled the interest of scholarly circles. The complexity of the genre is evidenced by the many “Gothics” that have emerged in the academic discourse of recent decades. Fred Botting in his introduction to The Gothic (2001) lists for example the eighteenth-century Gothic, Victorian Gothic, modern Gothic, postmodern Gothic, female Gothic, postcolonial Gothic, queer Gothic, and urban Gothic. In spite of this generic multiplicity, however, one of the first things that come to mind when one thinks about a proper Gothic story is the setting. Whether it is an eerie castle on the top of a hill in the middle of a stormy night, a haunted house, a gloomy dilapidated neighborhood in a busy city or a dead spaceship drifting in space, from its very beginnings, Gothic fiction is connected with the architectural spaces in which its narratives are set. Titles of Gothic novels are teeming with names of buildings: The Castle of Otranto, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Bleak House, to name just a few. It is also often the case that the setting of the story, a ruined castle, abbey, a haunted house, etc. is a character of its own, sometimes more important than some of the main characters. Going deeper, one discovers that spatiality on various levels is an undeniable feature of Gothic fiction. The Gothic genre sets out to uncover the dark and twisted 1 corridors of human mind where all the terrible secrets lie hidden. It is inherently transgressive in that its main purpose is to disrupt the established order whether it is a social order, patriarchal order, or psychological restraints. The reason why the Gothic lasted so long, why it is so malleable is that it deals with the fundamental contradiction of human existence. It is the contradiction between the civilized and the barbaric, the realm of order and the realm of chaos, Our space and the space of the Other. Human nature always strives for the one by excluding the other without realizing that they are uncannily dependent on each other. Manuel Aguirre writes that “[t]he thresholds which horror fiction characters shun or violate, the boundaries behind which the enemy lurks, are essentially lines dividing domains of being: the human world closes itself to, and yet longs for, contact with an Otherworld it deems non-human, unreal, and evil” (“Closed Space” 3). This is manifested for example in that “a proper definition of a given thing in a given dimension requires reference to another dimension” (Ibid. 10), so in the myth of creation there are six days of doing completed by one day of non-doing and there is death to complete life. The role of Gothic is to point out the inevitable relationship of these two spheres by having characters transgress borders, forcing them to undergo a journey from their safe home to a place of evil and back. Gothic is about “blurring of metaphysical, natural, religious, class, economic, marketing, generic, stylistic, and moral lines” (Hogle 8-9), it brings the marginal into the centre. The aim of this thesis is to explore this Gothic spatiality in its various forms. Although the adaptability and diversity of the Gothic causes the different genres of the Gothic to make use of space in innumerable ways, with regard to the scope of this thesis, the focus will be limited to four texts of British authors writing between the second half of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century. The origin of the Gothic novel as a historical form is usually dated between 1764 and 1820, the 2 years which saw the publication of Horace Walpole`s The Castle of Otranto and Charles Maturin`s Melmoth the Wanderer respectively. However, it is now clear that the Gothic novel lived on in various forms, adapting on to the new times and environments, of which especially interesting with regard to space is the burgeoning urban environment of the nineteenth century. For the sake of comparison, therefore, not only the “proper” Gothic texts will be included in this thesis but also some examples from the later period. In the first chapter we will look at the origins of the Gothic, at the aesthetics of the eighteenth-century Britain and the connection to the Gothic Revival in architecture. The following chapter will be concerned with the division of literary space into three areas: the home, the residence of the hero/heroine, which is part of the everyday world, a safe place. Then there is the border or threshold and the anti-home, which is the realm of the Other, a place of chaos and evil, the abode of the villain. The rest of the thesis consists of three chapters and each chapter deals with an important setting of the Gothic fiction, a representative of one of the outlined areas of literary space: the house, the castle, and the city. 3 2. Gothic Origins – Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Gothic Revival Gothic fiction emerged from a fusion of unique aspects of the eighteenth century. First, the heightened interest in England`s past, especially the mediaeval era brought to the architectural foreground looming cathedrals and mansions with labyrinthine structure, towers and gargoyles. Second, the changes in aesthetic feeling granted more importance to one`s personal sensibilities and imagination prepared ground for reveling in the sublime feeling evoked by the terrors that may be found lurking in such cathedrals and mansions. These changes happened partly as a reaction to the Enlightenment. During the eighteenth century, the term “gothic” underwent significant changes of meaning and connotations. Originally, the term comes from the name of one of the Germanic tribes, the Goths, who played an important role in the destruction of Rome. Due to lack of written materials in subsequent periods and general confusion of terms, “‘Gothic’ became a highly mobile term, remaining constant only in the way it functioned to establish a set of polarities revolving primarily around the concepts of the primitive and the civilized” (Punter 3). Gothic came to denote everything uncivilized, barbaric, in architecture all that is irregular and ugly, especially in comparison with the classical style. As Ruskin wrote: “when that fallen Roman, in the utmost impotence of his luxury, and insolence of his guilt, became the model for the imitation of civilized Europe, at the close of the so-called Dark ages, the word Gothic became a term of unmitigated contempt” (Ruskin 6). In architecture, the opinion of the Gothic style began to change as part of the nationalist sentiments of the time: “As the Italians of the Renaissance looked back to Rome, so the ‘Gothic Gentlemen’ set out to build for themselves structures in keeping with their own history” (Lang 254). Since the word 4 Gothic was connected with the Goths, it was also connected with Germanic tribes in general and therefore with the history of Britain: “the Gothic Revival was an English movement, perhaps the one purely English movement in the plastic arts” (Clark xix). Although the style of building was not always called Gothic, there is certain evidence that the style as such had never really died out. For example, Kenneth Clark, in his Gothic Revival mused, if it would not be more appropriate to speak of
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