CLASS AND GENDER IDENTITY IN "MALE GOTHIC," FROM WALPOLE TO BYRON NIDA DARONGSUWAN PHD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE JANUARY 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page List of Illustrations IV Acknowledgements V Abstract VI INTRODUCTION 1 Class and Gender Identity in Late-Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain 6 The "Male Gothic" 17 CHAPTER 1 Horace Walpole and the "Aristocratisation" of the Gothic 25 Walpole's Sense of the Gothic 26 The Castle ofOtranto 35 The Mysterious Mother 52 Nineteenth-Century Responses to Walpole's Work 64 CHAPTER 2 William Beckford: "Epater Ie Bourgeois" 70 Biographical Memoirs and The Vision 72 Vathek 79 The Episodes ofVathek 95 The 1790s and After 103 CHAPTER 3 Matthew Lewis: "Lewisizing" Gothic 116 Lewis and the Culture of Sensibility in the Early 1790s 117 The Monk 125 .. n Lewis after The Monk Scandal 141 CHAPTER 4 "Drawing from Self': Lord Byron 164 Constructing Authorial Identity: From Hours of Idleness to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I-II 166 The Turkish Tales 178 Leading the "Satanic School": Manfred and Other Works 193 CONCLUSION 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY 224 111 LIST OF ILLUSTRA TIONS Page PLATE 1 Portrait of a Nobleman in the Dress of an Albanian, by Thomas Phillips in 1814. © Queen's Printer and Controller of HMSO, 2004. UK Government Art Collection. Reproduced from Robert Beevers, The Byronic Image: The Poet Portrayed (Oxford: Olivia, 2005) 29 173 PLATE 2 Byron, engraving after George Sanders' portrait of 1809 by William Finden in 1830. Reproduced from Beevers, The Byronic Image 12 179 PLATE 3 Portrait ofa Nobleman, by Thomas Phillips in 1814. John Murray Archive, London. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, London. Reproduced from Beevers, The Byronic Image 25 190 PLATE 4 Byron, engraving after the drawing by George Harlow by Henry Meyer. Published 30 January 1816 by T. Cadell & W. Davies, Strand, London. Reproduced from Beevers, The Byronic Image 69 212 IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deepest gratitude is to my supervisor, Dr. Jim Watt, who has guided me with expertise and patience, and has given me encouragement throughout the four years of my research. I would like to thank also the members of my Thesis Advisory Panel, Dr. Emma Major and Prof. Harriet Guest, along with my external examiner, Dr. Angela Wright, for valuable thoughts and constructive advice on my thesis. I am grateful to the Royal Thai Government for selecting me as a recipient of the Thai-UK Collaborative Research Network scholarship. Specific thanks go to my senoir colleagues at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Assist. Prof. Dr. M. R. Kalaya Tingsabadh, Assist. Prof. Dr. Sudaporn Luksaneeyayawin, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pachee Yuvajita, who encouraged me to apply for the scholarship, without which I would not be able to do a PhD in the UK. My interest in the eighteenth century has increased from a number of research seminars and conferences held by the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies. It has been a pleasure to study in the warm and friendly environment here. My special thanks go to Jinghuey Hwang, my closest eighteenth-century comrade; Koji Yamamoto, for his enthusiastic comment on my conference paper; Jinat and Angus Whitehead, for hosting the few but memorable dinners, along with lively and engaging conversation. Thanks also to my Thai friends at the University of York, particularly Pairoj Wilainuch, Nattama Pongpairoj, Manu Deeudom, Sittiphol Viboonthanakul, and Taweesak Kritjaroen, who have made my stay abroad more like "home." Friends studying in other universities in the UK-Tongtip Poonlarp, Sirirat Na Ranong, Raksangob Wijitsopon, Jiranthara Sriouthai, and Nawaporn Sanprasert-have shared their experience, making me feel that I am not alone in this lenghty PhD project. Thanks too to Poonperm Paitayawat for literature and theatre conversation, and for having been such a wonderful London host. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my family and Pitch Tiranasawas for their unwavering love, support, and great confidence in my abilities. With heartfelt gratitude and affection, I dedicate this thesis to my parents. v ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is to investigate works by major male writers of Gothic fiction-namely, Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Matthew Lewis and Lord Byron-in the context of the changing social and cultural climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The "male Gothic," as I will argue, represents a kind of social performance, and it is a subgenre of fiction in which there is a persistent engagement with questions of class and gender identity. Between around the 1760s and the 1820s, Britain started to witness the gradual decline of aristocratic cultural hegemony and a more vigorous self-assertion of the middle classes, which sought to regulate aristocratic "excess." Examining the self representation of the authors in question, alongside their morally and sexually transgressive works, this thesis will consider the "male Gothic" as a literary category that made possible the performance of implicitly oppositional class and gender identities, and provided a means of resisting emergent "middle-class" ideologies and values. Such a notion of "resistance," however, I will argue, also needs to be seen in the context of the writers' various attempts to offer their works to the public as both legitimate and pleasurable, and hence takes the form of an often playful vacillation between the licensed and the subversive, rather than any more absolute and uncompromising form of cultural opposition. Concluding by looking at the diverse but increasingly hostile reception of Byron's work in the 1820s and 1830s, this thesis will consider the backlash against the "male Gothic" more generally around this time, and it will suggest that Byron's work marks the high-point and, perhaps, the end-point of the genre. VI INTRODUCTION Since the publication of David Punter's seminal work, The Literature of Terror (1980), "a flood of critical material,"! to use Punter's words, has established Gothic fiction as a genre that not only embraces wide-ranging themes, features and functions, but also invites different, often competing theoretical approaches to analyse its development and transformation across history and cultures. As psychoanalysis and queer theory have increasingly gained momentum in literary studies, there has been an attempt to examine Gothic works written by male writers as a tradition in which the portrayal of protagonists' exploits is explained in terms of the authors' psychological experience, and in particular their deviation from a normative heterosexuality. Timothy Mowl's biography, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (1996), is perhaps the most obvious example of such an enthusiasm for "queering" the male Gothic. 2 Drawing the reader's attention to Walpole's private correspondence with his male friends, Mowl contends that Walpole was "a homosexual who consorted with other homosexuals and bisexuals of his class."3 The Castle of Otranto (1764), as Mowl puts it, reflects Walpole in "a state of febrile excitement" after William Guthrie's attack on his intimate relationship with Henry Seymour Conway-a public "outing" of Walpole, as Mowl calls it-in A Reply to the Counter Address; Being a Vindication of a Pamphlet Entitled, An Address to the nd ! David Punter, preface, The Literature of Terror, 2 ed., vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1996) viii. 2 Other examples are Raymond Bentman, "Horace Walpole's Forbidden Passion," Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York UP, 1997); Jill Campbell, '''I Am No Giant': Horace Walpole, Heterosexual Incest, and Love among Men," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 39.3 (1998): 238-60; Max Fincher, "Guessing the Mould: Homosocial Sins and Identity in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto," Gothic Studies 3.3 (2001): 229-45; Adam Potkay, "Beckford's Heaven of Boys," Raritan 13.1 (1993): 73-86; and Lauren Fitzgerald, "The Sexuality of Authorship in The Monk," Romanticism on the Net 36-37, Nov. 2004-Feb. 2005,28 Nov. 2005 <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2004/v/n 36-37/011138 ar.html>. 3 Timothy Mowl, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (London: Murray, 1996) 4. 1 Public, on the Late Dismission of a General Officer (1764), which probably made Walpole consider it "expedient" to "bring out a rip-roaring, red-blooded romance that included threats of rape in gloomy cellars and portray[ ... ] normally sexed young men falling in love, normally, with beautiful high-born maidens in distress."" While Mowl's reference to homosexuality is anachronistic, so too is his description of Walpole as an "outsider" inaccurate: as a son of a former Prime Minister, Walpole was from his childhood a member of elite circles, serving in Parliament for twenty- seven years and maintaining connections with many illustrious social and political figures of his time. Queer readings such as Mowl's may offer new perspectives on Gothic fiction, but they often downplay the significance of other kinds of context. A more theoretically and historically informed criticism has been advanced by the literary scholar George Haggerty, whose recent book, Queer Gothic (2006), discusses the genre in the light of Michel Foucault's history of sexuality and ideas articulated in psychoanalytical studies.5 Since Gothic fiction, in Haggerty's words, "offered a testing ground for many unauthorised genders and sexualities," it might be seen to function as "a historical model of queer theory and politics: transgressive, sexually coded, and resistant to dominant ideology.,,6 Haggerty's remark about the emergence of the literary Gothic in the late eighteenth century, coinciding with modern concepts of sexuality, is worth expanding to include other aspects of cultural transition in this period.7 Focusing on constructions of class and gender identity, my thesis will 4 Ibid. 186. 5 Haggerty's earlier works on the subject are "Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford, and Lewis," Studies in the Novel 18.4 (1986): 341-52; and Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia UP, 1999).