Gothic Riffs Anon., The Secret Tribunal. courtesy of the sadleir-Black collection, University of Virginia Library Gothic Riffs Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 ) Diane Long hoeveler The OhiO STaTe UniverSiT y Press Columbus Copyright © 2010 by The Ohio State University. all rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic riffs : secularizing the uncanny in the european imaginary, 1780–1820 / Diane Long hoeveler. p. cm. includes bibliographical references and index. iSBn-13: 978-0-8142-1131-1 (cloth : alk. paper) iSBn-10: 0-8142-1131-3 (cloth : alk. paper) iSBn-13: 978-0-8142-9230-3 (cd-rom) 1. Gothic revival (Literature)—influence. 2. Gothic revival (Literature)—history and criticism. 3. Gothic fiction (Literary genre)—history and criticism. i. Title. Pn3435.h59 2010 809'.9164—dc22 2009050593 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (iSBn 978-0-8142-1131-1) CD-rOM (iSBn 978-0-8142-9230-3) Cover design by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe. Type set in adobe Minion Pro. Printed by Thomson-Shore, inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the american national Standard for information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSi Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is for David: January 29, 2010 Riff: A simple musical phrase repeated over and over, often with a strong or syncopated rhythm, and frequently used as background to a solo improvisa- tion. —OED - c o n t e n t s - List of figures xi Preface and Acknowledgments xiii introduction Gothic Riffs: songs in the Key of secularization 1 chapter 1 Gothic Mediations: shakespeare, the sentimental, and the secularization of Virtue 35 chapter 2 Rescue operas” and Providential Deism 74 chapter 3 Ghostly Visitants: the Gothic Drama and the coexistence of immanence and transcendence 103 chapter 4 Entr’acte. Melodramatizing the Gothic: the case of thomas holcroft 136 chapter 5 The Gothic Ballad and Blood sacrifice: from Bürger to Wordsworth 163 chapter 6 The Gothic chapbook: the class-based circulation of the Unexplained supernatural 196 Epilogue 229 Notes 237 Works cited 253 index 277 { ix } - L i s t o f f i G u R e s - frontispiece: Anon., The Secret Tribunal (1803) ii figure 1 Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799) 7 figure 2 John thurston, King Lear: O my dear father (1805) 65 figure 3 Handbill for Camille (1797) 81 figure 4: Handbill for Le Moine (1797) 84 figure 5 Lithograph, Robert le Diable, Act ii, scene iV: Bertram to Alice: “oui! tu me connais!” (1831) 90 figure 6 Musical score by thomas Busby for the last act of A Tale of Mystery (1801) 159 figure 7 Anon, title page from Tales of Wonder (1801) 209 figure 8 Anon, frontispiece from Tales of Wonder (1801) 211 figure 9 Frontispiece, M. E. L. D. L. Baron De Langon, L’Hermite de la Tombe Mystérieuse, ou le Fantôme du Vieux Cháteau, vol. 1 (1816) 233 { xi } - P R e f a c e a n D a c k n o w L e dg m e n t s - ) We never saw more interest excited in a theatre than was expressed at the sor- cery-scene in the third act [of Coleridge’s gothic drama Remorse (1813)]. The altar flaming in the distance, the solemn invocation, the pealing music of the mystic song, altogether producing a combination so awful, as nearly to overpower reality, and make one half believe the enchantment which delighted our senses. —Thomas Barnes, review of Remorse in the Examiner (January 31, 1813) he cover of this book, Pieter Breughel’s epic canvas The Battle of Car- Tnival and Lent (1566), depicts the denizens of an early modern euro- pean village engaged in a variety of activities that would have occurred on that specific day of transition including, off in the upper left corner, gawking at a public performance of the popular carnival pantomime Val- entine and Orson. This 1489 French legendary tale concerns the adven- tures of noble twin brothers who have been separated at birth, one of them raised in the wild by a she-bear, the other brought up as a prince at court. This tale was so popular that it was first transformed into a street play and then chapbook form, in which it spread throughout european culture for three hundred years. in 1794 it was adapted as a melodrama by Thomas Dibdin, who altered the plot in a significant way. he has the two brothers meet by accident in the forest as adults, the cultivated valentine serving wine to the bear-mother so that she dies, leaving Orson desolate (i.v). it is no coincidence that Valentine and Orson was typically performed by traveling troupes on the cusp of the religious calendar, during that period when carnival excess becomes Lenten penance and abstinence. in telling a tale that foregrounds a variety of transitions (from rural to urban; from { xiii } P re f A c E and A c kn o wledgmen t s “raw” to “cooked”), the play literally makes the maternal forest home of Orson a place of das unheimliche.1 Its resurgence in popularity during this period can be seen as illus- trating the “civilizing” and secularizing processes that natalie Davis and Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) have associated with the early modern european carnival and the development of urban centers in Breughel’s period.2 as Charles Taylor has more recently noted, the carnival is but one manifes- tation of the “need for anti-structure” or what he calls ritualistic public displays of controlled chaos being “brought into a new founding of order” (47). For Taylor, who employs the theories of victor Turner and arnold van Gennep, the carnival gradually extended beyond a few days to become an “unofficial zone” in which the imagination was given free rein and where a “public imaginary” could flourish in the spheres of art, music, literature, and theater (52). initially, these public performances of the “human code of complementarity” put forward the notion that all of us are members of a “communitas, fundamentally equal” and living in dependent coexistence with each other, the weak with the strong and all protected by an omnipo- tent deity (49–50). But gradually the productions of the public imaginary began to display the very processes by which european society acted out its ambivalent rejection of its earlier structuring principles, that is, its alle- giance to God, king, priest, and patriarch. This earliest form of seculariza- tion, the secularization of public spaces, continued until the final stage of secularization could emerge, that is, internal transformations in subjec- tivity and the ability to embrace simultaneously multiple and contradictory belief systems. This book analyzes how those transformations in interiority and conscience were staged and culturally disseminated through a variety of popular gothic productions (operas, dramas, melodramas, ballads, and chapbooks), while at the same time examining how the gothic itself was a secularizing mode that shaped a number of art forms and had multiple points of presence in popular european culture. Although Valentine and Orson is not generally considered part of the gothic canon, there are a number of gothic tropes in the work, particularly the death of the doubled bear-“mother” and the rescue of the biological mother Belisanta from a giant, and so i am interested in positioning this one particular work, and its transmutations through different literary forms, as representative of the larger argument of this book. What i would call the secularizing agenda of the gothic imaginary (as well as the interre- lated and mediating genres of sentimentalism and melodrama) arose and flourished during this particular period, roughly the mid-eighteenth cen- tury through the early nineteenth century, throughout Britain, France, and “Germany” because all three developing nation-states were assailed by reli- { xiv } P re f A c E and A c kn o wledgmen t s gious, political, and social changes that they were ill equipped to accommo- date so quickly.3 in particular, the world of early modern europe, a society dominated by the religious calendar and the festivities that we see depicted in Breughel’s painting, was a culture thoroughly informed by traditional religious beliefs. religious liturgies, texts, and doctrinal beliefs had been embraced and practiced for close to two thousand years and had functioned persistently for this culture as both its structuring principle and bulwark. The role of religion and what we might recognize as its more popular mani- festations, superstition and magic, in the daily lives of Western europeans were effectively undercut by the forces of secularization that were gaining momentum on every front, particularly by 1800. it is clear, though, that the lower class and the emerging bourgeoisie were loath to discard their traditional beliefs, and we can see their search for a sense of transcendent order and spiritual meaning in life in the continuing popularity of gothic performances, as well as May Day celebrations, halloween, Christmas har- lequinades, and the highly stylized and almost ritualistic theatrical produc- tions based on fairy tales or myths, all events that demonstrate that there was more than a residue of a religious calendar or a “thirst for the Sacred” (Brooks, 16) still operating in the public performative realm. In addition, the gothic aesthetic emerged during this period as an ideo- logically contradictory and complex discourse system, what i am calling a secularizing of the uncanny, a way of alternately valorizing and at the same time slandering the realms of the supernatural, the sacred, the maternal, the primitive, the numinous,4 and das unheimliche.5 Defining das unheimliche is frequently done by contrasting it with heim, literally meaning, as Freud reminds us, a home or secure space, and in Grimm’s Dictionary a place “free from ghostly influences.” Typically, theorists of the uncanny conceive of it as a repetitive, disturbing, haunting figure that intrudes into a largely secular domain, so that a culture in which religion still thrives does not organize itself much around the uncanny as a category (royle 2003; Punter 2007).