The Gothic Novel 1790–1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, British Isles English Language and Literature 1981 The Gothic Novel 1790–1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs Ann B. Tracy State University of New York, Plattsburgh Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Tracy, Ann B., "The Gothic Novel 1790–1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs" (1981). Literature in English, British Isles. 57. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/57 For Mary Jane Keith Schildberg, an early and sinister influence ooooooooooooo::x:oooooooooooocooooooooooooooooooooocoooooc:oooooooooooo This page intentionally left blank The Gothic Novel 1790-1830 ClOOOOOOOOOOOO'OOOOClOOOCIOOOCC CC CO CO CO CO CIXIOOOOOQOOO CO CC CO CO DCCC COCO COCO CO CO CO COCO CO CO COCO COCO CO COOOCXKXIOOOOOOCOOCO Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs ANN B. TRACY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Publication of this book has been assisted by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Tracy, Ann Blaisdell. The Gothic novel, 1790-1830. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. English fiction - 19th century - Stories, plots, etc. 2. Gothic revival (Literature) 3. English fiction - 18th century - Stories, plots, etc. 4. Horror tales, English - Stories, plots, etc. I. Title. PR868.T3T7 823'.0872 1 09 79-4013 ISBN 978-0-8131-5513-5 AACR2 Copyright © 1981 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth serving Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506-0024 Contents co coco co coco coco co co co co co coca coca co co co cocoooooco co coco co co co co co co ooooaocooo coco co co co co co co co oocooooococooooooocooooo Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Sunnnaries 13 Index to Motifs 195 Index of Characters 206 Index of Titles 214 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments My principal indebtedness is to my mother, Brenna Tracy, whose voluntary functions have ranged from secretary to research assistant and have been undertaken out of sheer maternal affection; my work would have been very much more difficult without her. I am largely indebted as well to four good friends: Drs. Eileen Curran and Herman Doh, who have painstakingly proofread and edited many more Gothic plots than they ever wanted to know about; Barbara Doh, who has loyally maintained that she likes the mechanics of in dexing; and Pat Hoffmann, who has provided moral support, occasional sanctuary, and a keen eye for bombast. Further, I am grateful for the help, support, and advice provided at various points by Lynn Valenti, and by Drs. Carol Ames, Gerald Bentley, Frank Carner, Jay Macpherson, and Philippe Perebinossoff. A number of friends and relatives aided my labors by of fering hospitality near university libraries - Olive Blais dell, John Dottridge, Harriette and Steven Land, Gary and Peg Miles, Beverly and David MacNeill, Dorothy and Brian Parker, Ed Wortman, and especially and recurrently my kind cousins Frank and Grace Blaisdell of Charlottesville, Vir ginia. Not least am I grateful to several people whose profes sional assistance was especially valuable and courteous, notably the staff of the rare book room at the University of Virginia's Alderman Library and John Langley of the Univer sity Press of Kansas. Finally I am indebted to Ruth Fecteau and Gina Patterson, whose clerical labors on my behalf were salaried, but whose interest and encouragement defied com pensation. 00000000 vii 00000000 This page intentionally left blank Introduction After a deceptively modest beginning in the 1760s, Gothic fiction had by the nineties acquired such vigor and momentum as to carry it three decades into the nineteenth century. What we now rather loosely describe as Gothic motifs and plots invaded the brief literary sketch and the five-volume novel, the chapbook and Dr. Nathan Drake's Literary Hours, drama and verse. Gothicism crept into the libraries of men of letters (Wordsworth anathematized the novels and Cole ridge reviewed them), into the heads of the coming genera tion (Macaulay and Thackery seem never quite to have lost the taste), and, judging by a fine shadow-toy of the Bleed ing Nun which I have had the privilege of admiring, into the toy-cupboards. Gothics and quasi-Gothics were written by men and women who were also writing opera, history, biogra phy, scientific papers, Shakespearean forgeries, treatises on beekeeping, sermons, newspaper reports, literary criti cism, poetry, recollections of Byron, political observa tions, and topographical works. Greats, near-greats, and friends of greats tried their hands at various forms of the Gothic; writers of ordinary if not exceptional merit flooded the market with it. It was written tongue in cheek and it was written tear in eye. It came studded with travelogues, interspersed with poetry, quivering with sensibility, dark with Romantic gloom, clad in fancy dress, dripping gore, em bellished with piety or sensuality, and framed with asser tions that it had been found on crumbling manuscripts. Most of all, it came in enormous quantities and we may presume that it was sold and read in analogous quantities, though the popularity of traveling libraries would suggest more readers than sales. Nowadays there seem to be three critical questions most often asked about the Gothic novel. Where did it come from? What caused its emergence? How does it behave? The first question seems to me not very interesting, though curiosity on that score is understandable, given the rather flashy na ture of the Gothic phenomenon. Literary historians have 00000000 1 00000000 been prone in general to see Gothic precursors in Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom and Leland's Longsword. They have observed in the Graveyard school tastes and preoccupations compatible to the development of the Gothic and have noted the influence of French romances and of German Ritter-, Rauber-, und Schauerromane. And yet the German novels that appear in translation among the English - Horrid Mysteries and Necromancer of the Black Forest, for instance- seem oddly fragmentary, quite a different breed of fiction from the complicated but smoothly resolved novels of such writers as W. C. Green, Curties, Ireland, Stanhope, and Pickersgill. As for precursors, where do we stop? Certainly some of the novels, besides appearing to owe their attractive villains to Milton and their comic servants to Shakespeare, are, in devices of plot, more like Revenge Tragedy than anything else. And how, in any case, are we to trace the ancestry of such a pastiche of historical, sentimental, and horrific as "Gothic novel" suggests? I am well content for these ques tions to refer the reader to such stalwarts as Birkhead, Railo, Summers, and Varma. The second question - What caused its emergence? - in terests me very much indeed, for the answer to that might tell us as well why the last fifteen to twenty years have witnessed a similar phenomenon. But I do not pretend to know the answer, and nothing so far has led me to believe that anyone else knows it either. Perhaps some day a psy chologist-cum-historian with a grasp of philosophy and an unusual knowledge of the early Gothic novel will tell us why people at a particular point in history need to frighten themselves in a particular way, and precisely what circum stances trigger a need for the Gothic's peculiar titilla tions. Until then, we had better go on to the third ques tion - How does it behave? - for this one is both interest ing and possible to answer in some detail. Gothic fiction has suffered a little, I think, from a tendency on the part of scholars to treat it as a curiosity. Curious it may be. but one misses a great deal of a novel by standing too far away from it. For this reason Robert Kiely's The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), which talks about such novels as The Monk and Melmoth the Wanderer from the inside, as though they were perfectly ordinary books, has always seemed to me to contain unusually valuable observations. These introductory remarks, there fore, will deal with the view from inside the novels. I have not discriminated for my generalizations here between "terror" and "horror" Gothic, or between those and the his torical or sentimental Gothic, or any combinations thereof; rather, I have tried to discover what viewpoint, if any, all novels called "Gothic" might share. The world represented in Gothic fiction is characterized by a chronic sense of apprehension and the premonition of impending but unidentified disaster. In this world, appear ances frequently, though not consistently, deceive, the mind and the senses falter and fail, and the passions overwhelm. Tempters, natural and supernatural, assault in impenetrable disguises, precipitating ruin and damnation. Nobody is en tirely safe; nothing is secure. The Gothic world is quin tessentially the fallen world, the vision of fallen man, living iq fear and alienation, haunted by images of his mythic expulsion, by its repercussions, and by an awareness of his unavoidable wretchedness. Further, it is a fallen world peculiarly wi.thout hope. Robert Kiely has noted this hopelessness. as it appears in Maturin's Melmoth the Wander er, as a peculiarity of the author's theology, 1 but the hopelessness seems to be far more pervasive.