Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia Hitchcock Goes East: Postcolonial Gothic in Under Capricorn

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia Hitchcock Goes East: Postcolonial Gothic in Under Capricorn Contemporary fiction has shown increasing interest in horror, particularly in two broad thematic areas: terrorism and the Postcolonial Gothic. In this paper I propose to investigate the elements of the Postcolonial Gothic in a different framework, that of a cinematic text of the mid-twentieth century, Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949), based on the eponymous novel by the Australian novelist Helen Simpson. I will draw attention to the reuse of conventional Gothic components in the context of British imperialism towards the construction of the colonial/racial Other and the representation of ‘difference’. As a genre drawing on the mysterious, frightful Other, the Gothic has from early on included references to colonialism. Elements such as alienation, over- eroticisation, primitiveness and even cannibalism were central to the imperial discourse as well as to the genre. The encounter produced a specific type of Gothicism which supported stereotypes grounding the imperial endeavour. As the film came out in the late period of the British Empire, the historical moment of the production of the film has to be looked into to understand its lukewarm reception. It also sheds light on the use of the Gothic by the ‘Master of Noir’, on its relation with contemporary postcolonial Gothic criticism and on the artistic interpretation of gender politics. The Postcolonial Gothic The golden age of the literary Gothic is usually located between 1764, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and 1820, with Charles Maturin’s Melmoth, The Wanderer. These frontiers have long been trespassed and the classic formula has successfully been reinvented in a myriad of gothicised forms, in tune with the Gothic’s own premise against purity and absolutism. From the Romantic Gothic to the Victorian Gothic, to Gothic satire, to Southern American Gothic, the mode seems to experience ongoing metamorphoses in the encounter with coterminous literary genres like science fiction, fantasy, and horror.1 Furthermore, this internal dynamic 1 Some subcategories specifically linked with the Postcolonial Gothic include the Imperial Gothic, the West Indian Gothic, and the Tasmanian Gothic. The latter examples clearly refer to specific geographic locations; the Imperial Gothic, however, is often confused with the Postcolonial Gothic. Although the distinction is not always apparent, the Imperial Gothic describes the type of literature set in the imperial centre marked by the ghosts (frightening elements, racial Others, exotic features and so forth) originated from the imperial margins. The debate on the field is just taking off and is in dire need of theorisation, namely with reference to its terminology. Studies dedicated to the Postcolonial Gothic are still rare, though already triggered off with David Punter’s Postcolonial Imaginings in 2000. Punter does not use the terminology as such, but nevertheless focuses on what we could refer to as the symptoms of the Gothic in postcolonial and diasporic literature. Recently, Alison Rudd published Postcolonial Gothic Fictions (2010) on texts from the Caribbean, 138 Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia seems to be a direct consequence of a sharp interpretation of the specific historic times of its production. For instance, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886), in the tradition of the Urban Gothic, could not have come to be or be read apart from the phenomenon of industrialization; nor, to provide a more recent example, could Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (film 1992, TV series 1997-2003), considered a contemporary materialization of the Suburban Gothic, have emerged without the phenomenon of Youth Culture. In this essay I propose to investigate the elements of one of Gothic’s most exciting postmodern representations, that is, the Postcolonial Gothic. The term ‘postcolonial’ is not regarded as post-independence movements’ fiction. A very complex term, it should convey both the historic phenomenon and literary production of resistance prior to the nationalistic movements of the mid-twentieth century as well as those following it, celebrating liberty but continuing to investigate the imperial strategies which still operate and which, therefore, interrogate the suffix ‘post’. In other words, the chronological parameter is not suitable for my critical purpose. That is not to say that the fall of imperialism is not significant to any discussion related to postcolonialism. It is precisely having that in mind that a comparative reading of Under Capricorn as the 1937 novel by an Australian female writer, Helen Simpson, and as the 1949 cinematic text of a male British director, Alfred Hitchcock, narrating a story set in 1832 in Sydney, offers insightful lines of thought. Succinctly, my purpose in this paper is to bring attention to the refashioning/reinstating of conventional Gothic components in the context of British imperialism through the analysis of the representation of difference in terms of the colonial/racial Other as well as of gender identities/roles. The Gothic has from an early stage included elements linked with colonialism. The metropolitan mind located in the colonies forms of otherness which were simultaneously feared and desired. Elements such as alienation, over-eroticisation, primitiveness, and even cannibalism were vital both to the imperial discourse and to the genre. The encounter was fruitful, and from it arose a specific type of Gothicism which met the material and imagined needs of the empire. Othering is precisely what Gina Wisker Australia, New Zealand and Canada, locations which have received much of the overall critical attention. Also on Canadian postcoloniality Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte have edited Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic (2009). Gina Wisker provides a good introduction in her Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature (2007) and in her article ‘Crossing Liminal Spaces: Teaching the Postcolonial Gothic’ (2007), as does Tabish Khair in The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (2009). .

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