Castle of Wolfenbach

Eliza Parsons The Castle of Wolfenbach edited with an introduction and notes by Beatriz Sánchez Santos 2009 THE CASTLE OF WOLFENBACH BY ELIZA PARSONS ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction …………………………………………………...……………………...iv Part 1: The construction of meaning in characterization 1.1. Formulaic language in The Castle of Wolfenbach ……………………... ix 1.2. “The amiable Matilda”: repetition and amplification of meaning ……xviii 1.3. “She is truth and goodness itself”: intensifiers and the stereotype....…xxix Part 2: Blurred identities, complex sensibilities 2.1. “Who, or what, am I?”: blurring boundaries…………………...…..…xxxvi 2.2. “She shed floods of tears”: formulaic language revisited and the complex expression of sensibility……………………………………………………...xliv 2.3. “Easier conceived than described”: sympathy at the boundaries with drama and fairytale…………………………………………. …………………lv Part 3: The conflicting discourses of determinism and free will 3.1. “You are no base unworthy offspring”: innate qualities in Matilda..….lxix 3.2. “Providence intervened”: the supremacy of Divine Will…………….lxxvi 3.3. “I learned resignation”: nature and nurture in the novel…………...…lxxx 3.4. “It was my own voluntary choice”: the discourse of free will………lxxxiv 3.5. “I am under a state of obligation”: the boundaries of free will…….. lxxxix 3.6. “The pride of birth”: Matilda’s social values and eighteenth-century accounts of the self………………………………………………………...…xcii Conclusion……………………………………………….……………….xcvii Note on this edition………………………………………………………xcix Bibliography……………………………...…………………………………civ The Castle of Wolfenbach Volume I ………………………………………………………………………..1 Volume II …………………………………………...…………………………71 Explanatory notes ………………………………………………….…...…… 139 iii INTRODUCTION There were six editions of The Castle of Wolfenbach since its first publication in 1793 until 1854 1; but this novel was not reprinted until 1968, as part of the Northanger Set edited by Devendra P.Varma. Despite being a remarkably popular novel in its time, it was only saved from being entirely forgotten by a mention of it in Austen’s Northanger Abbey , which enabled it to be retained in the memory of some readers and scholars. Although it may be hazardous to attempt to formulate a reason for the oblivion of The Castle of Wolfenbach , one may wonder why a novel which was successful enough to have five editions in sixty years, and which was judged after its first edition as “more interesting than the general run of modern novels”, 2 has never deserved much attention. Furthermore, one may ask why this is the case with Parsons and with other writers of Gothic novels who, as Maurice Lévi pointed out, “perhaps deserve (…) more than the total obscurity to which they are condemned nowadays”. 3 Ironically, it may have been precisely the popularity of Gothic which led, in turn, to the profusion of novels of this genre, and to the general belief that they were unoriginal and mediocre, thus deserving of disappearing into oblivion. The question is undoubtedly much more complex and long-lasting than that, since it involves the moral discourse that warned against a type of fiction that obsessed the reader and exposed her to such condemnable passions as vanity and lust, not to mention the possibility of her becoming a “Female Quixote” or a Catherine 1 In 1793, 1794, 1824, 1839 and 1854, according to Garside, Raven and Schowerling, p.592. We also worked with an 1835 edition found at the British Library not recorded in Garside, Raven and Schowerling, in which the novel was published together with Longsword in a single volume. 2 Anonymous review in The British Critic, III (1794), p.199. 3 “méritent peut-être (…) mieux que l’oubli total où ils sont aujourd’hui tombés” (Lévi:436, my translation). He mentions the names of John Palmer, W.H. Ireland, Francis Lathom, T.J. Horsley Curties, Regina Maria Roche, Eleanor Sleath and Eliza Parsons. iv Morland. 4 As E.J.Clery states in The Rise of Supernatural Fiction , “[t]he connection between female readers and improbable, unimproving fictions was well established by the 1790s, both in literary satire and in sober treatises on conduct and education”. 5 This was part of a rhetoric that could have been founded in the circulation of library books, a “series of metonymic contaminations” whereby the “commercial promiscuity” of books leads to “a parallel fate for the ( de jure ) female readers who devour and internalise the stories”. 6 Another mechanism at work to make a novel like The Castle of Wolfenbach inessential, and therefore marginal, is that of the canon. This would instantly label dozens of novels as mere imitations of The Mysteries of Udolpho , or The Monk , by virtue of these novels’ superior quality, which results in a tendency to assume that a study of the genre could dispense with the minor works on the grounds of their status as mere imperfect copies of the original. The Castle of Wolfenbach exemplifies the tendency to forget the mass of Gothic fiction in favour of a few titles that have been deemed worthy of study or mere consideration in a narrow “Gothic canon”. We would like to step out of the vicious circle that a canon imposes, whereby only a few literary works are studied and constitute the whole catalogue of valid subject matter for study, effacing through time the interest that other works may have had, on the basis that these are inferior to the already established canonical texts. We believe that a suspension of this criterion of quality on which the canon is built can break fresh ground that will provide new viewpoints and approaches to the study of the genre. Thus, we will see how those characteristics for which The Castle of Wolfenbach could be criticized or even ostracized, such as its formulaic repetitiveness or the predictability of its plot, are precisely those which make it the more interesting when they are carefully examined. We want to turn a discussion of the novel in spite of its language into a 4 The inclusion of Wolfenbach in the set of “horrid novels” in Northanger Abbey was beneficial insofar as it kept the novel “alive” as a reference of Gothic fiction, yet it did so in the context of a satire of these novels. Even though Jane Austen’s novel can be recently seen as much more than a critique of Gothic fiction, the titles of the seven “horrid novels” would be evoked as the material instances of the satirized genre. 5 Clery, 2005:96 6 ibid:97. v discussion of its language, as we believe in the fruitfulness of analysing this novel from a formalistic point of view, where language is a point of departure to explore the position of the novel within the genre and within the larger frame of eighteenth-century literature. In Part 1 we try to go beyond the common assumption that repetition is an element that signals lack of quality in a novel, to view it as an instance of formulaic language, a feature that brings it closer to folklore, and which is not to be regarded as a mere combinatorics, but as a form of creating complex networks of meaning. We will explore the intricacies of character description through an analysis of formulaic expressions and collocations of frequent words in the novel, which will lead us to a reappraisal of Matilda’s character in Part 2. We will try to show how the very language that seeks to present Matilda as a model of virtue paradoxically jeopardizes her position as a virtuous character, and how conflicting depictions of her character, emanating from opposing perceptions of herself (her own and others’), make her stand on the threshold between virtue and vice, the bearer of truth and the impostor, the child and the woman. In part 3, we are impelled to considering how this ambiguity in the characterization of Matilda affects the way we understand her motivations and actions. What moves Matilda to act as she does? The novel’s language offers us the possibility of prying into her motivations to act in what is termed as a “virtuous” way, and invites us to deal with two contrasting discourses that build a very intricate definition of what is (or should be) the heroine’s free choice. Is Matilda predestined to be happy? Is her destiny determined beforehand, either by a supreme power or by any innate qualities of hers? Or is she, as she puts it, “mistress of her own destiny”, directing herself to a prosperous future by the exertion of a voluntary self-denial? We encounter this dilemma vi when analysing the interplay between two different languages that push their way through the novel, which we have termed as the “discourse of determinism” and the “discourse of free will”. By carefully analysing this interplay, we will attempt to delve into aspects such as the influence of the folktale in Gothic fiction, the binary oppositions predestination/free will and nature/nurture, or the significance of social conventions in some of Matilda’s motives. Finally, we will present some of these aspects against the background of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, since we believe that the unresolved tension between the two discourses reflects the complexity surrounding the definition of reason, free will and, ultimately, the human character at the time of its publication. This edition, inscribed within The Northanger Library Project (HUM2006-03404, directed by Professor Manuel Aguirre at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), is the first long piece of research we contribute to the production of the LIMEN group (Liminalist Investigations Into Modern English Literature), also based at that university. Given that the study of the novel that is offered here concerns mainly its language, it is advisable to start by reading the novel before the introduction to recognise the excerpts; notwithstanding this, we also provide a detailed summary of the plot in the first section of this introduction to clarify the chronology of events and the connection between characters where necessary.

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