The Gothic As a Practice, by TGS Jones
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CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by ResearchArchive at Victoria University of Wellington THE GOTHIC AS A PRACTICE: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic by Timothy Graham Stanford Jones A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Victoria University of Wellington 2010 ABSTRACT Gothic studies, the specialist academic field that explores the Gothic text, has developed substantially over the last twenty-five years. The field often frames the Gothic as a serious literature, involved in historic discourse, and having special psychological acuity; this thesis suggests that there are a number of problems with these argumentative strategies, and that the academy now makes claims for the Gothic that are discontinuous with how this popular genre is understood by most readers. While Gothic studies is the study of a genre, curiously, it has seldom engaged with theorisations of genre. Nevertheless, an understanding of what genre is, and how it alters reading practice, is crucial to understanding the Gothic text. This thesis attempts to reconcile and develop a number of disparate approaches to genre through Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. It argues that genre is not a set of textual conventions but a group of procedures that facilitate and modify both writing and reading practices. Consequently, genres like the Gothic should be seen as discrete historicised phenomena, which retain a cohesive practical sense of how they ought to be performed before they hold discursive properties. Rather than arguing for the literary value of the Gothic, this thesis understands the genre as a popular practice. The consequences of this theorisation of the Gothic are explored in case studies of particular moments in three separate Gothic fields. Firstly, the American Gothic of the mid-nineteen-eighties, particularly Stephen King’s It , Joyce Carol Oates’ Mysteries of Winterthurn , and Toni Morrison’s Beloved , facilitates a discussion of the relationship between Gothic and literary practices. The Gothic text has its origins in ‘lowbrow’ popular culture, even as it sometimes aspires to ‘highbrow’ literary performances. Secondly, the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties is used to stage a discussion of both the way that readers become involved and immersed in the Gothic text, creating a distinct subjunctive ‘world’, and of the way that Gothics define themselves in relation to each other. The discussion refers to Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out , which heavily influenced the field, as demonstrated in works by Susan Howatch, Kingsley Amis, Robert Aickman and Mervyn Peake. Wheatley’s depiction of the black mass became a key Gothic procedure, and can be read as this particular field’s metaphor of its own practice. 2 Thirdly, New Zealand’s underdeveloped Gothic field provides a venue to explore the Gothic’s relationship with nation and national literature, and how the practice is involved in landscape. Frank Sargeson’s stories and his novella The Hangover , together with Janet Frame’s A State of Siege are texts authored by canonical New Zealand writers that participate in a local Gothic, although their participation in popular genre has been little recognised. This thesis argues that the Gothic is a commonsense cultural practice, facilitated through the canniness of habitus. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Victoria University of Wellington for granting me the scholarship that has enabled my research. I am also grateful to the Faculty Research Committee for their support, which allowed me to travel to the International Gothic Association conferences in 2007 and again in 2009. Thanks are also due to Education New Zealand’s Postgraduate Study Abroad Award programme that assisted my travel in 2009. Thank you to Jerrold E. Hogle, Andrew Smith, and to the editors of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies for their support and interest. I have very much appreciated the kindness and interest of the English faculty at Victoria, all of whom have been generous enough to express their interest in my progress and my project. Special thanks to David Norton, Jane Stafford, Mark Williams, Harry Ricketts, Heidi Thomson, Peter Whiteford and Tatjana Schaefer, for looking out for me. I am extraordinarily thankful for the input of my supervisors, Anna Jackson and Charles Ferrall. They have been as astute as they have been supportive and I have felt very lucky to have them. And finally, an enormous thank you to my wife, Jane, whose support and belief has never once flagged over the course of these years, despite the near- Gormenghastian scope of the obsession my research has entailed. 4 CONTENTS 1. Some Problems in Gothic Studies, and a Theory of the Gothic 6 2. Discourse and Practice in the American Gothic of the Nineteen-Eighties 56 American Gothic Studies and the Field 60 It 73 Mysteries of Winterthurn 88 Beloved 109 Conclusion: Headless Bride 124 3. Ritual and Subjunctivity in the English Gothic of the Nineteen-Sixties 128 The Devil Rides Out 132 The Devil on Lammas Night 145 The Green Man 153 Two Tales from Dark Entries 160 The Gormenghast Trilogy 174 Conclusion: The Highgate Vampire 189 4. Towards a New Zealand Gothic: Practice in an Underdeveloped Field 196 Some Problems in Critical Versions of New Zealand Literature and the New Zealand Gothic 201 Frank Sargeson’s Gothic 212 Janet Frame’s Reception and A State of Siege 235 Conclusion: Gothic Landscapes and Antipodean Tales 249 Conclusion: The Gothic as Practice 257 Works Cited 261 5 CHAPTER ONE : SOME PROBLEMS IN GOTHIC STUDIES , AND A THEORY OF THE GOTHIC What is the Gothic? Appropriately for a genre that so often revels in ambiguity, even the word has always held an approximate, mutable, contested meaning. This chapter attempts to answer that question, providing a critique of the specialised critical approaches to the genre that have developed over the last thirty-five years, and offering a theoretical response to them. The following chapters explore the genre in the context of the United Kingdom in the nineteen-sixties, the United States in the mid nineteen-eighties, and finally, in New Zealand in the nineteen-thirties through until the nineteen-nineties. Each of these historical ‘moments’ provides a venue to examine the genre’s performativity, its relationship to criticism, literature and national identity, all of which are issues raised as consequences of the theorisation of the genre suggested in this chapter. The argument of this chapter and the case studies that follow hope to address the concerns about Gothic studies raised by Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, that it often abandons genuine historicity and that the assumption of Gothic Criticism [is] that the ‘Gothic’ is to be defined not according to observable features of theme and setting but according to the realms of psychological depth from which it is supposed to originate (dream, fantasy) or the psychological responses it is believed to provoke (fear, terror, horror). Gothic Criticism is frequently unable and unwilling to distinguish its supposed object from the generality of fearful or horrible narratives. 1 Gothic studies has been reluctant to define the object of its investigation. It is emblematic of this problem that the Oxford English Dictionary has only very recently, in March 2008, introduced a draft addition describing the sense of the word ‘Gothic’ in which it is critically used, denoting a genre of fiction, not limited by historical 1 Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, "Gothic Criticism," A Companion to the Gothic , ed. David Punter, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 216. 6 origin, that involves the suspenseful, the sensational, the supernatural or macabre. In a sense that exceeds that given by the OED addition, it could mean a cultural production in one of a number of different media that involves these qualities. This is the primary sense in which this thesis uses the word, encompassing genre labels such as horror, weird stories, dark fantasy, and the literature of the macabre. The word is expansive, and the OED includes earlier relevant senses that do not entirely separate themselves as unique. It notes Walpole’s use of the word as subtitle to The Castle of Otranto , but this is rightly ascribed to his medievalism rather than to the supernatural and sinister inclinations that might encourage us to label a text as Gothic in a twenty-first century context. However, it is easy to see how, in our present use of the term which does not distinguish between Walpole’s wilful anachronism and his brightly haunted imagination, these two separate senses collapse into one another. That the meanings attached to the word are changeable is hardly a new observation; Alfred E. Longueil noted in 1923 that ‘Critical terms, like other speculations, have their ups and downs. So it has been with the adjective “gothic”’. 2 In a literary context, the term denoted barbarism and a lack of decorum in the early eighteenth century; however, Longueil attributes what he calls the ‘re-neutralizing’ of the word to Bishop Richard Hurd in his 1762 Letters on Chivalry and Romance , where he argued for the value of the ‘Gothic romance’. 3 When Walpole and Reeve used the term, it was already in a recuperated sense; as we will see, Gothic studies has emphasised the need for the recovery of the term. As more Gothic texts were written and consumed, the present meaning of the word began to emerge, denoting the supernaturalism, orientalism, morbidity and spectral obsessions present within the texts. Longueil believes that this sense had displaced earlier meanings to a significant degree by the end of the eighteenth century. 4 Michael Gamer suggests that it is not until the early nineteenth century that ‘Gothic’ denoted a genre; thus the sense of the term discussed here was not really 2 Alfred E.