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“The Grin of the Skull Beneath the Skin:” Reassessing the Power of Comic Characters in Gothic Literature

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“The Grin of the Skull Beneath the Skin:” Reassessing the Power of Comic Characters in Gothic Literature University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English English, Department of 12-2011 “The grin of the skull beneath the skin:” Reassessing the Power of Comic Characters in Gothic Literature Amanda D. Drake University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Drake, Amanda D., "“The grin of the skull beneath the skin:” Reassessing the Power of Comic Characters in Gothic Literature" (2011). Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English. 57. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/57 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. “The grin of the skull beneath the skin:” Reassessing the Power of Comic Characters in Gothic Literature by Amanda D. Drake A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English Nineteenth-Century Studies Under the Supervision of Professor Stephen Behrendt Lincoln, Nebraska December, 2011 “The grin of the skull beneath the skin:” 1 Reassessing the Power of Comic Characters in Gothic Literature Amanda D. Drake, Ph.D. University of Nebraska, 2011 Advisor: Dr. Stephen Behrendt Neither representative of aesthetic flaws or mere comic relief, comic characters within Gothic narratives challenge and redefine the genre in ways that open up, rather than confuse, critical avenues. Comic characters in the Gothic texts of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Clara Reeve establish the comic as a serious and legitimate part of the Gothic aesthetic. Comic characters continue to appear in all forms of the Gothic, including its parodies, well into the nineteenth-century, suggesting that these characters endure as necessary and vital elements within the evolving Gothic genre. As the genre evolves, the characters evolve as well, progressing from fool to humorist and then wit. This evolution reflects a shift in comic agency and the changing theories of humor between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The comic character’s creation of humor, in a literary genre whose sole claim to fame often seems to be the development of terror, creates an axis which reveals much about the Gothic author’s aesthetic concerns. In the context of insightful cultural readings delineated by recent Gothic scholars, I demonstrate how a formal reading of Gothic convention can establish not just cultural legitimacy for the genre, but also aesthetic legitimacy by reassessing the ways in which comic characters’ humorous wordplay deliberately disrupts readers’ expectations about the emotionally charged tenor of the conventional Gothic narrative. 1 See p. 198 in Victor Sage’s “Gothic Laughter: Farce and Horror in Five Texts.” iii Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor and committee members for their help, support, and wonderful advice. Stephen Behrendt addressed all my concerns with warmth and wit. I want to thank Laura White for giving me the opportunity to explore my initial ideas concerning wit in Villette in the Nineteenth-Century Novel seminar. Thanks, also, to Robert Stock for enthusiastically exploring the possibilities of the Gothic with me during an independent study. Many others within the Department of English supported my efforts. Thanks to Stephen Buhler for his help in finding sources on Shakespearean servants, and to the members of the Nineteenth-Century British Literature circle for providing excellent feedback in the earliest stages of my scholarship. iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One 29 A Fool’s Errand: The Comic Servant’s Role in the Formation of the Gothic Chapter Two 75 “You Slay Me!”: Comic Villains in the Female Gothic Chapter Three 117 Dark Wit: Witty Protagonists in the Victorian Gothic Mode Chapter Four 151 “Humor Me”: The Amiable Humorist in Gothic Parody Works Cited 203 Drake 1 Introduction The notion that the Gothic is difficult to define as a literary genre has become so commonplace as to be clichéd.1 While Gothic texts seem to deliberately follow set conventions, to the point of being formulaic, scholars have continually focused on those texts which go beyond mere formula in an effort to legitimize the Gothic aesthetic. As Diane Long Hoeveler puts it, “Providing a satisfactory explanation for the popular gothic’s fixation on formula has always been one of the main challenges facing its critics” (6). In this paradigm, the critic fails to question the perception that formula is a challenge to overcome and rather turns to those texts which seemingly negate formula, defining the genre through incoherence rather than cohesion. My dissertation questions the accuracy of these definitions by reconsidering part of the Gothic formula as an important and unifying aspect of the genre. In the present study, I seek to legitimize the Gothic aesthetically, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick does, by looking closer at what seems to be a superfluous convention, especially in the Gothic: the comic character and his or her humorous effect on the text. 1 For the purposes of this dissertation, the Gothic will be treated as a genre in and of itself (as opposed to a mode which is subsumed by the genre of the novel or the romance), at least in terms of the texts produced in its “heyday” between 1764-1800. While the texts I discuss are prose, not all of them are novels. And many texts identified as Gothic over the years are dramas, poems, or a mixture of forms. One only has to peruse Ann Radcliffe’s work, the defining body of literature labeled Gothic, to note that she includes poetry in her novels. Other authors that are labeled as Gothic (and usually solely as Gothic such as Matthew Lewis) wrote plays as well as novels. The Gothic, then, serves as a more unifying label than the novel or the romance. By the nineteenth-century, the distinctiveness of the Gothic will be subsumed and transformed through adaptation into the Victorian novels of Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens, thus becoming a mode. As Carol Margaret Davison notes, following the theories of John Frow, genres which rely on form and implication to garner “complicity” from readers usually turn into modes as time goes on (17). Drake 2 In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick manages to develop a meaningful aesthetic by which to define the Gothic through an analysis of convention, asserting that Ann Radcliffe’s use of the black veil symbolizes a crucial aspect of all Gothic texts: a play with surfaces. She claims the Gothic is “the conventional genre par excellence” because it draws attention to the use of convention as a superficial device for generating meaning. Character is, for Sedgwick, one such superficial construction which may, and typically does, reveal deeper social and cultural meanings “along such axes as generation, sex, and class” (166). In the end, Sedgwick’s work remains to most the cornerstone of the defense of the Gothic as a genre because it does not deny its reliance on formula but probes the deliberateness of the formula and the effects motivating its use. Her work also stands as testament that any critical look at Gothic conventions must ultimately ground itself in character and effect. Much as the veil led Sedgwick to a deeper knowledge of the Gothic axes concerning gender and class, so too does the comic character’s creation of humor, in a literary genre whose sole claim to fame seems to be the development of terror, create an axis which reveals much about the Gothic author’s aesthetic concerns. In returning to form and convention, though, I do not seek to ignore or invalidate the excellent cultural readings already well-delineated by recent Gothic scholars, which I will discuss in a moment; rather, I seek to show how a formal reading of Gothic convention can establish aesthetic, and not just cultural, legitimacy for the genre. The one feature upon which most critics can agree is that the Gothic is meant to create a certain emotional effect, terror, making it a precursor to the horror genre. This Drake 3 argument once again defines the genre, not by its aesthetic form, but rather by its emotional resonance with its audience. As E. J. Clery outlines, the Gothic, through its use of the supernatural, “takes effect through an appeal to the emotions. The meaning of the text is inseparable from its affect, its impact on the reader, [. .]” (The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 70). As in the case of the Gothic’s formulaic devices, defining the genre through emotion seems to mark it as a popular form rather than an artistic, aesthetically driven form. The emotional effect that is often produced, then, becomes yet another criticism leveled at the genre from its very inception.2 David H. Richter acknowledges that the emotional content of the genre is a powerful component of its popularity and that it would be a mistake for critics to deny or degrade that power, especially in the face of the “legion” of critics attacking the genre for being “too effective” in emotionally investing the reader in its narrative (96). The effectiveness of the reader’s emotional investment is noted, too, in the way literary critics discuss Gothic texts as “addictive” and holding “pathological pleasures” which have “extraordinary powers [. .] over the sensibilities of his or her readers” (Clery “Against Gothic” 41).3 2 The reviews of Radcliffe’s and Matthew Lewis’s works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge have often been cited as the definitive source of contemporary critical reception of the genre.
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