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The Force of a Frame: Narrative Boundaries and the Gothic Novel

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The Force of a Frame: Narrative Boundaries and the Gothic Novel THE FORCE OF A FRAME: NARRATIVE BOUNDARIES AND THE GOTHIC NOVEL by CLAYTON CARLYLE TARR (Under the Direction of Richard Menke) ABSTRACT This study examines frame narratives from the late eighteenth century through the late Victorian period. Studies of the Gothic have either neglected framing devices or dismissed them as conventions that establish structures of narrative. This project, however, reads them as formally destabilizing. While frame narratives appear to provide structure—limits, boundaries, borders— they far more frequently disturb narrative cohesiveness. Starting with Ann Radcliffe’s revolutionary approach, which situated the frame narrative within the fiction itself rather than outside as paratext, novelists used form to intensify the Gothic effect. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, Walton’s letters enclose Victor’s central narrative, but when the creature authoritatively appears in both sections of the frame, the comforting narrative boundary between character and reader ruptures. The study proceeds with chapters on Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Charles Robert Maturin, and James Hogg. In addition, it interrogates how several nineteenth-century writers reimagine the Gothic frame, first through chapters on the Brontës and Dickens, and finally through Joseph Conrad and Henry James. “The Force of a Frame” excavates, for the first time, the rich relations between frame and form to develop a new understanding of the narrative dynamics and aesthetic vibrancy of the Gothic novel. Far from tangential, the Gothic novel in fact provides a foundation for aesthetic realism. Perhaps it is not the comfortable realism we expect, that which directs us towards claims of objectivity, but it is a realism based on human experience, the often disturbing, sometimes horrifying reality of perspective, untruth, and doubt. INDEX WORDS: Novel, Gothic, Realism, Framing devices, Narrative, Aesthetics, Print culture THE FORCE OF A FRAME: NARRATIVE BOUNDARIES AND THE GOTHIC NOVEL by CLAYTON CARLYLE TARR B.A., Indiana University, 2005 M.A., University of South Carolina, 2007 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2013 © 2013 Clayton Carlyle Tarr All Rights Reserved THE FORCE OF A FRAME: NARRATIVE BOUNDARIES AND THE GOTHIC NOVEL by CLAYTON CARLYLE TARR Major Professor: Richard Menke Committee: Roxanne Eberle Chloe Wigston Smith Casie LeGette Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2013 iv DEDICATION For my parents. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have many to thank: my mentors at the University of South Carolina, who taught me how to be a graduate student; my employers at USC Rare Books and Special Collections, Ross and Lucy Roy, who taught me to love books; my tutor at Oxford, Freya Johnston, whose remarks inspired the project; and especially my doctoral committee at UGA for their indefatigable work throughout my studies. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page AKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES.......................................................................................................................vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................1 2 “[A] FRAME OF UNCOMMON SIZE”: ANN RADCLIFFE’S AESTHETIC THRESHOLDS.......................................................................................................42 3 HEARTS OF DARKNESS: WALTER SCOTT AND THE FRAMES OF GENRE...87 4 FRAMING FRANKENSTEIN: MARY SHELLEY AND THE POLITICS OF EDITING.............................................................................................................131 5 “[T]HE VERY FRAMES WERE BROKEN”: GOTHIC OMNISCIENCE IN MELMOTH THE WANDERER............................................................................186 6 JAMES HOGG’S “DISGUSTING ORAL TALE”: PRINT IDENTITIES AND FRAMES OF PRODUCTION.............................................................................224 7 FRAMES OF INHERITANCE: GENERATIONAL GOTHIC IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS AND THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL......................................263 8 FIRST AND THIRD: DICKENS’S DUELING NARRATIVES AND GOTHIC REALISM............................................................................................................304 CODA GLORY IN A GAP: JAMES, CONRAD, AND FRAMING REALISM.........348 vii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: Limbird’s British Novelist engraving for The Mysteries of Udolpho.............................61 Figure 2: The frame-structure of Melmoth the Wanderer............................................................201 Figure 3: The title-page for Hogg’s Confessions ........................................................................232 Figure 4: The frontispiece facsimile in Hogg’s Confessions.......................................................233 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Lacan’s fundamental thesis is that a minimum of “idealization,” of the interposition of fantasmatic frame by means of which the subject assumes a distance vis-à-vis the Real, is constitutive of our sense of reality—“reality” occurs insofar as it is not (it does not come) “too close.” —Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom1 But let the frame of things disjoint. —Shakespeare, Macbeth2 In Edgar Allan Poe’s haunting poem, “The Raven” (1845), a speaker sequesters himself in a chamber to grieve for his lost love Lenore. Poe expresses the features of the poem’s “locale” in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846): “a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident:—it has the force of a frame to a picture. It has an indisputable moral power in keeping concentrated the attention.”3 Without borders the textual canvas would spread indefinitely and become too varied and unruly to elicit the desired environmental effect. Poe’s frame metaphor comes with complications. The speaker is effectively interred in the chamber, and eventually his psyche becomes buried beneath the raven’s oppressive shadow. Although the speaker is trapped, the frame of his melancholic chamber can be penetrated from the outside. Mistaking the raven’s sound for a knocking guest, the speaker opens his chamber door to a silent and blind abyss—a gateway to cathartic forgetting and death that the speaker refuses to pass through. But when the speaker finally opens the window, the raven bursts in to perch permanently at the point of escape and to mock the 1 Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1997), 23. 2 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Hardin Craig (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, and Co., 1973), 3.2.15. 3 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s Magazine 28.4 (April 1846): 166. 2 speaker’s melancholy with his monotonous and loaded “nevermore.” The raven enters the picture of the poem, the “circumscription of space,” from outside the frame, the world of reality and remembering, to remind the speaker never to forget. Because the chamber acts as a threshold between reality and art, its force is always twofold: simultaneously imprisoning and exposing the speaker, who is doomed to a purgatory of grief. As Poe suggests, frames possess a powerful aesthetic force that draws in and rejects, confines and protects, interrupts and concludes, complicates and defines. While the frame of Poe’s chamber shelters the speaker, it also permits access from haunting memories and ominous figures outside. What “concentrates the attention” is ultimately permeable and deconstructing. However, Poe’s conception of framing echoes an established formal mode, for narrative frames became a dynamic staple of the Gothic long before Poe articulated their force. Ann Radcliffe’s novels, for example, thrive on the fear motivated from being trapped yet vulnerable. The Gothic both permits and fosters formal and thematic experimentation. It is the mode where all things unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and controversial come to reside. As Peter Garrett argues, the Gothic is where “fiction reflects on its forms and effects, foregrounds its status as a fiction, makes us sense the forces of writing and reading that work through and between narratives.”4 Yet the genre’s formal modes are an area scholars have left largely ignored. The ease with which thematic Gothic conventions can be identified has always been ground for satire. A 1797 essay, “Terrorist Novel Writing,” provides a “recipe” for the familiar trappings, and concludes, “Mix them together, in the form of three volumes, to be taken at any of the watering-places before 4 Peter K. Garrett, Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003), 4. 3 going to bed.”5 These ingredients are only themes, however, and the sole formal instruction is the vessel in which they are to be mixed. During her succinct outline of Gothic conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick remarks: “You know something about the novel’s form: it is likely to be discontinuous and involuted, perhaps incorporating tales within tales, changes of narrators, and such framing devices as found manuscripts or interpolated histories.”6 Sedgwick’s rather timid qualifiers “likely” and “perhaps” do not do justice to the formal dynamism of Gothic novels, which in fact employ these qualities without exception. Despite appearing
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