Goth Rhizomes: Queer Difference in Minor Gothic Literature
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GOTH RHIZOMES: QUEER DIFFERENCE IN MINOR GOTHIC LITERATURE TREVOR M. HOLMES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAMME IN ENGLISH YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO, ONTARIO October 2013 © Trevor M. Holmes, 2013 Abstract This project identifies three minor authors in three historical periods, applying deconstructive and queer theory to their writings and to their biographies. The resulting analysis traces gothic effects through other, more familiar texts and figures in order to bring about re-readings that disrupt certain monolithic understandings of literary and sexual identity over time. With a focus on gender transitivity and sexual dissidence, and the insights afforded by queer readings in which queer is framed as a verb, the analysis opens up ways of reading genre through the experimental theories of Deleuze and Guattari. Going beyond identifying major and minor gothic literature, I propose that we understand the literary gothic as a writing machine that produces goth-identified subjects. Tracing concepts like Minor Literature, Rhizome, Becoming-other, the Refrain, and the Body without Organs through fictional and life narratives from Charlotte Dacre, Percy Shelley, Count Eric Stenbock, and Poppy Z. Brite (Billy Martin), I suggest ways in which my reading of minor figures and their works has implications for how we might re-read works by major authors Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey) and Henry James (“The Jolly Corner”), and works by popular author Anne Rice (with a particular focus on the character Lestat and the later novel Tale of the Body Thief). Similar to the Foucauldian notion of the subject as simultaneously an effect of and a producer of discourse, the turn to Deleuze and Guattari requires a more explicit addressing of agency on the part of authors and readers. A micropolitics of the self through prose narrative is derived, as against a grand narrative of influence, filiation, and static sexual definition. ii Dedication This work is dedicated to three of my family members. First, to my late grandmother, Maeve Antoinette (Harty) Holmes, who arrived from Ireland in the 1950s and became the first woman to sell furniture in the flagship Eaton’s store. Years later, she was also the only family member who seemed unconcerned about my odd fashion and makeup (or at least she kept any critical opinions to herself). She admired academia and great literature, but it was her subversive love of things popular, spooky, queer, and liberatory that has stayed with me since our early days attending theatre, meeting her friends, and poring over her modest but eclectic library (not only did we both love Oscar Wilde, she had also been a Stoker fan from the beginning – she read and kept an early edition of his Lair of the White Worm). I know she would be thrilled to see my topic acknowledged in an academy that once would have thought it too low for critical consideration. Second, and most materially, to my spouse Dr. Morgan Holmes and our son Nicholas. They have an unvarnished view of a process almost as old as we are as a family, having seen me defer, abandon, return, repeat, fret, sweat, create, enjoy, and also hate the process of a PhD over some two decades. When I left my programme in 2000, I thought I would make quick work of the half-written dissertation and return triumphant. The fact that I have been able to trudge back after a long, slow journey away, much humbled and much matured, is because of their patience, their lessons, and their love. Thank goodness Morgan opened that pub door a quarter century ago in the midwinter cold to chase away demons with me, to create lives and knowledge together. iii Acknowledgments Genuine thanks go first to my dissertation committee for evincing in equal parts sagacity, patience and longevity since they assembled in the late 1990s. My supervisor Kim Michasiw’s passion for things both gothic and well-wrought kept me coming back even when I thought I had best drop the whole endeavour, both of us knowing I’d have to disappear again for lengthy periods. Ian Balfour and Julia Creet have been enthusiastic and astute readers with an array of lenses that have suited a rather interdisciplinary project perfectly. The questions and suggestions they provided at the first and final stages are a formidable backdrop of psychoanalytic, rhetorical, Marxist, postmodern and queer criticism that – even if only a little made it into the final version – could not help but expand my depth of thinking about gothic texts and goth subcultures. Friends, family and colleagues deserve special consideration for feeding, challenging, and cheering my eternal return to this work. Singling out individuals seems uncharitable toward the rest, but Denise Stockley deserves some kind of above-and- beyond award for reading drafts and helping me plan my return. I would like to thank all my colleagues in the global educational development community, including the Challenging Academic Development Collective, who have helped me to bring my deconstructive and critical theories from my “former” discipline into an intellectually fulfilling career at conferences and in print. From them I have learned invaluable lessons about feedback and collaborative writing. Undergraduate and graduate professors and fellow students – too many to mention – have inspired and kept me on my toes since the 1980s, perhaps without knowing it. iv Throughout my non-academic career, I have had truly supportive supervisors. Beth Popham at Trent understood what it is to care about literary research and teaching while being an administrator; Julia Christensen Hughes at Guelph supported my unusual grant application to visit archives abroad; Donna Ellis and Geoff McBoyle at Waterloo approved my Fall 2012 study leave that brought the project to its ready state. Guelph and Waterloo, through regular research days and Staff Associaton grants, have been materially helpful beyond what support staff like me are enculturated to expect. The ever-widening community of gothic studies and queer studies scholars welcomed me early and often into informal dialogues at conferences and elsewhere. Among dozens of critical friends, I wish to honour the memory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who supported me early on as I was framing my question. A model of scholarly care and intellectual generosity, she talked to me about my project and sent me one of her own copies of The Coherence of Gothic Conventions when I was having difficulty acquiring one. Finally, had Darren Wershler not mentioned in 1992 “this awesome novel with vampires riding around in a van blaring Bauhaus and drinking Chartreuse” and said “You’ve got to read it,” it is possible that I might never have connected the dots I now see slightly more clearly. Portions of Chapter 3 would have been impossible to write were it not for the gracious and thorough efforts of Fiorella Superbi at i Tatti – though the main reason for Harvard’s outpost here is to preserve the collections of Bernard and Mary Berenson, Fiorella has kept careful account of the letters and stories of Count Stenbock that found their home there through Mary, his close friend up to his death. David Tibet’s care with republications of some of these stories, getting them into my hands to play with, has been v truly impressive. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto supplied my earliest encounters with Stenbock texts. Parts of Chapter 4, revised and updated for the current work, have appeared previously in Gothic Studies 9:1 (2007) and in Romanticism on the Net 44 (2006). Some initial thoughts on Count Stenbock’s “True Story of a Vampire” (much more developed in Chapter 3) appear in my previously published essay “Coming out of the coffin: Gay Males and Queer Goths in Contemporary Vampire Fiction” Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, ed. Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon. (Philadelphia: U Penn P, 1997). vi Table of Contents Abstract…ii Dedication…iii Acknowledgments…iv Table of Contents…vii Preface: Gothic In/Vestments……………..1 Chapter 1: Minor Gothic, Queer Theory, and Goth Anachronism……10 Gothic Plateaus: on the postmodern and queer use of history and identity…11 Rhizomes, Minor Literature, and Genealogical Schema…………18 Becomings in the gothic: sex, gender and sexuality………..21 Judith Butler and Performative Gothic………….…….24 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the Homosocial…..27 Rhizomes, goth-identification, and the case of nomadic embodiment….29 Deleuze and Guattari and Literary Criticism…..32 Why goth?...............33 Chapter 2: Gothic Becomings in Zofloya, Northanger Abbey, and Percy Shelley….42 Rhetorically queer: deconstructing male-female gothic dimorphism….42 Formations of the self: what does it matter who is gothing?.…..62 Sex, gender, and leopard skins: Zofloya, masculinity, and becomings-animal….73 Dangerous Reading with Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney……82 Between goths: Percy Shelley and Rhizomatic Desire……96 Becoming-other….98 Rhizomatic gothic….105 Chapter 3: Dissident Sexualities and Becoming-Other in Late Victorian Fiction..116 Count Stenbock and minor Victorianism……..116 Deviant, Heretical, or Dissident: sex and gender trouble….125 Part 1: The minor gothic refrain… Music and mesmerism in art and life…..133 Part 2: Becoming-animal, becoming-other…….145 Of Gypsies, animals, and wild identities…..149 Part 3: Becoming-other and minor gothic gender……159 Part 4: Henry James and Jolly Nomadism…… 172 Chapter