THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL The Maternal Gaze in the Gothic being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Sara Williams, BA Hons (Hull) MA (Sussex) November 2011 Abstract Sara Williams MA (Sussex) This transdisciplinary thesis excavates the critically-neglected Gothic convention of the maternal tyrant through the theoretical framework of the maternal gaze, recently conceptualised by Alina Luna in Visual Perversity: A Re-articulation of the Maternal Instinct (2004). As a counter-response to the critical heritage of feminist and film scholarship which privileges the presence of an objectifying and fetishising male gaze, Luna argues that the maternal gaze issued from the womb is the most powerful and fatal because it is concerned with nothing apart from devouring the child and reinstalling it in the mother’s body, and punishing the paternal order which had taken it away. Examining how the Gothic articulates intra-uterine symbols and structures, I consider a spectrum of written and visual texts to argue that an omnipotent maternal gaze is pathologically narrativised by the genre. The thesis is structured in three parts of two chapters each which plot the evolution of the maternal gaze in the Gothic. In Part One, ‘The Gothic Heritage’, I discuss maternal symbolism and structures in folkloric and Victorian Gothic texts to show how the infanticidal maternal gaze has existed in the genre since its inception, while Part Two, ‘Gothic Practices’, reveals how the maternal gaze in the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries used the intersecting technological and religious practices of photography, Spiritualism and Marian iconography to Gothicise the domestic space of the maternal practitioner. Part Three comes home to ‘The Gothic Domestic’, which examines how narratives of child abuse, incest and trauma are perpetuated in the domestic space for the maternal gaze through modes of serialisation, and I conclude by showing how the internet has become the modern Gothic web in which the maternal gaze weaves hypertextual narratives through which mothers meditate on and reproduce the image of the abused and traumatised child. This thesis provides new directions for genre criticism and gaze theory, and drawing on feminist, film and psychoanalytic scholarship I use the maternal gaze to write a place for the maternal tyrant in the Gothic, one which she has previously been denied by the critical and cultural blindness to the capabilities of maternal desire. Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements vi List of Illustrations viii Introduction – The Maternal Gaze in the Gothic 1 If Looks Could Kill: Maternal Gaze Theory 3 Nothing to See Here: The (In)visibility of the Maternal Tyrant in the Gothic 10 The Ocular Devouring Womb of the Gothic 11 Watch your Language: The Stifling Semiotic Womb 13 The Maternal Tyrant as Gothic Convention 15 Encountering the Maternal Gaze 17 Part One – The Gothic Heritage of the Maternal Gaze 26 1. The Gothic and Maternal Symbolism in the works of J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker 28 Away with the Fairies: Le Fanu and the Folkloric Legacy 29 ‘You and [eye] are one forever’: ‘Carmilla’ 37 Puerperal Narratives and Mothers’ Names 39 Cat’s Eyes: The Feline-Familiar’s Maternal Gaze 51 Carmilla’s (Un)ending 59 Bram Stoker’s ‘Jaws of Hell’ and The Uncanny Mark of the Maternal 61 Making her Mark: Maternal Impressions and the Womb’s Searing Gaze 66 The Jewel of Seven Stars: The Hand that Rocks the Cradle is the Hand That Rules the World 70 From Tomb to Womb: The Mummy Returns 74 - ii - Pussycat, Pussycat 88 A Tera Which Has no Name: The Sublime Gothic Unspeakable of the Maternal Gaze 91 ‘Her eyes look like positive murder’: ‘The Squaw’ 99 Foetal Desire: Reading the Death Drive 108 2. ‘The more I saw the less they would’: Subverting Hysteria and Surveillance in The Turn of the Screw, The Orphanage and The Others 112 ‘We’ll see it out’: The Turn of the Screw and the Hysterical Panopticon 115 The Hysterical Precedent 119 ‘Something like madness’: Performing Hysteria 121 Contesting the Male Gaze: The Maternal Spectral Panopticon 127 ‘The story will tell’: Hysterical Language and the Maternal Gaze 134 The Narrative Womb 135 Trapped in the Umbilical Web 142 The Daughter’s Disease 155 The Look of Love: Hysteria, Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy and the Unimpeachable Gaze of Maternal Benevolence 158 ‘Your pain gives you strength’: Maternal Sacrifice and MSBP in The Orphanage 164 Believe and You Will See 168 There but for the Grace of God go I: The Others 180 Seeing in the Dark 187 Picture This: The Photographic Maternal Gaze 191 Part Two – The Maternal Gaze’s Gothic Practices 196 3. Seeing is Believing: Spiritualism, Psychic Photography and the Maternal Gaze 199 The Perfect Medium for the Grieving Gaze 200 Ectoplasmic Mediumship: The Birth of the Spectacle 206 Eva C., Margery and Kate 209 - iii - Florence Marryat’s Textual Spiritualism 215 Ada Deane, Georgiana Houghton and Psychic Spirit Photography: The Return of the Imprinting Maternal Gaze 222 Ada Deane 223 Georgiana Houghton 229 4. ‘Taken From Life’: Memorial Portraiture, Divine Death and the Virgin Mary in the Photography of Julia Margaret Cameron 239 Memorial Portraiture: The Living Dead 239 ‘I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me’: Julia Margaret Cameron 245 Hail Mary, Full of Grace 253 Blessed is the Fruit of Thy Womb 272 The Maternal Gaze’s Gothic Technologies 293 Part Three – The Maternal Gaze and the Gothic Domestic 297 5. Guilty Pleasures: Incest and the pre-Oedipal Maternal Tangle in Great Expectations, Virginia Andrews’ Dollanganger Saga and Misery Literature 299 ‘Like Charles Dickens’: Great Expectations as Incest Intertext 300 Her Mother’s Daughter: Maternal Sadism and the Cycle of Abuse 306 ‘Goodbye Daddy’: Virginia Andrews and the Maternal Tyrant 313 ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down’ (Job, 14: 1-4): Flowers in the Attic 318 ‘Momma’s story’: Envisioning the Gothic Unspeakable 320 ‘You want to catch us’: Maternally-induced Incest 325 Breast is Best: Oral Fixation in the Attic 336 ‘That’s another story’: Serialisation, Invagination and the Gothic Textual Tease 349 I Couldn’t Put It Down: Misery Loves Company 362 - iv - 6. (Never)ending the Story: The Maternal Gaze and the Matrixial Gothic Abyss 373 Looking Back 374 Weaving the Web: The Maternal Gaze and 21st-Century Media 377 Trapped in Her Own Web: Rebeccah Beushausen and the Virtual Maternal Gaze 381 Bibliography 387 - v - Acknowledgements Writing this thesis has been an immensely enjoyable and gratifying experience, and there are many people I want to thank for that. I owe a debt of gratitude to my wonderful supervisor Dr Catherine Wynne, whose astuteness, kindness, warmth and good humour have inspired and sustained me throughout this process. I could not have wished for a better supervisor. Thank you Catherine, I look forward to keeping in touch and working together in the future. I want to thank Professor Valerie Sanders, Professor Katharine Cockin, Dr Sabine Vanacker, Professor Ann Heilmann, Dr Bethan Jones, Dr Veronica O’Mara and Dr John Osborne for their help and encouragement, and all the staff in the English Office, who have tolerated my pestering. I am also extremely grateful to the Department of English for the financial assistance and teaching opportunities it has given me. I would also like to thank Jennifer at www.completevca.com, a brilliant resource for Virginia Andrews, and Stanley Burns M.D., for allowing me to use photographs from his collection. To all my friends at the Brynmor Jones Library, past and present, thank you for putting up with my womb talk for the past three years and for bringing me back to reality. Coming to work with you has been a very welcome distraction. Most of all I want to say thank you to my parents Christina and Mort for being so encouraging and supportive, emotionally and financially, and for being smart, funny, kind, great people who always help me keep things in perspective. I am very lucky to have you both; thank you for not being the parents I write about and for letting me out of the attic. And thank you Laura, who understands everything, always. I love you all very much, this thesis is dedicated to you. - vi - My Mother Medbh McGuckian My mother’s smell is sweet or sour and moist Like the soft red cover of the apple. She sits among her boxes, lace and tins, And notices the smallest of all breezes, As if she were a tree upon the mountain Growing away with no problem at all. Her swan’s head quivers like a light-bulb: Does she breed in perfect peace, a light sleep, Or smothered like a clock whose alarm Is unendurable, whose featureless Straight face is never wrong? No one knows what goes on inside a clock. - vii - List of Illustrations 1. Birth of an Ectoplasm, from the French edition of Baron Schrenck-Notzing’s Phenomena of Materialisation, 1920. 210 2. Detail from Birth of an Ectoplasm. 210 3. Margery séance, 19th January 1925. Cambridge University Library, SPR collection. Reproduced in Martyn Jolly, p.78, fig. 52. 212 4. W.J. Crawford, Kate Goligher with psychic structures, 1920. From Photographs taken at Belfast with the Goligher Circle 1920/21, SPR Collection. Reproduced in Jolly, p.83, fig. 55. 214 5. Ada Deane, Armistice Day 1924. Bright Bytes Studio. Reproduced in John Harvey, p. 52, fig. 23. 226 6. Ada Deane, self portrait with spirit extra, c.1922. Barlow Collection, British Library.