The Figure of the Gothic Author in Nineteenth-Century America E. Bulford Welch A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Sheffield 2019 2 The Figure of the Gothic Author in Nineteenth-Century America Ellen Bulford Welch A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Humanities School of English November 2019 3 4 Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/L503848/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. My first thanks must go to Professor Andrew Smith for all of his guidance and support throughout the project. I could not have asked for a more positive, generous or dedicated supervisor. Many thanks also to Dr Duco van Oostrum for practical advice on the PhD and to Dr Amber Regis and Dr Jonathan Ellis for feedback during the confirmation review. I am also grateful to the team at WRoCAH for practical support during the PhD process. Thank you to Sarah Bulford, Ian Welch, Rita and John Bulford, Richard and Joyce Welch, Roger and Chris Welch and John and Suzanne Taylor for all of their encouragement and support. A big thank you must also go to John Taylor for invaluable assistance in the proofreading department. A final thank you to Jonathan Taylor, without whose companionship, empathy and keen wit this process would have been an infinitely more Gothic prospect. 5 Abstract This study comprises an investigation into the figure of the Gothic author in nineteenth- century America. Overall, it demonstrates that the persistent critical attribution of Gothic identities to practitioners of the Gothic genre — what I term the Gothicisation of the Gothic author — exerted a profound impact upon the perception and practice of Gothic authorship. Tracing this trend back to the biographical approach to literary criticism which dominated nineteenth-century literary discussion, I argue that a method of textual exegesis which read the content of an author's work as an index of their character posed a particular threat to the public reputations of practitioners of the Gothic. Conflated with their troubled protagonists, diagnosed with dysfunctional psychological traits and aligned, both metaphorically and literally, with Gothic character types, this discourse created a cultural climate in which Gothic authorship had to be strategically negotiated. As I illustrate, this was primarily achieved through the adoption of evasive writing strategies that were designed to distance the author from their chosen mode of writing. Whilst this thesis places the gothicised discourse surrounding Gothic authorship in a transatlantic context, it is especially concerned with the unique ramifications that it held for notions of American national identity during the nineteenth century. Following the American Revolution, when the process of nation-building became tightly bound up with the creation of a successful and authentically American national literary canon, the figure of the American author assumed a nationally representative status. This was instantly problematised, I argue, by the Gothic's prominence within America's emerging literary tradition. As well as examining the ways in which authors navigated the negative personal connotations attached to Gothic authorship, therefore, this study also interrogates the rhetorical strategies that American critics used to de-gothicise the Gothic works of authors whose writing was deemed to be of significant national value. 6 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 5 Abstract 6 Table of Contents 7 Declaration of Originality 8 Note on Texts 9 Introduction 11 Chapter 1: The Gothic Author as Gothic Subject in Nineteenth-Century Criticism 31 Chapter 2: American Literary Nationalism and the De-Gothicisation of Nathaniel Hawthorne 75 Chapter 3: American Periodicals, the Culture of Sensationalism and the Strategic Construction of Gothic Texts 127 Chapter 4: A Gothic Alter-Ego: Louisa May Alcott and her Hidden Career 175 Conclusion 221 Bibliography 233 7 Declaration of Originality I, the author, confirm that the Thesis is my own work. I am aware of the University’s Guidance on the Use of Unfair Means (www.sheffield.ac.uk/ssid/unfair-means). This work has not been previously been presented for an award at this, or any other, university. 8 Note on texts Original spelling and punctuation have been retained throughout for quotations. 9 10 Introduction Gothicising the Gothic Author On the 1 January 1848 the satirical American periodical, The John-Donkey, printed a parodic 'How To' guide for writers 'desirous of achieving immortality' as Gothic authors.1 Facetiously glossing the nineteenth-century Gothic as the 'Common-place High-pressure Highfaluting' style (a direct descendent of 'the Romantic High-pressure Highfaluting' mode inaugurated during the 1790s by the hugely popular, yet contentious novels of 'Mrs. Radcliffe' and 'Monk LEWIS'), this guide advises the genre's contemporary aspirants to adopt the following practices: When you sit down to write, tangle your hair carefully, loosen your neckerchief, and rumple your shirt-collar. Upset all the chairs, overturn all earthen utensils, and kick the bed-clothes around your attic. [...] Follow these rules, and every one will think you an author of great genius, or a bedlamite — and the distinction between the two is very slight. In either case they will think you inspired. If you can talk in your preface about some clique — some secret cabal, whose members are busily engaged in putting you down — so much the better. Declare you will not be put down, or you will not stay ‘put.’ Assume the defensive.2 According to this manual, Gothic authorship is bound up with the espousal of recognisably Gothic lifestyles or behaviours. At best, rumoured to be associated with the enigmatic and exclusive underworld of secret societies, practitioners of the genre are expected to exhibit a kind of dark glamour. At worst, they are painted as seedy, undignified or pathetic underdogs, fundamentally unsuited to the demands of everyday life. Imagined in a permanently 'defensive' posture, they are associated with such basic personal “failings” as domestic disorder, poor personal hygiene and sartorial mishap. This portrait also makes the psychological connection between Gothic authorship and emotional dysfunction or insanity, with Gothic works demonstrating a fine line between literary 'genius' and the ravings of a 'bedlamite’. Simultaneously a figure of lurid fascination and pity, the Gothic author is represented as anathema to normality. They are creatures of melodrama and excess, flamboyantly or compulsively manifesting the extremes of their chosen mode of writing. Whilst clearly tongue-in-cheek (as well as promoting the cynical adoption of eccentric literary personas as a commercially beneficial self-fashioning strategy), this set of 1 'Hints to Novelists', The John-Donkey, 1 January 1848, p. 11 (p. 11). 2 'Hints to Novelists', p. 11. 11 instructions is illustrative of one of the most pervasive critical discourses surrounding Gothic authorship in the nineteenth century: the assumption, almost invariably pejorative, that writers who produced Gothic fictions were Gothic figures in their own right. Within this discourse, the world of the Gothic author was one in which the boundaries between fact and fabrication were always blurred. The fictional Gothic narratives consumed by readers were perceived merely to be a reflection or extension of the Gothic narratives that their creators inhabited in actuality. This study argues that the persistent critical alignment of Gothic fictions with Gothic realities — what I term the Gothicisation of the Gothic author — exerted a profound impact upon the perception and practice of Gothic authorship in nineteenth-century America. I argue that the ubiquity of biographical readings of Gothic texts, which conceptualised them as the product of everything from low-level melancholia to sinister pathologies and demonic possession, created a literary climate in which Gothic authorship had to be strategically negotiated. On a personal level, individual writers often resorted to evasive writing practices, such as anonymous authorship, or the adoption of metafictional Gothic subgenres designed to erect a deflective barrier between the content of their fiction and their own character. On a wider scale, the conceptualisation of Gothic authors as Gothic subjects frequently shaped the construction of their early reception histories. More often than not, this led to the publication of character portraits which cast shadowy question marks over their reputations, many of which have inflected their on-going cultural legacies and critical treatment up until the present day. Rufus Griswold's infamous obituary of Edgar Allan Poe is a case in point.3 Under certain conditions, however, it prompted contemporary essayists, reviewers and biographers to justify, reinterpret, or entirely elide the Gothic elements in an author's corpus. These critical acts of redemption or realignment were often influenced by the literary nationalist appropriation of specific authorial careers, most notably Nathaniel Hawthorne's. When the gothicised discourse surrounding Gothic authorship became entangled with questions of national cultural identity, especially in connection with a specific writer's emergent canonicity, patriotism demanded that the troubling personal implications attached to the Gothicism