Notes Introduction: Borderlines: Contemporary Scottish Gothic 1. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, writing shortly before the latter film’s release, argues that it is, like the former, ‘still an outsider tale’; despite the emphasis on ‘Scottishness’ within these films, they could only emerge from outside Scotland. Caroline McCracken-Flesher (2012) The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 20. 2. Kirsty A. MacDonald (2009) ‘Scottish Gothic: Towards a Definition’, The Bottle Imp, 6, 1–2, p. 1. 3. Andrew Payne and Mark Lewis (1989) ‘The Ghost Dance: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, Public, 2, 60–73, p. 61. 4. Nicholas Royle (2003) The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 12. 5. Allan Massie (1992) The Hanging Tree (London: Mandarin), p. 61. 6. See Luke Gibbons (2004) Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization, and Irish Culture (Galway: Arlen House), p. 20. As Coral Ann Howells argues in a discussion of Radcliffe, Mrs Kelly, Horsley-Curteis, Francis Lathom, and Jane Porter, Scott’s novels ‘were enthusiastically received by a reading public who had become accustomed by a long literary tradition to associate Scotland with mystery and adventure’. Coral Ann Howells (1978) Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London: Athlone Press), p. 19. 7. Ann Radcliffe (1995) The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, ed. Alison Milbank (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 3. 8. As James Watt notes, however, Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne remains a ‘derivative and virtually unnoticed experiment’, heavily indebted to Clara Reeves’s The Old English Baron. James Watt (1999) Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 103. 9. Diana Wallace persuasively argues that The Recess has been unjustly neglected and should be considered the foundation of an ‘alternative female genealogy’ for both Gothic and historical fiction, but views the novel’s importance only in relation to English history. Diana Wallace (2013) Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press), pp. 5, 47. 10. Sophia Lee (1785) The Recess; or, a Tale of Other Times, 3 vols. (London: T. Cadell), vol. 3, p. 94. 11. Later novels, including Francis Lathom’s The Romance of Hebrides (1809) and Catherine Smith’s The Caledonian Bandit (1811) present Scotland ‘as a nation inhabited by female monsters and a site of gender subversion’. Carol Margaret Davison (2009) ‘Monstrous Regiments of Women and Brides of Frankenstein: Gendered Body Politics in Scottish Female Gothic Fiction’, in Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (eds), The Female Gothic: New Directions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 196–214, pp. 198–199. 12. Richard T. Kelly (2011) The Possessions of Doctor Forrest (London: Faber), p. 16. 168 Notes 169 13. Robertson Davies (1992) Murther and Walking Spirits (London: Penguin), p. 275. 14. Alan Warner (2012) The Deadman’s Pedal (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 171. Varie embraces this rumour, introducing Simon to occult rituals. 15. Walter Scott and William Erskine (1817) ‘ART. VIII. Tales of My Landlord’, Quarterly Review, 16.32, 430–480, p. 435. 16. As Anne Williams and many other critics have noted, Walpole’s influence has been drastically overstated. As she writes: ‘The myth of Walpole has led to a serious error in the medium or matter of Gothic: the assumption that it belongs to a prose fiction tradition that flourished and died in the space of fifty years’. Anne Williams (1995) Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. 11. Nevertheless, virtually every survey of Gothic literature begins with a discussion of Walpole’s novel. 17. Monica Germanà ties the publication of The Bad Sister to a larger ‘fantastic revival’ in Scottish fiction. Monica Germanà (2010) Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing: Fiction since 1978 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 2. Gordon’s 1996 video installation A Divided Self I & II refer- ences both Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self. Douglas Gordon (2006) Superhumannatural (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland), pp. 36–38. 18. See Catherine Spooner (2006) Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion), p. 8. 19. Kevin MacNeil (2010) A Method Actor’s Guide to Jekyll and Hyde (Edinburgh: Polygon), p. 158. 20. An even more explicit account of Edinburgh’s literary and Gothic forma- tion can be found in Ian Rankin’s ‘Sinner: Justified’, which depicts the artist Douglas Gordon meeting Muriel Spark’s Jean Brodie, Hogg’s Gil-Martin, and other Edinburgh characters in local pubs. In a conversation with himself in a mirror closely paralleling James Robertson’s The Fanatic, discussed in Chapter 1, Gordon imagines himself as Stevenson’s David Balfour, Alan Breck, and Henry Jekyll, Scott’s Guy Mannering and Scott himself, and Dr Robert Knox. Ian Rankin (2006) ‘Sinner: Justified’, in Gordon, Superhumannatural, pp. 19–24, p. 23. 21. Robert Miles (1993) Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy (London and New York: Routledge), p. 189; David Punter (1999) ‘Introduction: Of Apparitions’, in Glennis Byron and Punter (eds), Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (Basingstoke: Palgrave), pp. 1–8, p. 3. 22. Ian Rankin (2005) Hide and Seek (London: Orion), p. 52. 23. Val McDermid (2014) Northanger Abbey (London: Borough Press), pp. 9–10. 24. Jacques Rancière (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum), p. 141. 25. Ian Duncan (1992) Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 21. 26. Anne Williams goes as far as to cite Justice Potter Stewart’s famous pro- nouncement on the obscene: ‘I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it’. Williams, Art of Darkness, p. 14. 27. Horace Walpole (1998) The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. E.J. Clery (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 10. 28. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1986) The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen), pp. 9–10. 170 Notes 29. Watt, Contesting the Gothic, pp. 1–3. 30. See, most influentially, David Punter’s account of Smollett and sentimen- talism – David Punter (1996) The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, 2nd ed., 2 vols (London and New York: Longman), vol. 1, pp. 25–40 – and Williams’s argument for the unity of Gothic and Romanticism (Williams, Art of Darkness, pp. 175–238). 31. Gary Kelly (1989) English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London and New York: Longman), pp. 50–51; see Marshall Brown (2003) The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 43 for a longer discussion. 32. This view is showcased in Robert Ignatius Letellier’s monograph on Scott and Gothic, where he argues that ‘images of suffering and death’ in A Legend of Montrose, and depictions of torture and imprisonment in Ivanhoe, are sufficient to label those texts Gothic. Robert Ignatius Letellier (1994) Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Novel (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press), pp. 134–136. Letellier also argues that St Ronan’s Well, perhaps Scott’s least-Gothic novel, can be seen in terms of a Gothic love triangle and ‘dark Romanticism’ (p. 162). 33. Watt, Contesting the Gothic, p. 10. Punter, meanwhile, argues that Scott includes Gothic episodes, events, and characters in his novels, but that the novels themselves should not be thought of as Gothic (Punter, Literature of Terror, vol. 1, p. 144). 34. Marc Redfield (1996) Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), p. 42. 35. George Steiner (2001) Grammars of Creation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 23. 36. Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath (1993) ‘Introduction’, in McGrath and Morrow (eds), The Picador Book of the New Gothic (London: Pan Books), pp. xi–xiv, p. xiv; Jerrold E. Hogle (2002) ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–20, p. 2. 37. Kelly Hurley (2002) ‘British Gothic Fiction, 1885–1930’, in Hogle, Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, pp. 189–207, p. 193. Punter, for instance, who provides a number of definitions of Gothic in The Literature of Terror (begin- ning with the title), finally concludes that Gothic can be identified through ‘its concern with paranoia, with barbarism and with taboo’ (Punter, Literature of Terror, vol. 2, p. 184). 38. Maurice Levy (2004) ‘FAQ: What is Gothic?’, Anglophonia, 15, 23–37, p. 34. 39. Timothy G. Jones (2009) ‘The Canniness of the Gothic: Genre as Practice’, Gothic Studies, 11.1, 124–133, p. 124. Victoria Nelson’s identification of hybridity as a defining feature, while perhaps necessary, allows for similar confusion and oversimplification. Victoria Nelson (2012) Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 8. 40. Lucie Armitt (2011) Twentieth-Century Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press), p. 2. 41. Duncan, Modern Romance, p. 23. 42. Punter, Literature of Terror, v. 2, p. 119. 43. Julian Wolfreys (2002) Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 10. Notes 171 44. David Punter (1998) Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan), p. 14. 45. Margaret Oliphant (2000) A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and the Unseen, ed. Jenni Calder (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics), p. 370. 46. As Elisabeth Jay argues, the story suggests that the girl has been seeing her own mirror-image all along: ‘To an imaginative girl, nurtured in an environ- ment that sees writing as a male prerogative, the prospect of attaining the fellowship of the pen is alluring, but fraught with the danger of disappoint- ment and the alternative taunts of eccentricity bordering upon madness, or impropriety’.