The Gothic Fantasy of History: Fear and Loss in the British Long Eighteenth Century Anna Shajirat A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2017 Reading Committee: Juliet Shields, Co-Chair Gillian Harkins, Co-Chair Raimonda Modiano Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English 1 ©Copyright 2017 Anna Shajirat 2 University of Washington Abstract The Gothic Fantasy of History: Fear and Loss in the British Long Eighteenth Century Anna Shajirat Co-Chairs of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Juliet Shields Associate Professor Gillian Harkins English This dissertation joins the ongoing scholarly debate about the form and function of gender in literary studies of the gothic. I reclaim the term “female gothic” to form an argument about historical representation in literary texts of the latter part of the British long eighteenth century. Based upon a combined sense of fear and loss that pervades the historical present, the female gothic generates its own model of history, what I call the “gothic fantasy of history.” Fear and loss in the present incites a retroactive fantasy of a lost historical past, which is ambivalently constructed as both an idyllic paradise and a barbarous monstrosity. At the same time, however, the writers of the female gothic exploit the work of fantasy that imagines a lost historical past to cast into relief the equally fantastic work that constructs the historical present as an enlightened age of reason and progress. In what I demonstrate is a prototypically gothic move, the twentieth- century psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan provides the key to unlocking the relations between gender, history, and fantasy. In the same way, the gothic provides the analytical tools necessary to deconstruct the haunting and daunting structure known as Lacanian psychoanalysis. 3 Table of Contents Introduction 5 Veils of Fantasy 19 Portraits of Melancholia 53 Colonial Mirrors 89 Fragmented Documents 129 Works Cited 159 4 Introduction When Laura, the gothic heroine of The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey (1797), finds herself a prisoner in the eponymous abbey, which is rumored by the local villagers to be haunted, she acquires the fortitude to explore her ominous surroundings. As she walks along a moonlit gallery, “she contemplated her own shadow as she walked; but, how was she astonished, and how did she stand aghast, when she saw another shadow besides her own, which appeared larger, and to be that of a man! Her fortitude at once forsook her.”1 Laura’s first impulse is to attribute this mysterious shadow to a supernatural phenomenon. However, she “considered that, by some oblique reflection of the moon, two figures might be reflected from one…and she easily fancied that her fears had magnified the figure, and likewise given it the resemblance of a man” (59). The author of this novel, known only as Mrs. Carver, here takes up the tactics of the supernatural explained, most famously attributed to Ann Radcliffe. This explanation for the supernatural is, however, just as unreasonable as the supernatural itself; it makes no logical sense. When Laura returns to the gallery the next night and attempts to recreate the double shadow, she looks as foolish as the stock gothic character of the superstitious servant who attributes any and all inexplicable events to ghosts and demons. However, “as to ghosts, [Laura] believed no such thing; it was not the dead from whom she had any apprehensions” (48). Indeed, Lord Oakendale is a living, breathing human who presents a very real threat to Laura’s bodily integrity, and this threat is perhaps more frightening than any seemingly supernatural phenomenon. In fact, in the narrative’s retroactive explanation of the supernatural we learn that the shadow was of a man, of one of the grave robbers who 1 Carver, The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey, ed. Curt Herr (Crestline: Zittaw Press, 2006), p. 58. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text. 5 inhabit the castle and who employ scare tactics meant to incite terror in the abbey’s visitors. The narrator calls these grave robbers “unfeeling monsters of society,” drawing a distinct line between feeling human and unfeeling monster. And yet, what appears to be monstrous and inhuman is not supernatural at all; the grave robbers are as human as Laura. Though the novel may explain the supernatural, it cannot account for the horror of reality. I open the present study with this scene and its retroactive explanation to illustrate the exemplary concerns of the category of gothic fiction known as the “female gothic.”2 Diane Long Hoeveler claims that Oakendale Abbey’s “value can be found, not in any skillful presentation of plot, characters or tropes, but in its peculiar presentation of a clear anti-modern, anti-scientific ideology at its core.”3 However, the female gothic is very much concerned with the “modern.” While critics are sometimes hesitant or resistant to adopt this term, I make use of the gendered category to make an argument about the form and function of historical representation in the latter part of the long eighteenth century.4 The present study is one about gender, about women writers and women’s lives in history reimagined in gothic scenes of terror. I see no reason to shy away from gendered language because the gothic mode I explore is gendered.5 Based upon a combined sense of fear and loss that pervades the historical present, the female gothic generates 2 Ellen Moers coined this term in Literary Women (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976). Since then critics such as Anne Williams and E.J. Clery have taken up and revised the term in opposition to the “male gothic,” known for its more overt depictions of horror and unexplained supernatural phenomena. 3 Hoeveler, The Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and Anti-Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780-1880 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), p. 240. 4 Diana Wallace, for example, uses the term “Gothic historical fiction” instead of the female gothic. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), p. 4. 5 Following Ruth Anolik’s lead, I refer to the gothic as a “mode,” rather than a “genre.” See Anolik, Property and Power in English Gothic Literature (Jefferson: McFarland and Co., 2015). This term allows for a more capacious understanding of the gothic, which can include a variety of texts ranging from Lacanian psychoanalysis to eighteenth-century historiographical writing. 6 its own model of history, what I will call the “gothic fantasy of history.” Fear and loss in the present incites a retroactive fantasy of a lost historical past, which is ambivalently constructed as both an idyllic paradise and a barbarous monstrosity. Carver’s heroine, Laura, embodies the specific fears and losses taken up by female gothic writers of the long eighteenth century in her encounter with the mysteriously doubled male shadow. Women’s untenable positions in eighteenth-century life are dramatized in the female gothic by heroines who face a series of seemingly supernatural threats only to find that these threats are posed not by ghosts but by men in positions of power. These inescapable threats to the heroine’s personhood turn female subjectivity into a shadowy substance. Indeed, Laura’s terror upon encountering the doubled shadow is twofold: she is obviously terrified that she is in the presence of a supernatural being, but, more powerfully, she is horrified by the confrontation with this spectral subjectivity in the form of an immaterial object, a shadow. The gothic fantasy of history as articulated in the female gothic is, then, an attempt to escape and evacuate the present, filled as it was with fear and loss, terror and horror. At the same time, however, the writers of the female gothic know that their presentations of the historical past are fantasy constructions, some more obviously than others. They exploit the work of fantasy that imagines a lost historical past to cast into relief the equally fantastic work that constructs the historical present as an enlightened age of reason and progress. The female gothic thus turns both historical past and present into objects of fantasy. This project is, then, as much about the specific category of the female gothic as it is about, in Dan Edelstein’s words, critiquing “how the narrative of ‘the Enlightenment’ emerged as a self-reflexive understanding of the historical importance and specificity of eighteenth-century Europe.”6 6 Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 2. 7 The shadowy substance of female subjectivity in the gothic cannot be thought apart from the world of objects and, furthermore, history cannot be thought apart from fantasy. Fantasy is, then, the intermediary between subjectivity and history. In the female gothic, any conception of the human as separate from the object world, and of history as separate from the present, is a fantasy. In what I will demonstrate is a prototypically gothic move, the twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan provides a key to unlocking the relation between female gothic subjects and objects, between history and fantasy. In the same way, the gothic provides the analytical tools necessary to deconstruct that haunting and daunting structure known as Lacanian psychoanalysis. This methodological move is gothic because it enacts the retroactive function of fantasy in conceptualizing history as imagined by the female gothic. To read gothic literature of the long eighteenth century through a psychoanalytic lens is of course to retroactively revise that literature, to imagine it apart from its historical present, to fantastically project a set of concepts into a time and place that they do not belong.