Below you will find some strategies and models of critical writing, divided
into various categories. These categories are linked to appropriate examples
from three essays, all dealing with the relation of the author to the Gothic
tradition:
Despite these qualifications, all the color-coded examples and categories
below conform to MLA practice and should prove a useful guide in your thinking
about the art of critical argument.
If one had to choose a single motto for the Gothic and its intricate weavings
of deferral and revelation, it
would be hard to find a better one than this,
Clara Wieland's summation of what she has learned through her
terrifying ordeals. At first, the
statement does not seem to make sense or, to put it another way, it seems to
resist
sense. If harboring or repressing certain
sentiments, for example, the kind Clara has for Pleyel, is a criminal thing,
the argument should be one for revelation and
more frank communication of those feelings. But something
apparently forbids at the outset disclosure of
those sentiments (perhaps, in Clara's case, the modesty and
"rectitude"--that favorite word of
Brown's--becoming a heroine). It seems there is no way out:
disclosure incurs
societal censure; deferral or repression of
feeling borders on the criminal and, for Brown, frequently leads to
disease and madness, ultimately death. Yet
try as many critics have to make Brown an opponent of such various
superegos as Rationalism and Puritanism, it is
hard to see him as a "Romantic" defender of the imagination and full
disclosure of feeling. After all, Edgar
Huntly's decision to communicate thoughts which ought not to be
disclosed--thoughts which Sarsefield
emphatically tells him he should not disclose--leads directly to the death of
both Edny and Sarsefield's child and the general
calamity which ends Brown's last gothic novel.
Call this
circle the catch-22 of the Gothic: a strong compulsion toward order and
closure which cannot
contain--and indeed seems at times to breed--a
fascination with the forbidden and the libidinous; a revolutionary
exploration of the darker regions of
consciousness that yet appears haunted by the moral systems it threatens to
violate. Such paradoxes epitomize Brown's
fiction--and his critical legacy. He's
been read repeatedly as a critic
of the Enlightenment and Lockean epistemology; as
a demystifier of Rousseauist idealism; as an opponent of
religious fanaticism; as a tester of
Godwinian ideals (see, for example, Pattee and Volishin). Yet from
opposing
quarters come arguments that his fiction is
haunted by a Calvinist, darkly religious vision, one that even expresses
profound misgivings about the value of the
literary imagination itself (see Levine and Bell). Some early critics
simply dismissed such incongruities as inevitable
loose ends of Brown's almost manic method of composition: he
wrote his four major works within the space of two
years. Others see him as a deliberate ironist, with
notoriously unreliable narrators, artfully plotted
doppelgängers, and shifty points of view that produce an almost
postmodernist resistance to closure (see, among
many, Brancaccio and Grabo). Perhaps the most productive
approach is to see the irresolutions in Brown as
reflecting the larger tensions of a developing American vision, one
that wrestles with the European intellectual
legacy but which betrays some anxiety of influence; one that subjects
new ideals of the Revolution and the frontier and
private property and the self-determining individual to a dark
scrutiny; one that acknowledges political,
economic, and religious uncertainty in its search for an American
identity (see Christophersen, Hinds, Watts, Fliegelman).
Many of these reassessments have, somewhat curiously, led
critics to question whether Brown should be
considered a Gothic novelist. The usual logic of
such an argument goes like this: because Brown delves so deeply
into areas of the American consciousness (and
unconsciousness) and so alters the setting of his scenes of horror,
he offers a more profound or psychologically
complex or politically canny vision than one usually finds in the
"Gothic." But one is left to wonder
just what constitutes this too conveniently monolithic and naïve genre against
which Brown is measured. In terms of the
catch-22 defined above, Brown appears as quintessentially Gothic. It
is true that Brown insists in his preface to Edgar
Huntly that he will move beyond "Puerile superstition and
exploded manners; Gothic castles and
chimeras" to engage "the sympathy of the reader" (3). But
his alternative
choices--isolated residences at the edge of the
"western wilderness" and cities in plague--allow him, if anything, a
greater range in creating a landscape of
terror. Such plot devices as ventriloquism and sleepwalking become
powerful metaphors for exploring the id and
allow Brown endless variations on the natural vs. marvelous
dichotomy of terror introduced by Reeve and
Radcliffe. Murderous voices whisper from closets; mysterious
manuscripts are buried, exhumed, stolen,
repressed; a plague observer dreams of his own interment while still
alive; compellingly enigmatic Europeans appear
and disappear, carrying with them signs of angst, supernatural
power, and impenetrable secrets that enthrall
the narrators' imaginations; bodies spontaneously combust;
will-o'-the wisps beckon nighttime walkers to
destruction--and, indeed, the most important action in a Brown
novel usually occurs at night: he is the
novelist of the night, with virtually all of his last gothic, Edgar Huntly,
taking place in the pitch dark. Darkling, his
characters hover in exquisitely prolonged states of uncertainty, unsure
as to whether their fears proceed from some
otherworldly and irreversible fatality or from some real and palpable
source of evil--or from their own delusions and
madness.
These
characters offer telling variations on significant Gothic themes and
conventions. Theodore Wieland
provides spectacular realization of that sense of
religious terror haunting so many Gothics: it may be right to say
that through him Brown wishes to expose the
dangers of religious fanaticism, but Wieland's murderous power
does border on the supernatural--no prison can
hold him. Also cutting across the idea of Brown's fiction as
simply anti-Calvinist is the remarkable (and very
typically Gothic) ineffectuality of his exemplars of Right Reason.
Pleyel and Sarsefield and Dr. Stephens are given
to homilies warning about the dangers of superstition, religious
zeal, an overactive imagination, etc., but they
repeatedly miss or misinterpret crucial events unfolding before
them. The same kind of errors attend another
Enlightenment ideal central to the Gothic sensibility: the Adam
Smithian capacity of the sympathetic imagination
to identify with and to alleviate the suffering of others. Brown's
earnest moral vision frequently seems to endorse
this power of sympathy--it distinguishes Clara and Dr.
Stephens--but it can, as with Edgar Huntly (and
Clara as well) become obsessive, until it appears, in Krause's
phrase, "an inordinate sensitivity on behalf
of unmerited suffering" ("Introduction" xxvii). So
resistless is Edgar's
identification with Edny that he becomes his
double, following his descent into sleepwalking and, arguably,
madness. Perhaps Clara Wieland best
represents the complexity of Brown's moral vision: caught between
Pleyel's rationalism and her brother's religious
fanaticism, uncertain of the dividing line between the phenomenal
and the noumenal, alternately self-reliant and
desperate for domestic harmony, desiring but fearful of desire, living
the American dream only to find it turn into a
nightmare, Clara may represent a new kind of gothic heroine (as
does Constantia Dudley of Ormond), a bit more
independent, wary, in short American, but her considerable
virtues prove no match for the dark forces arrayed
against her.
Given these conflicting moral perspectives, Brown's
villain-heroes assume a power quintessentially Gothic in
its expansivenss and ambiguity. Carwin's
voices, denied by reason and too readily embraced by religion, gain a
weird omnipresence and assume a power that not
even its manipulator can control; Edny, an erstwhile "hero" of
his own rags-to-riches narrative, mistakenly
(maybe) thinks he has become a villain; Welbeck, the proto-Byronic
forger and cynic, teaches his student Arthur so
well that he finds himself hounded by the young man's demonic
pursuit; Ormond epitomizes Brown's
recurrent fascination with the dark, Radcliffean seducer; and we cannot
forget Theodore, the man who murders his family
in the name of righteousness. All deserve their place in any
gothic roll-call of monomaniacal villain-heroes.
Yet it
is, finally, not in his diabolical characters or in his new landscape of terror
that the true importance of
Brown's Gothic achievement lies. That
significance lies rather in the complexity of his vision as a "moral
painter."
All English Gothics up to this stage (remember
1798), no matter how at cross purposes they at times seem, had
been governed by a strong, normative moral
code--wherein, as Napier has noted, "the vicious are punished, the
virtuous are rewarded, and social and ethical
imbalances are tidily corrected" (10). Brown's broken points of
view, fictions within fictions, and uncertain
narrators resist such didactic impulses and provide an arresting, new
complexity to the Gothic exploration of good and
evil. Therein lies the true historical value of Brown's fiction, for
both, as many critics have stressed, such later
American writers as Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville and such
devotees of his novels as the Shelleys.1 With such complex characters as Victor Frankenstein,
Beatrice Cenci,
and Ahab on the horizon, Brown's Gothic fiction
paved the way for a much more complex moral vision, one in
which the process of discovering the potential for
evil within an individual became more terrifying than any threat
from without.
1. Peacock noted that "of all the
works with which he was familiar" Brown's four novels, "took the
deepest root in [Shelley's] mind, and had the
strongest influence on his character . . . . nothing so
blended itself with the structure of his
interior mind as the creations of Brown" ("Memoirs of Percy
Bysshe Shelley" in Memoirs, Essays,
and Reviews, ed. Howard Mills [1970], 43).
Selected Criticism
Bell, Michael. "'The Double-Tongued
Deceiver': Sincerity and Duplicity in the Novels of Charles Brockden
Brown." Early American Literature 9 (1974): 143-163. While many
critics designate a specific philosophical position opposed by Brown, Bell, treating all four
of Brown's most Gothic novels, sees him as expressing misgivings about the
literary imagination itself. Think about the volatile imaginations of
Clara, Arthur Merwyn, Edgar, etc.
Brancaccio, Patrick. "Studied
Ambiguities: Arthur Merwyn and the Problem of the Unreliable
Narrator." American Literature 42 (1970): 18-27.
Inaugurates a series of articles that stress the notorious trickiness of
Brown's narrators.
Christophersen, Bill. The Apparition in
the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic. UP Georgia,
1994. Important because it bridges the gap between "gothic" and
historicist interpretations of Brown: "Those qualities in Brown's
romances that seem to me most profound and American are the gothic
qualities" (xi). Sees Brown using and transforming Gothic materials
to enable his explorations of the new nation's hopes and doubts.
Interesting note: Christopherson demonstrates that only eight of the nine
voices can be assigned to Carwin!
Fliegelman, Jay. "Ventriloquists,
Counterfeiters, and the Seduction of the Mind" in Prodigals and
Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority,
1750-1800. Cambridge:
1984. Reads Brown's novels in terms of the late 18th C. rebellion against
European paternalism and, thus, treats Brown's literature of terror simply as
his ambiguity regarding the promise and perils of liberty. Also see his
"Introduction" to the Penguin Wieland.
Goddu , Teresa A. Gothic America:
Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. In assailing
"interior, psychological readings" of the Gothic, Goddu's regards
Brown's dark mimesis of economic and political anxieties as foundational for
the formation of "Gothic America."
Grabo, Norman S. The Coincidental Art of
Charles Brockden Brown. Univ.
of North Carolina Press,
1981. A formalist approach that defends Brown's conscious artistry against some
early critical detractors. Book's central focus on how doubling and
coincidence enable Brown to depict American cultural deformity could have
benefited from attention to these motifs in the gothic.
Hazlitt, William. "American
Literature." The Edinburgh
Review (Oct. 1829). Rpt. in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt.
Ed. P. P. Howe. New York:
AMS Press, 1967. Vol. 16: 319-20. "[Brown's] strength and his
efforts are convulsive throes--his works are a banquet of horrors."
His novels are "overstraining" because America
(unlike Europe) has no native tradition of
supernatural lore upon which to draw; the result: his novels "are
full (to disease) of imagination--but it is forced, violent, and
shocking." Also draws parallels to Godwin and to Frankenstein.
Krause, Sydney J. "Introduction"
to Edgar Huntly. Kent
State University
Press, 1974. Vii-li. Probably the single best essay on EH.
Combines detailed background material with an acute psychological reading of
the doublings in the novel; also analyzes the novel's treatment of Indians.
---. "Penn's Elm and Edgar Huntly: 'Dark
Instruction to the Heart.'" American Literature 66 (1994):
463-484. A new historicist turn, of sorts, from one of Brown's most
distinguished scholars. Waldegrave's' "Elm is appropriately
gothicized" (469) as it presents a darkly ironic counterpoint to Penn's
elm and his hoped for peace with the Delawares.
Levine, Paul. "The American Novel
Begins." American Scholar 35 (1966): 134-148. Helpful in reviewing
the most important of Brown's early defenders (D.H. Lawrence, Chase, Fielder,
Parrington)--all of which treat seriously Brown's Gothicism--and for linking
Brown's Gothic tendencies to the residual Calvinism in his novels.
Parker, Patricia. Charles Brockden
Brown: A Reference Guide. Boston:
G.K. Hall, 1980. Annotated. Contains references from the earliest
reviews up to the book's publication date.
Pattee, Fred Lewis. "Introduction"
to Hafner Wieland (ix-xlvi). Still very much worth a read;
sees Wieland combining the Godwinian novel of social commentary, the
Richardsonian novel of seduction, and the Radcliffean Gothic with features
distinctly Brown's own.
Ringe, Donald A. Charles Brockden Brown.
Boston:
Twayne; G.K. Hall, 1991. A revised edition of Ringe's 1966 text that
incorporates helpful new material in addition to providing solid chapters on
biography, critical reception, and interpretation of Brown's novels and other
writings.
Rosenthal, Bernard, ed. Critical Essays
on Charles Brockden Brown. Boston:
G.K. Hall, 1981. Contains ten essays exploring various aspects of Brown's
fiction, Gothic and otherwise. Includes Nina Baym's important essay
"A Minority Reading of Wieland" (87-103), which sees the novel
unevenly working to transcend the Gothic to the tragic and which calls into
question Brown as a novelist of ideas.
Volishin, Beverly R. "Edgar Huntly and
the Coherence of the Self." Early American Literature 23
(1988): 262-280. Studies how the nightmare world of the novel subverts
Lockean epistemology and other 18th Century theories concerning the harmony of
mind and nature.
Warfel, Harry R. Charles Brockden
Brown: American Gothic Novelist. Florida University
Press, 1949. Unapologetically treats Brown as first and foremost a Gothic
novelist. Studies how Brown transforms the 18th Gothic and anticipates
Poe and Hawthorne.
Watts, Steven. The Romance of Real Life:
Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins
UP, 1994. Oblivious of the Gothic as it grounds its study of Brown's fictional
and non-fictional prose in "the socioeconomic and political transformation
of post-Revolutionary America."
Contains a bibliographical essay from a trenchantly new-historical perspective
(225-241).
Witherington, Paul. "Charles Brockden
Brown: A Bibliographic Essay." Early American Literature 9 (1974):
164-187. A still useful review of Brown scholarship divided into three
historical periods.
Herman
Melville
(1819-1891)
Principal Gothic Works
Moby Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper, 1851.
Pierre;
or, The Ambiguities. New York:
Harper, 1852.
"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street." Putnam's
Monthly, November-December, 1853.
"The Lightning Rod Man." Putnam's Monthly, August
1854.
"The Bell
Tower." Putnam's
Monthly, August, 1855.
"Benito Cereno." Putnam's Monthly, October-November-December,
1855.
The Piazza Tales. New York:
Dix & Edwards, 1856. (Contains "Bartleby the Scrivener. A Tale
Of Wall Street,"
"Benito Cereno," "The Bell
Tower, and "The Lightning-Rod Man."
These tales were originally
published anonymously in issues of Putnam's Monthly
Magazine from 1853-1855;
their arrangement in The Piazza Tales follows the chronology
of their appearance.)
Billy Budd, Foretopman, The Works of Herman Melville. 16 vols. London: Constable, 1922-
1924.)
Modern Reprints and Editions
Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. New York: Bantam, 1981. (This edition is
cited in the text.)
Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales. Ed. Robert Milder. New York : Oxford
UP, 1997.
Herman Melville: Selected Tales and Poems. Ed. Richard Chase. Holt,
Rinehart & Winston,
1960. (This edition is cited in
the text.)
Melville's Billy Budd and the Critics. Ed. William T. Stafford. Wadsworth, 1961.
Moby-Dick. Ed. Cyrus R. K. Patell. New York:
Oxford UP,
1999.
The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville. New York: Fawcett, 1964.
The Writings of Herman Melville. Ed. Harrison Hayford and others. 15
volumes. Evanston
and
Chicago: Northwestern UP & The
Newberry Library, 1968-1989.
In
his introduction to Herman Melville: Selected Tales and Poems, the noted
American scholar Richard
Chase evokes the dark poetics of the Gothic
spirit in his description of the eerie world of Benito Cereno,
calling it "a miasma of ancient sin, chaos
and decay, an enigmatic world of ruined summerhouses in desolate
gardens, of deserted chateaux and rotting
balustrades, a savage forest of equivocations, treacheries, and
uncommunicated talk among doomed men"
(vii). Why does Melville load his maritime saga with persistent
evocations of the Gothic tradition, such as
likening the slaves on board to Black Friars pacing a gloomy cloister
and the "castellated forecastle" (24)
to an ancient turret in decay? A simple answer would be that he
strategically
pressed into service atmospheric details from
his reading of Walpole, Beckford, and Radcliffe to help create the
nightmare world of the slave ship, the San
Dominick. But Melville also found in the Gothic something more
fundamental to his artistic vision.
The first English Gothics provided him with a world of sharp moral contrasts,
pitting innocent and vulnerable heroes and
heroines against an expansive, yet usually intelligible and confinable evil.
While many later writers in the
tradition, Melville among them, have been credited with a
psychological complication of this sharp
Gothic divide between good and evil, he above all offers a
profound moral complication of the
metaphysical world of the Gothic.
Melville's striking Promethean
figures share the most obvious affinity with Gothic literature in the way their
devouring egotism and monomania very closely resemble those of that famous
Gothic type, the villain-hero. The
imaginative allure of these characters has always stemmed from their daring
challenge to traditional ethical and
Christian teachings. Ahab, of course, stands at the head of the list, as
much a pure incarnation of the fearsome will
as a trenchant criticism of it. He is a man willing to doom his crew
to his fixation, his alleged desire to triumph
over what he deems elemental evil, while Melville never lets us forget
that Ahab fails to understand the vindictive
evil within his own heart. In his mix of sublime thunderings, petty
bullying, troubling omnipotence, and
superstitious reclusiveness, Ahab could very well stand as the most
spectacular and memorable distillation of the
Gothic villain-hero, a Promethean to outdo Victor Frankenstein or any
of the many prototypes that preceded
him. Even more Frankensteinian is the Renaissance over-reacher
Bannadonna in "The Bell Tower," who not only
constructs and secretively occupies a three hundred foot high bell tower as
a testimony to his artistic egotism but
attempts to usurp the role of God in his creation of an animated "locomotive
figure for the belfry" (202).
Preoccupied with some last-minute revisions on the bell's engravings before
its grand opening, Bannadonna is
crushed to death by the weird automaton, and the moral seems quite clear:
retribution awaits the ultra-humanist
who would make "man the true God" (203). A startlingly swift retribution also meets Melville's
last incarnation of
the Gothic villain, the Cain-like Claggart of Billy
Budd, "in whom was the mania of an evil nature . . . born with
him and innate, in short, a 'depravity according
to nature ' " (30). Claggart's obsessive desire to destroy Billy
and
Billy's accidental killing of him have invited all kinds of critical
interpretation, including chiasmic readings in which
their roles as good and evil are reversed, but considered in terms of the
Gothic tradition, there appears something
fundamental in their confrontation: a final unmasking of the terrible
allure innocence holds for evil, the fatal
attraction that fuels countless Gothic plots.
And herein lies the true irony of
Melville's achievement when considered in the context of the Gothic
tradition. Although he
has left us with some of literature's most superbly depraved souls in
characters who share
the most obvious affinities with any number of
Gothic villains, the true complexity of his moral and artistic
achievement concerns his intricate re-creation
of the opposing Gothic stereotype: the innocent. In the usual and
especially in Radcliffean Gothic plotting, imperiled Innocents invite the
reader's identification and moral sympathy,
as we read on to see if their essential and durable goodness can withstand
the intricate and often spooky
persecutions to which they are subjected by the powers of evil. But
Melville constantly tests the limits and nature
of the reader's sympathetic identification with and understanding of
innocence. In "The Lightning-Rod Man," we
perhaps witness his and our desired outcome for any confrontation between
good and evil, as the narrator, with
his powerful faith in providence, sees through the confidence man and his
satanic huckstering and throws him out
of his house. And so too it appears with the "generous" and
"benevolent" Captain Delano of Benito Cereno, who
walks into and out of hell unscathed, with no more protection than his
astonishingly obtuse faith in the good nature
of all men. Yet although Delano
is able to rescue Benito Cereno from the horrors of the slave ship, he cannot
understand "what has cast such a shadow" (34) over the Spaniard.
The "triumph" of the American's innocence is
reassuring in terms of the traditional moral formula governing Gothic
closure, but surely Melville also suggests that
his innocence is a kind of blindness that prevents him from understanding
the tragic dimensions of life. Yet
possessing moral sympathy for suffering, like the kind the lawyer arguably
possesses for Bartleby in "Bartleby the
Scrivener," may not solve the enigma of human tragedy. When the enigma
of Billy Budd's case is presented to
Captain Vere, we become aware that no verdict, no judgment is adequate to
the moral dilemma facing both him
and the reader. Does Billy die a Christ-like death as a vindication of
his innocence against a world of shadowy
equivocations and cross-choices? Or does his death indicate the triumph of
those dark forces over the good? To
what degree can we say that Billy is good and Claggert merely evil, when the
innocent has killed and the villain
dies a victim? Melville takes the central Gothic
confrontation of good-versus-evil and provides a
powerful tragic complication of its moral understanding. It is as if the
Gothic innocent has emerged
from the chamber of horrors only to enter a more bewildering one of moral
ambiguities and insoluble
cross-purposes.
These are exactly what afflict Pierre Glendinning in the novel subtitled The
Ambiguities, the
book that has proven the enigma of Melville's career. Written during
a period of increasing financial
difficulties and thus "very much more calculated for popularity than
anything" (qtd. in Hayford 367) he had written
before, Pierre
immediately met universally hostile reviews and would prove to put him in debt
to his publisher.
Part of Melville's unsuccessful plan to reach a wider audience, especially a
female audience, was his
determination to write "a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to
it, & stirring passions" (qtd. in Hayford 367),
an aim recognized but blasted by one of its first reviewers, who classed it
among "some of the ancient and most
repulsive inventions of the Anne Radcliffe sort--desperate passion at first
sight, for a young woman who turns out
to be the hero's sister, &c., &c., &c" (qtd. in Hayford
380). But surely Pierre
would also prove a gigantic
disappointment to readers who expected to be entertained by a species of
Radcliffean romance. For Pierre
is in
many ways a Gothic novel that has gone metaphysically mad. In the figure of
the suicidal Pierre, a man who can
do no right because he tries to live as if he could do no wrong, Melville
complicates and finally exhausts and
deconstructs the figure of the innocent. In order to do what is right by his
half-sister Isabel, the impossibly gentle
and docile and idealistic Pierre
abandons his inheritance, deserts a disturbingly doating mother, breaks the
heart
of his true love Lucy Tartan, and reduces himself to urban
poverty, misanthropic fits, imprisonment, and finally
suicide by "marrying" Isabel. The scare quotations are apt
here, because although Pierre
considers the marriage
not a real one but instead just an expression of duty to his half-sister,
hints of incest, that favorite Gothic taboo,
abound, not only with Isabel but with his mother. This book tests the limits
of not just Gothic fiction but fiction
itself; it is at one a romance and an anti-romance; another of Melville's
tragic evocations of innocence and a
disturbingly sardonic view, to quote a distressed contemporary reviewer of
the novel, of Melville's picture of "the
impracticability of virtue" (qtd. in Hayford 390); a moral complication
of the Gothic-sentimental plot read as
immoral by the reviewers, yet richly suggestive in the moral issues it
raises without ever resolving them. In much
of his fiction that shares affinities with the Gothic vision, but
nowhere more so than with Pierre,
Melville took the
genre to its illogical conclusion, in ways that no other writer has been
willing or able to do.
Selected Criticism
Arvin, Newton.
"Melville and the Gothic Novel." New England
Quarterly 22 (1949): 33-48. Although considering the presence of the Gothic
in Melville's writings a "slight thing," makes a good case that
both his dark metaphysical landscapes and his towering egotists achieve
some measure of meaning from the tradition.
Boudreau, Gordon V. "Of Pale Ushers and Gothic Piles: Melville's
Architectural Symbology." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
67 (1972): 67-82. Valuably documents Melville's extensive reading in
Gothic fiction and suggests a number of influences on his work from that
tradition, especially in terms of architectural metaphors and some key
archetypes.
Fisher, Benjamin F. IV. "Gothic Possibilities in Moby-Dick." In
Gothick Origins and Innovations. Eds. Victor Sage & Allan Lloyd Smith. Amsterdam; Atlanta,
Georgia:
Rodopi; Costerus New Series 91, 1994: 115-122. "Melville surpasses many of
his predecessors in Gothicism by presenting us with what amount to two 'haunted
castles,' the Pequod and the sea."
Goldner, Ellen J. "Other(ed) Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason
in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison." Melus 24 (1999): 59-83. The
Gothic representations of slavery in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno exposes
the complicity between a Western scientific worldview and slavery. The Gothic
elements reveal the distorted way in which the rational discourse views the
world, indicating the failures of Western empiricism.
Kosok, Heinz. Die Bedeutung der Gothic Novel fra das erzählwerk Herman
Melvilles. [The Significance of the Gothic Novel for the Narratives
of Hermann Melville]. Hamburg,
West Germany:
Cram De Gruyter, 1963. Still the only book-length study of Gothic
elements in Melville's writing. Treats ships such as the Pequod and San
Dominick as floating haunted castles.
Lackey, Kris. " ' More Spiritual Terrors ': The Bible and Gothic
Imagination in Moby Dick." South Atlantic
Review 52 (1987): 37-50. Examines the interplay between "the
popular texts of Gothic romance and holy writ" in the novel as providing a
context for its depiction of deep-seated "spiritual fears."
MacPherson, Jay. "Waiting for Shiloh:
Transgression and Fall in Melville's ' The Bell-Tower.' " In Gothic
Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression. Ed. Kenneth W. Grtaham. New York: AMS, 1989:
245-258. Emphasizes a number of Gothic intertexts for Bannadonna, among these
the figure of Victor Frankenstein; both are paradigmatic overreachers.
Magistrale, Tony. " ' More demon than man ': Melville's Ahab as Gothic
Villain." In Spectrum of the Fantastic. Westport,
CT: Greenwood,
1988: 81-86. Likens Ahab to the villains and villain-heroes of Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, and Maturin. Important in seeing how the
Gothic supplied Melville with a vehicle to develop his tragic and pessimistic
perspectives.
Miles, Robert. "Melville's Pierre
and the Origins of the Gothic." ELH 66 (1999): 157-177.
Relates the Gothicism of Pierre to Melville's classic Gothic sources.
Ryan, Steven T. "The Gothic Formula of ' Bartleby. ' "
Arizona
Quarterly 34 (1978): 311-16. Notes Gothic details in Melville's
story, most intriguingly the idea of premature burial in Bartelby's spiritual
resignation.
Shetty, Nalini V. "Melville's Use of the Gothic Tradition."
In Studies in American Literature: Essays in Honour of William Mulder. Delhi: Oxford
UP, 1976: 144-53. Explores how Gothic material in the major stories
enable Melville to probe the enigma of good versus evil.
Trimpi, Helen "Melville's Use of Demonology and Witchcraft
in Moby Dick." Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969):
543-62. Studies sources in demon-lore, among them the English Gothic,
used by Melville in his Faustian tale of Ahab's transgressions.
Count
Donatien Alphonse François Sade
[The Marquis de Sade]
(1740-1814)
Principal Gothic Works
Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertue [Justine, or the Misfortunes of
Virtue]. 2 vols. Paris:
Girouard, 1791.
La Philosophie dans le boudoir [Philosophy in the Bedroom].
Londres, 1795.
La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertue. 4 vols. Paris, 1797.
La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertue, suivie de l'Histoire
de Juliette, sa soeur, ou
les Prospériteés du vice [followed
by the story of her sister Juliette,or the Prosperity of
Vice]. 6 vols. Paris, 1797.
Les 120 Journées de Sodome, ou l'Ecole du libertinage [The 120 Days
of Sodom, or
the School of
Libertinage]. From
the original autograph by Maurice Heine. Paris, 1931-1935.
Les Crimes de L'amour: nouvelles heroiques et tragiques; precedes d'une
Idee sur les romans.
[The Crimes of Love] Paris: Masse, an VIII
[1800].
Modern Reprints and Editions
Juliette. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1968.
The Marquis de Sade: Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings.
Trans. Richard
Seaver & Austryn Wainhouse,
with introductions by Jean Paulhan & Maurice Blanchot.
New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
Marquis de Sade:The Gothic Tales. Trans. with an introduction by
Margaret Crosland. London:
Picador, 1992. (Contains
"Eugenie de Franval" and "Florville and Courval.")
The Misfortunes of Virtue, and Other Early Tales. Marquis de Sade.
Ed. & Trans. David
Coward. Oxford:
Oxford UP,
1992.
The 120 Days of Sodom,
and Other Writings. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse & Richard Seaver;
with introductions by Simone de
Beauvoir and Pierre Klossowski. New
York: Grove
Press, 1966.
In a scene whose general contours are terribly familiar to Gothic readers, the
corrupt Abbess
Delbéne brings her fellow debauchees and the heroine
of the novel Juliette to a dark subterranean
vault beneath a convent, where lay moldering the
corpses of nuns she has murdered. In a centrally
Sadeian way, what follows exceeds anything even darkly
dreamt of in the tradition of the first English
Gothic tales, including its most obvious parallel in
the grotto passages of The Monk, a novel, not
surprisingly, greatly admired by Sade. For
Delbéne has brought her band of revelers--and Juliette, far
from being some heroine in distress, is a very
willing member of the band--to the tumuli so that she
might receive "five or six thumping f**kings
upon [one of] her victim's corpses" (96) In another way,
however, the scene stops short of the
Gothic. As Delbéne's debauchees reach quite literally
their
climax, it seems, but only seems, a genuine
moment of Gothic horror awaits them: "a dreadful shrill
screech was heard, all the candles snuffing out
that very instant" (97). Juliette
faints away in terror,
and all are struck deaf and dumb. Have our
voluptuaries met their moment of divine retribution or
infernal apotheosis? No, the unflustered
Delbéne assures them: it was only the sound of a wood owl,
whose startled flight caused the lights to go out.
"In supernatural occurrences," she serenely asserts, "I
have no belief at all" (97).
Aside from its wicked little parody of Radcliffe's
"explained supernatural," the scene in Delbéne's
dark pleasure dome reveals some important facts
about Sade's relationship to the Gothic tradition.
First, of course, the scene indicates that he is
willing to take the usually nervous Gothic fascination
with the profane and the taboo to its point of
extreme fulfillment and satiety; every threshold of
painful and forbidden pleasure must be crossed,
from mutilation to "stricturing" to incest to the murder
of one's own children, all in the name of
increasing sexual gratification. His fiction provides graphic
realization of the libidinal content often found
sublimated and deferred in mainstream Gothic literature.
Thus, "sadism" and its closely related
offspring, masochism, have proved useful conceptual tools to
explore the dark psychological terrains of
Gothic literature. The sadistic character, after all, of an
Ambrosio in The Monk or of a character
like Dacre's Victoria de Loredani in Zofloya differs not so
much in kind as in degree from Sade's gallery of
insatiable perverts. Sade's denial of the supernatural,
indeed, his fierce contempt for any traditional
moral framework, also reflects tellingly on the Gothic
tradition from which it so emphatically, on this
point, departs. After all, what is it from Sade's atheist
perspective that so haunts and terrorizes
countless Gothic heroes and heroines? Is it not their
nursing of unacted desires--which, as Blake
says, breeds pestilence--their fear of moral retribution,
their guilt engendered by a hypocritical and
cruelly arbitrary societal superego? Sade's frontal
assault
on all hegemonic structures provides a provocative
way of reading the Gothic and has endeared him to
postmodern criticism. But the actual
experience of reading his fiction yields a strange irony. His long
novels, marked by what Klossowski calls
"apathetic reiteration" (30), are devoid of conflict and
laboriously thesis-driven; indeed, they are
more apt to bore than to scandalize a reader. It is only in
some of his shorter works, less ridden by the
dictates of his renegade philosophy and more in line with
familiar Gothic patterns of deferral and
revelation, that Sade succeeds as a writer of Gothic horror
fiction.
Let us first briefly review this
fiction in relation to the Gothic tradition before considering the
relationship of sadism to Gothicism. Justine; or, The Misfortunes
of Virtue bears the most striking
affinities to the Gothic, but Sade so carries to the extreme every feature
this laboriously developed
novel shares with the tradition that it reads like a parody of the female
Gothic. Justine appears to be a
caricature of the Radcliffean heroine, doggedly clinging to her cherished
notions of virtue while
physically losing her virtue in the most varied and outrageous of ways. A
poor and vulnerable outcast,
she becomes the plaything of, among others, the philosopher-villain Bressac
and his always eager band
of sodomites; the pedophile-surgeon Rodin, who brands her; the
gourmand-bloodletter, Gernade; and
the vicious recluse Saint-Florent, who enjoys sex best when aroused by near
hanging. Many of the
castles and corrupt convents where Justine suffers multiple rapes and worse
provide distinctly Gothic
settings, especially the corpse-filled catacombs of Saint-Florent, where
Justine must undergo
premature burial and witness the crucifixion of a nude, sexually
mutilated jeune fille. Whereas in
most Gothic fiction these dark settings evince a sense of supernatural awe
and fear, in Sade's fiction
they provide repeated occasion for ferocious sacrilege, as his freethinking
villain-heroes ransack every
religious scruple and mock every appeal to the supernatural in making
their case that monstrous
crimes are in perfect accord with natural law. Justine parodies the
Gothic not just in its perverse
delight in outraging virtue, as the poor Justine can repeatedly attest, but
in suggesting that pursuing
such a chimera as virtue leads to suffering and persecution. In a
final, grim parody of divine
retribution, the much abused but finally delivered Justine meets death by
lightning-bolt, while the
sadists who have used her and killed thousands of other peasants for their
amusement find their power
and financial resources "mysteriously" augmented. Vice, not
virtue, is its own reward.
As E. J. Clery has perceptively
noted, one encounters a paradox in the triumph of Sade's
aristocratic philosopher-villains: from an advocate (albeit a
latecomer) of the French Revolution and a
man who spent the better portion of his life in prison, "The
libertinism he advocated [would seem]
cognate with 'liberty,' yet sexual freedom as he portrays it is invariably
decked out in the Gothic
trappings of incarceration and tyranny" (205). Here is another related
paradox: while one might expect
from Sade, given his heretical program and the official censure of his
books, some kind of radical new
fiction, some breaking of boundaries, his novels provide only the most
perfunctory reading. Take for
example the sequel to Justine, the sister-novel Juliette. Its
thesis, "The Prosperities of Vice," already
amply demonstrated by the previous novel, Juliette quickly lapses into
the numbingly familiar Sadeian
pattern of "apathetic reiteration:" graphic sexual scene
followed by philosophical justification, then
more pornography, followed by more philosophy, and so on. Strangely,
despite the contrast promised
by the change in central characters, Juliette, as vice-loving as her sister
was virtuous, occupies a role
fairly identical to her sibling: she serves as subject (albeit now willing)
for a variety of more
experienced sadists, then must listen to their interminable natural
philosophies (essentially
Enlightenment arguments for reasoned self-interest and against
"superstition" taken to their reductio
ad absurdum). So too is the same pattern found in the less Gothic The 120
Days of Sodom
(a kind of
sexual Decameron plus 20) and Philosophy in the Bedroom (a
Sadeian kama sutra of sorts).
Perhaps this is the central paradox inherent in pornographic literature:
while such literature's entire
claim to excitement is built on the premise of ever more virtuosic variation
on its sexual content, it
more likely will lapse into metonymy, that most masturbatory of tropes,
offering, instead, only the
possibility of repetition and substitution. Despite its often
tendentious moralizing and other timidities,
the Gothic knew better. Its typically disguised and sublimated libidinal
energies allow the reader room
for fantasy; the reader of Sade's longer fiction, in a way strangely
consistent with his sexual
philosophy, must be more passive, more a consumer of fantasy than a producer
of it.
Margaret Crosland, translator of some of Sade's shorter works of fiction from Les
Crimes de
L'amour,
justifies entitling them the Gothic Tales because they possess the one
thing lacking in his
previous fiction: "suspense."
Prefaced by "Idée sur le roman," an essay in which Sade directly
acknowledges the English Gothic tradition, Les
Crimes offers at least two tales that can qualify as high
Gothic. "Eugénie de Franval," with
its story of a father's incestuous relationship with his daughter
Eugénie, replete with his philosophical defenses of
incest and attacks on the institution of marriage,
may at first seem just one more variation on themes
from La Philosophie dans le boudoir. But the
suspense that drives the short novel concerns
whether or not the two lovers will be caught. With an
unmistakable allusion to the woman who first had him
imprisoned for his outrageous sexual behavior,
Sade introduces a powerful mother-in-law, Madame de
Farneille, who threatens prosecution. Driven
to flee Paris
and to encourage his daughter to poison her mother, Franval eventually relents
and
repents. As he returns home through a gloomy
Gothic forest, having been ravaged by banditti, he
hears bells tolling that finally turn his thoughts
to the Deity. But too late: Eugénie has poisoned
Madame de Franval and, in a paroxysm awakened by a
very late dawning conscience, has died of
grief herself. There is nothing left for Franval
than to stab himself and throw himself into the coffin of
his lately deceased wife. Intrigue and
melodrama replace the more typically Sadeian graphic content,
and the moralistic closure--"great peril always
dogs those who do as they wish in order to satisfy their
desires" (11)--places Eugénie de Franval in the
company of other early Gothics. More tightly woven is
the story of "Florville and
Courval." Florville is, indeed, the unwitting victim of the
"fatality of destiny"
(138). At age fifteen she has an affair with a man
who, it turns out, is her brother; accidentally kills a
would-be rapist who, it turns out, is their son;
supplies testimony against a murderess who, it turns out,
is her mother; and has married the generous Courval,
who, it turns out, is her father. None of these
revelations occur until the very end of the novel,
after Florville has had a very Gothic dream of
mysterious bodies beckoning to her from their
coffins and right after she has been reading "an English
novel of incredible grimness" (131). The
heroine's extreme suffering and the multiple incests are pure
Sade, but there is an undeniable virtuosity in the
way he pulls together the various plot strands at the
end. One suspects that in many of the stories
from Les Crimes de L'amour, Sade adapted his usual
sexual themes to the Gothic form to produce a
fiction that, while still daring, would be
publishable.
The argument that a reading of Sade's
fiction requires a tendency toward masochism attests to
the conceptual power and pliability of the two pathologies that are his
legacy. The nineteenth-century
psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing first coined the term sadism to refer
to the obtaining of sexual
pleasure through degradation of others, and later, in reference to the
French author Sacher Masoch,
defined its opposite, masochism, in which pleasure depends upon being the
tormented and humiliated
victim. Freud importantly saw the two as active and passive manifestations
of a single instinctual
complex of fantasy and behavior, with masochism becoming a kind of
internalized sadism.
As a psychological interpretation
of personal and political relationships--for sadism and
masochism are all about power and mastery--the terms have a special
resonance in the Gothic
tradition. Walpole's
Manfred, Radcliffe's Mediterranean counts, Lewis's Monk, Godwin's demonic
Gines, Hogg's Gil-Martin-- all these and many other characters in the Gothic
canon define themselves
through and take considerable pleasure in the suffering they cause others.
They all provide terrifying
depiction of the id unleashed, insatiate, ever seeking more refined
variations on the pleasure to be
derived from cruelty. But they also all serve as indications of tyranny, the
sadistic extension of the
politics of self-interest and aggrandizement. In his important essay
"Idée sur le roman," Sade himself
perceives the Gothic novel as "the inevitable product of the revolutionary
shocks with which the whole
of Europe resounded." Because in
this "iron age" there "was nobody left who had not experienced
more misfortunes" than the most gifted novelist could depict, it became
"necessary to call upon hell for
aid" in conveying "the ills that are brought upon men by the
wicked" and the mighty (Sage 22).
Although, as Clery notes, his own fiction equivocates on the issue, Sade
clearly saw the familiar
Gothic pattern of demonic persecution and extreme victimization as tortured
reflections upon the
political upheavals of the day, an insight that has since been thoroughly
developed by recent critics of
the Gothic in their historicist treatment of the genre's sadistic tyrants.
Elizabeth Bronfen argues that
while the sadistic impulse in Gothic fantasy involves
intersubjective conflict, a conflict between subjects or classes, the
domination-submission complex can also be found in the register of
intrasubjective conflict,
where characters enact the struggle between a sadistic super-ego as
representative of the
law and a masochistic ego as representative of forbidden pleasures, by
suffering from guilt,
self-punishment, or self-purging. (127)
One thinks immediately of such characters as
Godwin's Caleb Williams (who worships his persecutor,
the criminal Falkland),
Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, Coleridge's Christabel, Hogg's Wringham,
and even Melville's reclusive Bartleby and
suicidal Pierre Glendinning. These masochists function as
an even more dramatic indication of a cruelly
arbitrary power, for they are so conditioned by the laws
and morality of the ruling ideology that they
willingly submit to, even revel in, suffering for some real or
imagined wrong.
Yes, it is interesting to
speculate about what Sade would have made of a character like
Christabel. One shudders to think of her in the hands of one of Sade's own
sadistic tyrants. As in
many ways she is a martyr to her own repressed sexuality, Christabel is
exactly the kind of subject the
Sadeian philosopher-villain most enjoys outraging. But perhapst Sade
would have read Geraldine as a
necessarily sadistic counterpart to Christabel's masochism--a Juliette to a Justine--and
thanks in part to
Sade's interpreters, we can now read both as an indictment of the gloomy,
life-denying, patriarchal
world of Sir Leoline. Perhaps his own fiction is negligible. But in
providing a vocabulary that explores
the complexly sexual dimensions of power, Sade and his critical legacy will
continue to illumine many
dark regions of the Gothic world, a world where power frequently expresses
itself in terms of sexual
domination and submission--and where sex always speaks of power.
Selected Criticism
Berman, Lorna. "The Marquis de Sade and his Critics." Mosaic: A
Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 1:2 (1968): 57-73.
Covers reactions to and attitudes toward Sade over two centuries.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. "Sado-Masochism." In The Handbook to
Gothic Literature. Ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts. NYU Press, 1998:
206-207. Concisely relates this "domination-submission" complex
to the Gothic tradition in general and Sade in paricular.
Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. New York: Pantheon,
1979. Controversially appropriates and radically rethinks Sade as part of
its project to reimagine from a feminist perspective the power relationships of
pornography.
Chanover, E. Pierre. The Marquis de Sade:
A Bibliography. Metuchen,
NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973.
Charts Sade's rise from the forbidden lists to his postmodern canonization.
Clery, E. J. "Ann Radcliffe and D.A.F. de Sade: Thoughts on
Heroinism." Women's Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 1
(1994): 203-214. On parallels and departures in the handling (or possibly
mishandling) of the persecuted maiden in the writings of Radcliffe and Sade.
________. "Sade." In The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Ed.
Marie Mulvey-Roberts. New
York University
Press, 1998: 204-205. Links and intelligently contrasts Sade's fiction
with the Gothic.
Grayson, Susan B. "Gothic Sexuality and Social Decay in Diderot and
Sade." In The French Revolution in Culture and Society. Eds. David
G. Troyansky, Alfred Cismaru, & Norwood
Andrews, Jr. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. "Gothic decay in
the settings of both [Diderot's] La réligieuse and Justine signifies the
disintegration of the Enlightenment and of religious orders."
Klossowski, Pierre. Sade My Neighbor. Trans. & Intro. Alphonso
Lingis. Evanston:
Northwestern UP., 1992. Reprint of the 1947 text. Contains the prefatory
essay "The Philosopher-Villain," added in 1967. Sade's outrage
perversely acknowledges the divine law it transgresses. Although not
specifically concerned with the Gothic, this study of the dialectics of
transgression ("in outrage what is outraged is maintained") provides
an illuminating context to study similar patterns in the Gothic.
Le Brun, Annie. "Un Rêve de pierre." In Les Chateaux de la subversion.
Paris: J. J.
Pauvert aux Éditions Garnier Frères, 1982: 103-110. Places Sade directly in the
mainstream of Gothic fiction.
McAllister, Harold S. "Apology for Bad Dreams: A Study of
Characterization and the Use of Fantasy in Clarissa, Justine, and The
Monk." Dissertation Abstracts International 32 (1972): 6383A (University of New Mexico). Relates Justine to the
sadomasochistic motifs of the Gothic tradition.
Seneleck, Laurence. The Presence of Evil: The Murderer as Romantic Hero
from Sade to Lacenaire. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987.
Notes resemblances between Sade's philosophic villains and their Gothic
counterparts in the 1790s.
Werner, S. "Diderot, Sade and the Gothic Novel." Studies on
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 114 (1973): 273-290. In revealing the
necessity for the monstrous, Sade elevated the philosophic value of evil.
Bibliographical citation: a few tricky ones among many
1. an internet article:
Jones, Steven E. "'Supernatural, or at Least Romantic': the Ancient
Mariner and Parody." Romanticism On the
Net 15 (August 1999) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/sejstc.
html>
2. title within title:
Cotsell, Michael. A Reader's Companion to Dickens' Great
Expectations. London: Methuen, 1990.
3. edited works:
Frank, Frederick, Douglass Thomson, and Jack Voller, eds. Major Gothic
Writers. New York: Greenwood, 2000.
Wordsworth, William. The Lyrical Ballads 1800. Ed. James Butler. Cornell UP,
1993.
4. Journals—continuous vs. non-continuous pagination:
Wilson, John. "Manners into Morals: What the Victorians
Knew." American Scholar 57 (1988): 223-32.
Lenoux, Neil. "Frederick Douglass and the Attention Shift." Rhetoric
Society Quarterly 21.2 (1991): 36-46.