Loving the Gothic Novel

Of the Gothic texts spanning an approximately 75-year period that we explored this semester–Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Maria (1792), Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), Dacre’s Zofloya (1806), Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818 and 1823), Hogg’s Confessions (1824), Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), Gaskell’s Gothic Tales (1848-65), and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847)–my top two favorites were, as I expected on signing up for this class due to my love of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, female-penned novels, The Italian and Northanger Abbey. More surprising to me was my third-place runner-up to them, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I had thought that I might grow to “love” Mary and Maria and perhaps Wuthering Heights almost as much as Radcliffe’s and Austen’s novels—I was excited about reading the feminist themes of Vindication of the Rights of Woman in novel form, and Jane Eyre is a personal favorite of mine, a book that changed my life due to personal reasons for which I related to Jane’s travails as my early-twenties self, leading me to believe that her sister’s Wuthering Heights might have a similar, significant impact on me. (It did not).

I’ve been interested since taking the Rise of the Novel course in the work of Deidre Shauna Lynch to include her most recent (2016) book, Loving Literature: A Cultural History and in other scholars’ work on literature-inspired empathy and/or love (or its corollary behavior hate)—for how and why literature can and does trigger strong emotional connections between the reader and fictional characters, even those emanating from a person’s state of mind/being that hails from quite another place and time. So perhaps I had been harboring some cultural biases of my own when I assumed I would not, could not be triggered by the saccharine brand of empathy of which Dickens has been capable over the years via the characters of Tiny Tim and Ebenezer Scrooge. In Loving Literature, Lynch writes,

“The gender politics I have evoked also seem implicit in Trevor Ross’s and David Simpson’s [a Blake scholar I have long admired/read!] presentation of the history of literariness as an episode in a broader feminization of culture: Simpson, for instance, sees literary studies as overly beholden accordingly to a ‘lexicon that is dominantly feminized: intuition, exceptionality, sympathy, empathy, lived experience and so forth’ … Such characterizations risk shoring up gendered dichotomies rather than investigating their construction or contestation” (127).

Perhaps it is because I myself am a “dominantly feminized” individual, with my pre-existing condition that disposes me to an appreciation for “intuition, … sympathy, empathy” that I thought I would “relate” to the authors themselves, Radcliffe and Austen, and maybe Wollstonecraft and Bronte but not Dickens. It could also be the case that the trends in literary studies have finally converged to meet my preconceived notions on the “value” of literature and the humanities being the human connection accomplished by it all, and that these factors combined to formulate the perfect storm for my prejudice against Dickens’ work. However, tears did form against my better judgment when I envisioned Tiny Tim atop his father’s shoulders coming home from church and when Scrooge’s conscience did an about-face in the presence of the child’s illusory future grave to illustrate the fate others might meet if not for Scrooge’s freeing of his cultural capital—sympathy, empathy, human connection and of course his money—to circulate amongst others. But mostly, I, a sucker for proof positive of people’s ability to change, “related” to Scrooge and his curmudgeonly ways, with his Larry David esque sense of humor regarding other individuals and their silly/dumb ways. I also surprisingly related to and enjoyed the company of Paulo the servant, much more so than Radcliffe’s Gothic heroine and hero, Ellena and Vivaldi, and Austen’s Catherine Morland.

The 75-year period which we studied, about 1790-1865, is the point of origin that scholars such as Lynch are pointing to for our modern-day reading habits to include our compulsion to “relate” to characters, which I describe I have done to various characters and somewhat unpredictably. Lynch argues that our impulse for such relating, or connection to characters, originated in a culturally specific moment, namely, the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. She writes that “studies of the late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century reinvention of Literature have tended to overlook how that reinvention also created a new object for people’s affections—one that altered the practices and protocols of those affections in its turn. In the romantic period, Jonah Siegel observes, ‘more writers become the objects of a fantastic admiration … than in all previous centuries combined” with “a notable increase in the need to admire” (Lynch 19). While I have become aware/cognizant of the biases that I harbor when picking up literature—the predisposition to the eighteenth-century female (non Matthew Lewis-type) Gothic and “female Bildungsroman”—the depth and breadth of the Gothic novels that we have read in this course have exposed me to many various types of Gothic novels, tropes and authors and, in the Gothic tradition, have revealed complex layers with regard to my interests in literature and the sympathy, empathy and other emotional connections it creates. When selecting a favorite text, then, I have made this decision by engaging with my conscious (rational) and subconscious mind, and my intuition in ways that my favorite authors, Radcliffe and Austen, recommend via their Gothic texts–namely, seeing is not believing, and you must delve further into your/others’ psyches in order to determine who is or is not operating as a Gothic villain, i.e., read people as you would a Gothic text, even in England (and/or “Italy” where Radcliffe off-shores the Gothic experience/villain but which represents her native England as evidenced by the lop-sided frame narrative which starts with English tourists and never gets wrapped-up). Not only that, but as Henry Tilney puts it to Catherine Morland while dictating the terms of how to temper reading of Gothic novels with reality: I “have gained a new source of enjoyment [in these texts], and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.”