Sublime v. Human Gothic Villains

The trope of the Gothic villain ranges from the most explicit—arguably Ann Radcliffe’s Schedoni, the ultimate personification of the Gothic sublime that she articulates in her seminal essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry”—to the less obvious yet still possessor of key Gothic villain qualities, the ultimate reformed villain we know all too well in contemporary western culture, Ebenezer Scrooge. According to Holland and Sherman in the article “Gothic Possibilities,” “Ann Radcliffe brought all the elements of the [Gothic novel] genre together in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1791)” (Holland 2). It is not a stretch by any means to argue that by the time Radcliffe wrote her mic-drop response to Matthew Lewis’s affront to her genre (Radcliffe tackles this issue in The Italian and also in “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” right before she bows out of authorship and the public eye for good), her melding together of “all the elements of the genre” had reached its pinnacle in The Italian and her companion definition piece/essay articulating this genre. Dickens, writing after Lewis’s permanent damage/separation to the Gothic, when it split into male and female, horror and terror types (complicated admittedly by female-authored works such as Zofloya and others, in the vein of Lewis/male/horror), takes and complicates traits of the Gothic villain into his ghostly Christmas tale. It wasn’t only Dickens who in the later half of the nineteenth century, combined hero and villain qualities into one character. “To be sure,” Holland and Sherman write, “the modern Byronic lover [aka Jane Eyre’s Rochester] combines the separate hero and villain of the eighteenth century” (Holland 2).

In this response essay, I will illustrate how the trope of the Gothic villain is developed by comparing and contrasting Schedoni, the Italian of Radcliffe’s The Italian, with Scrooge, the, ahem, “scrooge” of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (and countless curmudgeonly money-hoarders thereafter) and their respective narrative arcs and character development in the context of the novels in which they appear, and beyond. To “scrouge” such an analysis into these 500-1000 words (more on this not-so-common-anymore verb later), I will narrow this paper’s focus into the lens of these characters’ names, while also showing the life these names take on inside and outside the seminal texts in which they appear.

One of the first instances of character development of these Gothic villains occurs for readers in their names. As a creative nonfiction and fiction (aka anything prose) writer myself, dabbling in writing autobiographical fiction this semester, for instance, I was interested to see what contemporary, professional-writerly publications such as Writer’s Digest might have to say about “what’s in a name” for literary characters, and to apply those findings to the expertly named characters of these two distinctly different (time period and otherwise) Gothic novels, Schedoni and Scrooge. “Choosing a character name for your novel is as pressure-filled as picking a name for a baby,” begins the article “7 Rules of Picking Names for Fictional Characters.” (This extreme personal nature of literary names—to the extent of equating one’s character with one’s actual baby—alludes to the point I am making in the other response essay for this exam, What was your favorite text? Compare, contrast, explain, that readers develop relationships with characters and that this is important for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary studies then as now.) A good name, according to the aforementioned Writer’s Digest article, “has to suit the character’s personality, makes sense for the era and, most important, be super awesome … Names like Harry Potter, Holden Caulfield and Stephanie Plum are memorable not just because of the amazing stories they navigate, but also because these names ‘fit’ those characters so well.”

Scrooge is a “super awesome” name. A quick Google search confirmed this confirmation bias that I have, that Ebenezer Scrooge would appear high on any list of the top names of literary characters. On this list, for instance, he comes in third out of 50 (behind Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert and Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne). The name of Scrooge has of course taken on a life of its own, used according to the OED “to designate a miserly, tight-fisted person or killjoy” with the earliest use in this generic form in the Baltimore Sun in 1953. (“Britons, who have been looking forward to their gayest Christmas since before the war, suddenly face the threat that a railway strike will paralyze the nation on the eve of the holiday week. A Labor party paper called union leaders who ordered the strike ‘scrooges’”). Ebenezer means “stone of help,” denoting Scrooge’s stone heart that melts in the course of the novel. “Scrouge” is a (now obscure) English verb meaning “to incommode by pressing against,” “to encroach on (a person’s) space” and “to push or squeeze (a thing),” according to the OED. (In noun form, “scrouge” similarly means “a crush, squeeze, or crowd.”) These are all ways that Dickens describes Scrooge early on and throughout the novel: “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as a flint, …” (Dickens 6. See also page 50, 121, 130, 214, and 20 for other instances of the word “squeeze” in A Christmas Carol.) The word “stone” appears more often, 24 times, including the classic Puritan-productive use “grindstone,” as in, what task-mastering bosses say today: “keep your nose to the grindstone.”)

While I think I can safely say that the name Schedoni has never appeared on a Writers Digest list of any kind, and while most people would not, as is the case with Scrooge, refer to a person as, say, “a real Schedoni,” Radcliffe’s villain, too, is masterfully named. (To be fair, I did visit the OED and type in “Schedoni,” which turned up no definitions.) Due to Radcliffe’s signature prose descriptions of sweeping landscapes as though they are—and some are, in fact, derived from—landscape paintings, it makes sense that she names her villain, a human embodiment of the Burkean sublime, after an Italian painter, i.e., Bartolomeo Schedoni (of the early Italian Baroque era, 1578-1615, Schedoni is known for his Gothic novel-esque illuminated characters against dark backgrounds). Unlike Scrooge, Schedoni does not have a first name. Count di Marinella is his title, readers discover midway through the novel, and he is also known by his other, newer title which covers up the old—Father Schedoni. (Scrooge, more modern and secular, does not boast a special title other than, perhaps, the old miser or other such epithets characters bitter towards him might bestow.) I cannot locate any instance in which Schedoni is referred to on a first name basis.

This shrouding in mystery is appropriate, for this very Gothic villain, due to the sublime, impersonal nature with which he is addressed and described. Scrooge’s name thus shows that he is more explicitly human, relatable, even at his most distant/killjoy times, than the foreign, sublime Schedoni. Typically, according to Holland and Sherman, the Gothic villain is “more ancient and alien” (Holland 8) and “asocial, timeless, penetrating” than the Gothic heroine, the “contemporary … virgin” (Holland 10)–a description which most assuredly fits for Schedoni and his tortured female counterpart, Ellena. While Scrooge is in fact “asocial” (until he is reformed), “timeless” (he transcends time, “penetrating” the past, present and future with the help of the supernatural/ghosts), he is not completely Byronic as is “Rochester, the villainous, sexual, older man” who combines (deconstructs?) the binary of hero/villain (Holland 14). Far from having any woman he is sexually pursuing in his old age–his concern for money long ago alienated the woman to whom he was betrothed, and he is holed-up in a cold, hard-as-stone Gothic castle of his own making–he does “turn out to be a rescuer” (Holland 14), albeit of a crippled child, not a sexually at-risk woman. In this way, Scrooge is an interesting figure who complicates the already complicated villain/hero binary in a decidedly non-sexual, more secular way than Radcliffe’s Schedoni and other complicated/complicating villain/heroes thereafter.