Salzburg Studies in English Literature and Culture SEL & C 6
Failed Rites of Passage in Early Gothic Fiction
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Introduction
A first encounter with early Gothic fiction, which, by general agreement, is said
to come into its own with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of
Otranto in 1764 and end with Charles Maturin's belated masterwork Melmoth
the Wanderer in 1820,1 leaves the reader slightly puzzled – to say the least. As
creatures of habit and determined readers, we eventually become acquainted
with the Gothic and its critical tradition and tend to forget the initial
bewilderment. Yet I do remember vividly my confusion as to how one was to
relate to this flamboyant display of the most seemingly disparate thematic and
cultural concerns.
What caught my interest in particular was the great number of young and
inexperienced characters whose lives, though wildly differing in other respects,
seemed to follow a similar pattern: at some stage in their development, dramatic
– if not traumatic – events separate them from some system of order and hurl
them into a world of confusion and indeterminacy, where they are suddenly
forced to struggle on their own. Of all the possible themes and contexts one can
read into and out of Gothic fiction, it was the issue of puberty that intrigued me
most.
As elaborate answers tend to be sparked by basic questions, so this thesis
grew out of a simple query: why are there so many young characters in these
novels? As a preliminary response one may argue that these unfinished, still
potentially transformable proto-adults are ideal fictitious 'guinea pigs' for social
and educational experiments, a special preoccupation of the eighteenth century,
if one considers the vast amount of treatises published on different forms of
government and education. Secondly, their dependent nature automatically
brings them into close contact with centres of authority which, for the purpose of
this thesis, can be defined as family, education, the church, and the law. The
1
One may include Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) as
a forerunner and James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824) as the final point, but 1764-1820 is the period that most critics have accepted. See
Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 15; Jerrold E. Hogle,
"Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture", in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic
Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 1-20, p. 1; Robert Miles, Gothic
Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 30;
Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 1995),
p. 3; David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the
Present Day, Volume 1: The Gothic Tradition (Harlow: Pearson, 1996), p. 1; Angela
Wright, Gothic Fiction: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1, 5.
2
Failed Rites of Passage in Early Gothic Fiction
young adults of Gothic fiction are frequently still at the mercy of, and vulnerable
to, the exercise of institutional powers, or shown to be the products of such an
influence. This directly mirrors the institutional debates of the time, especially
the question of nature versus nurture. The most conspicuous concern of Gothic
fiction is the discrepancy between formation and actual experience. Not only do
young characters lose the social security net that has protected them, but, by
suddenly entering the world of experience, they also find the basis of their
upbringing either inadequate or severely challenged. This is a direct result of the
fact that their wider social environments do not cohere. Various institutions
have, or claim, dominance over their lives and frequently forget their foremost
duty of providing guidance and, ultimately, successful rites of passage for them.
The young heroines and heroes of Gothic fiction are simply neglected, led
astray, locked up, indoctrinated and tortured by authorities that are supposed to
be benevolent guides.
Although I am fully aware of the enormous differences between these
characters, say, for example, Emily in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) and Ambrosio in Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), one finds a
surprising number of structural correlations in their life patterns: a single or a
number of dramatic changes in their social circumstances, a loss of orientation
and social security along with radical individualization or isolation, a forced
reliance on their own judgment, a new and distressing world of experience, a
seemingly inadequate education or poor preparation for their new lives, an
exposure to guardians and authorities that do not have their best interests at
heart, or a felt necessity to act, despite confusing and contradictory impulses.
This ubiquitous life pattern of Gothic puberty with all its attendant
concerns is, of course, neither new to eighteenth-century fiction,2 nor to criticism
of the Gothic. What sets Gothic novels apart from structural forerunners is the
willingness to experiment, both in terms of content and narrative strategy, a
melodramatic and often quite improbable accumulation of adversities, and the
use of displacement strategies in order to discuss contemporary concerns in the
guise of exotic locations and customs, a device not unfamiliar to the stage, if one
considers Shakespeare's plays.3
In Gothic criticism, one finds book-length studies, or at least chapters and
substantial commentaries on such issues as education, both secular and religious,
2
3
See Wright, p. 129.
See, for example, Carol Margaret Davison, Gothic Literature: 1764-1824 (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2009), especially pp. 33 and 93 for the use of displacements,
but also pp. 24-6, 37, 45, 73, 117, 122-4, and 144 for the Gothic's focus on contemporary
concerns.
Introduction
3
the abuse of institutional power, crossing the threshold, transgressing
boundaries, and other phenomena related to Gothic puberty. Yet these studies
focus on concerns other than the struggles of young adults in society and their
fictitious Gothic counterparts. It is useful to discuss briefly what has been
covered in this particular area by referring to the three major schools of Gothic
criticism.
Marxist, materialist, cultural and New Historicist critics tend to foreground
the ideological struggles that are certainly central to Gothic fiction. The young
characters are usually read as representatives of the still emerging middle class,
who have to face and overcome the tyrannical laws and institutions of a feudal
order or, more generally, the terror of the past. In its rigorous adherence to these
basic tenets, Robert Mighall's A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999)
is probably the best example of this approach.4 In "Scottish and Irish Gothic",
David Punter stresses the humanitarian, rather than the functionalist aspect of
the ubiquitous trial of human nature in these texts. For him, the novels are
mainly concerned with "the relation between the human, considered as founded
upon a notion of self-motivation and free will, and the larger dehumanizing
forces of history, religion, and ideology which menace human authenticity with
a different story, a narrative of conquest and subjugation within which
individuals are mere puppets".5 He concludes that "Gothic in general […]
incarnates a set of stories within which human individuals are at the mercy of
larger powers".6
Although I essentially concur with this approach and propose myself that
there is a pattern underlying the lives of Gothic characters, I would argue that
the actual experiences are diverse enough to warrant a closer look at the issues
raised in each of these narratives. In her introductory chapter on the
contemporary reception of the early Gothic, Angela Wright draws attention to
the fact that criticism was directed precisely against plot formulas and recipes
that seemed to form the basis of terror writing.7 In this context she quotes from
Sir Walter Scott's assessment of Ann Radcliffe's fiction in Lives of the Novelists
(1827): "The persons introduced – and here also the correspondence holds
betwixt the melo-drame and the romantic novel – bear the features, not of
individuals, but of the class to which they belong".8 When dealing with popular
4
5
6
7
8
Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares
(1999; Oxford et al.: OUP, 2003).
David Punter, "Scottish and Irish Gothic", in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic
Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 105-23, p. 121.
Ibid., p. 122.
See Wright, pp. 7-34, esp. pp. 20-7.
Ibid., p. 27.
4
Failed Rites of Passage in Early Gothic Fiction
fiction, which the Gothic definitely was at the time, there is not only a
temptation on the part of the critic to treat characters as types or functions and
their experiences as plot formulas, but often very good reason to do so. I take
David Punter's basic statement as a starting point and attempt to show that the
individual life stories of characters and their different educational backgrounds
and encounters with various institutions can lead to diverse results and thereby
highlight particular contemporary concerns. In this type of reading, I attempt to
demonstrate that the Gothic is more than a symbolic clash of middle-class values
and the old institutional establishment. In The Rise of Gothic Fiction (1995),
Maggie Kilgour raises many important questions, for example, whether Gothic
novels are Bildungsromane.9 Yet, given the wide range of her interests, there is
no satisfactory answer to the pressing question of education in Gothic fiction.
Psychoanalytical approaches are usually ahistorical in terms of subject
matter, although some acknowledge developments within the discipline proper.
Basically, there are two main strands. One compares the Gothic in general to a
dream-like experience, in which characters, actions and locations can be read as
highly symbolic representations of otherwise hidden or suppressed matter. The
other follows Freud's example and treats fictitious characters as proper case
studies. Most apply a Freudian or Lacanian reading that is usually based on the
leading concepts of fear, repression, and desire.10 As my thesis is based on a
structural-anthropological approach and highlights the cultural context of Gothic
fiction, there are not too many overlaps. In addition, while Marxist critics tend to
functionalize the characters within a larger effort to expose and criticise
ideological and institutional power structures, psychoanalytical readings, in their
focus on inner processes, are often too specific for the kind of enquiry I am
interested in.
Feminist critics frequently rely on cultural-materialist and psychoanalytical
approaches to engage in a criticism of patriarchy, mostly focussing on Gothic
romances with heroines at their centres. Kate Ferguson Ellis's The Contested
Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (1989) is the
study that comes closest to my own interests.11 What makes her reading slightly
9
10
11
See Kilgour, pp. 33-9, esp. pp. 36-7.
See Michelle A. Massé, "Psychoanalysis and the Gothic", in A Companion to the Gothic,
ed. David Punter (2000; Malden, MA, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 229-41,
for a more substantial introduction. See also Wright, "'This narrative resembles a delirious
dream': Psychoanalytical Readings of the Gothic", in Gothic Fiction: A Reader's Guide to
Essential Criticism, pp. 97-124.
Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic
Ideology (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
Introduction
5
problematic is her "neat gendered parcelling",12 as Angela Wright says of Ellis's
article "Can You Forgive Her? The Gothic Heroine and Her Critics".13 This
statement equally applies to The Contested Castle. There are numerous
important observations about family in this study, but her strict adherence to
feminine and masculine Gothic as two separate categories forces her to make
some generalizations that do not hold. The conflation of various institutional
powers into the single concept of patriarchy and its association with family, the
church, and the law usually complicates, or even prohibits, a more diversified
analysis of Gothic narratives.14
Wright's own Gothic Fiction: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism
(2007) is an excellent introduction to various schools of Gothic criticism and, by
implication, of the Gothic itself. With a clear focus on feminist concerns, she
manages to achieve a fairly balanced, very pertinent picture that foregrounds
points of connection rather than differences. Jacqueline Howard's Reading
Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (1994) starts off with a thorough and
critical evaluation of feminist Gothic criticism that takes a stance similar to that
of Wright.15
A little harder to place is Robert Miles's Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A
Genealogy (1993). Much in the same way that Howard uses Bakhtin's concept
of 'heteroglossia' to allow for a broader, more inclusive approach to the Gothic,
Miles presents Michel Foucault's concept of genealogy as an authoritative backup for his far-reaching, perspicacious explorations of Gothic novels. Miles is
especially relevant to this study for three reasons: first of all, he reads Gothic
fiction with an eye on the representation of subjectivity and individuality, which
runs counter to the idea of characters as mere stand-ins. Secondly, he constantly
refers to the concept of 'threshold' when talking about the initiation of
Radcliffe's heroines into a world of experience.16 Thirdly, he stresses the
importance of education and the garden as the central metaphor of growth. Yet
12
13
14
15
16
Wright, p. 131.
Kate Ferguson Ellis, "Can You Forgive Her? The Gothic Heroine and Her Critics", in A
Companion to the Gothic, pp. 257-68, esp. pp. 264-5.
See Davison, p. 12, for a warning against oversimplification in this respect.
See Jacqueline Howard, "Women and the Gothic", in Reading Gothic Fiction: A
Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford et al.: OUP, 1994), pp. 53-105.
Davison provides a similar reading: "These Radcliffean Gothic narratives are cautionary,
ritualistic, travel-adventure novels that involve the testing and emotional growth of a
heroine on the verge of womanhood and marriage" (p. 90). See also p. 95.
6
Failed Rites of Passage in Early Gothic Fiction
these observations remain largely unconnected as they are used in various
contexts throughout the book.17
Although Gothic criticism offers illuminating observations about young
adults and their precarious situations, there is no study particularly concerned
with puberty as a structural phenomenon. A survey of Gothic criticism furnishes
one with countless details concerning this matter, but a suitable theoretical
framework has to come from outside the field. Natural choices are either
psychology or sociology, but these two disciplines are predominantly interested
in specific social and historical contexts.
A chance encounter with Marjorie Garber's Coming of Age in Shakespeare
(1981)18 finally provided the conceptual framework for this study. Garber
applies Victor Turner's theories on rites of passage to Shakespeare's plays in
order to understand which circumstances are conducive to maturation. She also
touches upon the question of power relations and the dangers and potentialities
of the liminal sphere, that indeterminate world outside or in-between structured
space.
Victor Turner was one of the most prolific and influential American, albeit
British-trained, social anthropologists of the 1960s and 70s. He brought Arnold
van Gennep's almost forgotten Rites de passage (1908)19 to the attention of a
wider audience by basing his own theoretical and sometimes tentative
explorations on van Gennep's basic tenets. The one concept that he became most
famously associated with is the liminal sphere and the associated liminal status
that people acquire when placed outside social structures. Since the concept of
liminality is highly relevant to a study of Gothic fiction beyond the limited
context of puberty and failed rites of passage, such generic and aesthetic
considerations are equally included in the first part of this study to provide a
larger framework and a consistent approach. In his later work, Turner himself
became interested in literature, especially drama and its ritual context. This
made him propose a rudimentary theory of genres which I shall touch upon in
chapter four.20
17
18
19
20
See Miles, Gothic Writing, esp. pp. 41, 76, 140, 183, for the centrality of education and
young characters, pp. 161, 173, for the concept of 'threshold'.
Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (1981; New York and London: Routledge,
1997).
Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L.
Caffee (1908; Chicago: Chicago UP, 1960).
See Peter Metcalf, "Victor Turner (1920-83)", in The Dictionary of Anthropology, ed.
Thomas Barfield (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp 476-7, for a brief
introduction to Turner.
Introduction
7
Together with Mary Douglas, to whom I shall repeatedly refer, especially
throughout the first part of this thesis, Turner belonged to the so-called
functionalist Manchester school of British social anthropology, established by
Max Gluckman.21 According to Blackwell's Dictionary of Anthropology,
… [f]unctionalism asks how any particular institution or belief is interrelated with other
institutions and to what extent it contributes to the persistence either of the sociocultural system as a whole or in parts. […] Functionalism required a more sophisticated
comparative method, interested in what institutions and beliefs meant to participants of
a society, as well as social correlations and interconnections. […] Functionalists liked to
show how kinship or religion structured ostensibly economic institutions, how the ritual
system stimulated economic production and organized politics, or how myths
(previously dismissed as idle stories or speculations) served as charters that codified and
regulated social relations. […]
Anthropology today continues its distinctive commitment to ethnographic THICK
DESCRIPTION of interconnections among different institutional and discursive parts of
society. […] A second feature of functionalism's legacy to anthropology is a continuing
commitment to sociologically contextualized cross-cultural comparison, and refusal to
allow the theoretical categories of North America and Europe to pass as unexamined
universal parameters.22
Turner's approach has come to be termed functional-structuralist, as he tends to
be inductive in his methods, despite "sociologically contextualized cross-cultural
comparison", and frequently arrives at generalizations that may not prove
tenable in each and every cultural context. Yet it is precisely this general
framework that makes it so fruitful for and easily applicable to other fields –
especially the study of literature. The temptation to engage in this type of
enquiry is all the greater when, in his introduction, van Gennep invites the
reader to test his anthropological theories "by applying the conceptual scheme of
The Rites of Passage to data in his own realm of study".23
However, there are three dangers involved in such an attempt. First of all,
one may be carried away too far into a foreign discipline, become too interested
in it for its own sake, and lose sight of one's initial focus. Secondly, one may
become so taken in by patterns and structures that one tends to see them
everywhere and rather fit the reading to the theory than the other way round.
Thirdly, data gathered from field studies among the Ndembu of northwestern
21
22
23
See Michael M.J. Fischer, "Functionalism", in The Dictionary of Anthropology, p. 209-12,
pp. 210-12.
Ibid., pp. 209-10. See Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York and
Oxford: OUP, 1997), p. 59, for another discussion of functionalist anthropology in a
contemporary context.
Van Gennep, p. xxv.
8
Failed Rites of Passage in Early Gothic Fiction
Zambia in the 1960s may not be directly applicable to a popular British genre of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – to say the least.
In answer to the first objection I would argue that most anthropological
approaches to literature rather suffer from the exact opposite, that there is no
reference or explanation whatsoever, and the literary critic's venture into the
foreign discipline leads to a highly idiosyncratic terminology and application of
concepts. Two of the most influential critics of the 20th century, Northrop Frye
and Mikhail Bakhtin, fall exactly into this category. To avoid such appropriation
of foreign concepts, I shall present Victor Turner's approach at some length and
as a separate part of this thesis, giving his theory more substance and coherence
in its own terms. I have, of course, selected those aspects that are most relevant
to literary and especially Gothic studies.
The first chapter introduces basic anthropological principles that will resurface
throughout the study. The central concept here is the 'unity of experience'. What
binds a society together is not so much an abstract belief such as patriotism or
religion, but the shared experience of meaningful activities. In the social context
of small tribes, it is, or rather used to be, possible to establish a system of
correspondences that meaningfully linked all aspects of life in one symbolic
order. This is crucial for a discussion of the (late) Enlightenment's political
thinking because the victory of a secular order and the fragmentation of social
life into various classes, factions, and parties, made it exceedingly hard to write
social cohesion back into the theories. This chapter also serves as a theoretical
background to a discussion of Gothic fiction as it is precisely this lack of 'unity
of experience' that troubles the young characters in Gothic fiction the most.
At this point a basic axiom of anthropological enquiry has to be stated. It is
a commonplace in anthropology and a necessary presupposition that one cannot
study the truthfulness of any given religion, but only its social function and
impact on society. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, one of the best-known British
anthropologists of the twentieth century, put it this way: the anthropologist "is
not concerned […] with the truth or falsity of religious thought. […] The beliefs
are for him sociological facts, not theological facts, and his sole concern is with
their relation to each other and to other social facts. His problems are scientific,
not metaphysical or ontological".24 When I treat religion exclusively as a social
institution throughout this book, it is not meant as an agnostic or atheistic stance,
but as a basic scientific principle.
24
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (1965; Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), p. 17.
Introduction
9
In the second chapter I shift my focus from a static conception of order to
the social changes of individuals within seemingly rigid systems. By their
biological natures alone, they frequently pass from one status or function to
another. All societies have to deal with the fact that their members are not cogs
in a machine, but are constantly transforming in terms of their bodies and social
placements. Those individuals undergoing transformations will automatically
cease to 'function' and drop out of their old social roles. It is, therefore, the prime
duty of institutions to accompany change in such a way that the individuals can
be successfully and meaningfully reintegrated into the collective to the mutual
benefit of both parties. These procedures or rites of passage, all involving a
symbolic crossing of thresholds, are necessary in a number of contexts, such as
birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, social, political, or religious office, and
death, to name the more obvious ones. In view of my approach to Gothic
literature I shall limit myself to questions of puberty and speak of rites of
passage exclusively in this particular context.
The third chapter explores the liminal sphere, the unstructured wasteland
outside ordered space, which becomes the setting for a re-educational process
for young men undergoing rites of passage. The passage of young women is
conceptualized differently and will also be addressed. As the liminal sphere is
associated with the formless and spiritual, the liminal experience allows the
dissolution and transgression of the usual boundaries set forth by culture, the reassemblance of its constituent parts in monstrous form and, finally, their
reconstruction in the old, and culturally desired way. This radical departure from
social life needs strictest supervision by an experienced elder to guide the
process; otherwise, there is a real danger of becoming lost. Since the concept of
liminality has such an important bearing on the structural, thematic, and
aesthetic concerns of the Gothic as a whole, this chapter also lays the
groundwork for the generic considerations in the remaining two chapters of the
first part.
The fourth chapter follows Turner's preliminary attempts to set up a genre
theory which grew out of his exploration of ritual and drama. Here my focus is
on his concept of the 'subjunctive mood' as a society's play frame. Similar to his
view on education, he sees creative work as a dismemberment that takes apart
the structures of the 'indicative mood' and combines them in monstrous form.
Apart from escapism and entertainment, he asserts a deeper meaning in this: the
monstrous allows a fresh and exciting new view on society by highlighting
implicit assumptions of the system that would otherwise go unnoticed. In
literary studies this concept has come to be known as defamiliarization. In this
way the Gothic, with its strategies of displacement and hyperbole, serves as the
subjunctive mood in societies and historical periods that have need of it. Robert
10
Failed Rites of Passage in Early Gothic Fiction
Mighall proposes a similar idea: "Epochs, institutions, places, and people are
Gothicized, have the Gothic thrust upon them. That which is Gothicized depends
on history and the stories it needs to tell itself".25 Early Gothic fiction points at
the weaknesses of the British Enlightenment project by foregrounding the slow
or non-existent institutional reforms and questions the seemingly unfounded
self-complacency of the establishment. Again, Robert Mighall pertinently sums
up this argument: "These novels do not reject the advantages of enlightenment,
modernity, and civilization in an irrational gesture of historical reversal; rather,
they cling to these totems more insistently through their troubled recognition of
the alternative".26 These considerations belong to the second and third parts of
my thesis, but are rooted in the concept of the subjunctive mood.
In the fifth chapter I shall address the question of how Turner's concept of
liminality relates to Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the carnivalesque as presented in
Rabelais and His World (1965)27 and Northrop Frye's broader generic
considerations in Anatomy of Criticism (1957).28 This proves particularly
relevant as Bakhtin and Frye are two of the most important and widely read
literary critics of the twentieth century who based their own theories on
anthropological concepts.
A further danger of a strictly functional-structuralist approach lies in the
tendency to provide the answers before the questions are asked and to use
quotations from literature only to prove what one has known all along. Turner's
own concept of liminality, especially with the publication of The Ritual Process
(1969),29 was in danger of becoming too broad and inclusive.30 Thus, to avoid an
excessive use of formulaic thinking, I am going to supplement my
anthropological framework with a contextualization of the Gothic in terms of
contemporary political and educational treatises. Thus, the second part of this
book provides a detailed study of major political theories of the long eighteenth
century which attempt to place individuals within various conceptions of social
order and define under which conditions they may be integrated. This is
followed by a discussion of the Gothic in terms of the relationship between
25
26
27
28
29
30
Mighall, p. xxv.
Ibid., p. xviii. See Botting, Gothic, p. 46, for a similar idea.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, introd. Michael
Holquist (1965; Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1984).
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
UP, 1990).
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969; New York: Aldine
de Gruyter, 1997).
See Metcalf, p. 477.
Introduction
11
individuality, society, and its institutions. As there exists a natural and obvious
link between the social puberty of young adults and their dependence on and
vulnerability to centres of power, I shall explore these issues in terms of family,
education, the church, and the law in the third part of this book.
The first chapter of Part Two addresses a central concern of all political writing:
the legitimacy of power. By analysing three key texts, Sir Robert Filmer's
Patriarcha (1680), John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690), and Jean
Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762), I shall demonstrate how the
Enlightenment established itself institutionally against the dominant power
structures of previous centuries, especially absolutism and the Church. While
Locke paved the way for an intermediary step towards democratization and the
political order of eighteenth-century Britain, Rousseau anticipated a second
wave of Enlightenment thinkers who desired a clearer cut with the past. Without
the option of Divine Right as the founding principle of society, both
conservatives and reformers had to base the legitimacy of the social order on a
different foundation. The traditionalists frequently invoked the Law of Nature, a
moral code seemingly built into the very fabric of creation, to serve as social
'glue'. In many of these theories one detects a clear reluctance to accept arbitrary
laws as the only means to preserve social cohesion. Rousseau himself presents
democracy and the social contract as ideals, rather than true alternatives.
Chapter two focuses on what Roy Porter calls the "late" or "second"
Enlightenment that gained momentum in the aftermath of the French
Revolution.31 While the basic tenets remained the same, the ideological thrust
was not directed against the medieval Church and feudal order, but against
eighteenth-century institutions that were presented in these terms to show how
backward they still were. From this point of view, the recently established
United States of America had become Britain as it should have been. Instead, by
an ironic twist of fate, Britain had played the part of the repressive regime
against which a properly enlightened nation had to assert itself.32 The utopian
vision of global and unstoppable progress was renewed in this late
Enlightenment and contrasted sharply with a dystopian view of things as they
are. A century after the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights, many
political thinkers and social commentators had the impression that the
Enlightenment order, in many respects, proved to be a foul compromise rather
than a substantial reform. The power of the king had been severely curtailed,
31
32
Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000; London:
Penguin, 2001), pp. 399, 423.
See ibid., p. 402.
12
Failed Rites of Passage in Early Gothic Fiction
whereas the aristocracy and local grandees were not only unaffected by the
revolution but benefited enormously from their greater freedoms. The
decentralization of the Georgian era strengthened their local control over politics
and jurisdiction. Having done away with the grand narratives of religion and
monarchy, all that was left were secular institutions, which determined people's
most immediate experience of the state. This leads to the curious situation in the
second half of the eighteenth century that institutions were increasingly
identified with everything that went wrong in the body politic, whilst they were,
at the same time, seen as the only means to better the situation. For the one
group, the French Revolution provided the impetus to abolish the institutions
altogether, for the other, to strengthen their grasp on the people. In this context I
shall discuss Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
and Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).
In the third chapter I argue that, as a major subjunctive mood in the late
eighteenth century, Gothic fiction played out a number of speculative scenarios,
placing individuals in opposition to various institutions of past and present. It
removed the comfortable security net of social integration and property and let
young adults struggle on their own without the support of the family, frequently
exposed to the arbitrary power of institutions and abused by figures of authority.
In this respect, Gothic puberty serves as a vicarious experiental matrix that
allows writers to imaginatively explore a variety of social configurations.
Instead of primarily focusing on the Gothic as narratives of victimization and
villainy, I shall demonstrate that they are more interested in the impact of social
systems on human beings and how changes in the environment have a profound
effect on the lives of these young adults. It would thus be too limiting to read
Gothic fiction only in terms of a concern with patriarchy or an attack on the
aristocracy, as Ferguson Ellis and Mighall seem to suggest respectively. There
are far too many deviations from and reconfigurations of such simple
oppositions.
To demonstrate these in greater detail, I shall concentrate on four centres of
power in the third part of this thesis in the sequence in which young people are
most likely to encounter them: family, education, the church, and the law. My
basic argument is that they all fail in Gothic fiction, for various reasons, and are
detrimental to the young adults' rites of passage. The variety of ways in which
characters become ill-prepared for life warrants such a stratified approach,
although the same basic idea is ultimately presented from four different angles.
In my reading of Gothic fiction, family and education are as closely related as
institutionalized religion and the law. Each of these chapters starts with an
overview that explains how the four institutions are presented and how they
Introduction
13
affect the lives of the central characters. This is followed by a case study that
demonstrates a particularly interesting manifestation of Gothic puberty.
In Gothic romances the central rite of passage is obviously the wedding,
often opposed by parents, until the obstacles are finally overcome in the ideal of
marriage and social reintegration. However, there is another pattern. Especially
in narratives mapped on Frye's concept of the tragic mode, characters may not
only be denied their central rite of passage, but may themselves become agents
of disorder and chaos, striving for alternative, often misguided enterprises that
estrange them further and further from society. The acting out of taboo
behaviour and the perversion of rites are typical deviations in this type.
This foregrounding of individual volition in contrast to established patterns
and structures – both as brave defiance of despotism and criminal transgression
of a social order – is the actual focus of Gothic fiction. Ann Radcliffe's
seemingly contradictory attitude towards Catholic monasticism in The Italian
(1797) can be explained as different individual responses to the same
institutional framework. Radcliffe is not interested in a consistent attitude
towards an actual institution, but in the vital question of how individuals
respond to and act within such a system. This leads her to turn one convent into
a female utopia and a trial of the Inquisition into a fine demonstration of British
law enforcement. In both cases it is the initiative of an individual that transforms
stern tradition into kind practice.
There is no escape from institutions and social interactions, as the selfish
enterprises of Ambrosio or Victor Frankenstein clearly show. In a world where
there is no appeal to a higher power, everything is determined by individual
action and volition. Although it seems anachronistic to introduce the idea of
'human rights' here, they loom large in Gothic fiction as a point of reference,
which cannot be pinned down to an institutionalized court of appeal, but rather
to a shared or felt system of reference.
After the dangers of being sidetracked by a foreign discipline and making
literature fit the imported framework, a third objection may be raised against the
relevancy of anthropological field work to a study of literature. Northrop Frye
seems to be a strict opponent of such an endeavour: "Critical principles cannot
be taken over ready-made from theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any
combination of these".33 Despite such reservations, he himself allows for a
substantial borrowing of anthropological terms and concepts where it suits his
33
Frye, p. 7.
14
Failed Rites of Passage in Early Gothic Fiction
observations on literature.34 Turner's anthropology is not a ready-made manual
for reading literature, although the broad categories he establishes allow for an
easier transfer to other fields. Where I use concrete examples from Turner's or
other anthropologists' field studies, they are meant as illustrations of general
principles rather than curious anecdotes.
This, of course, leads to an impasse. If we abstract data from
anthropological field studies and Gothic fiction to such a degree that both
somehow match, what remains must be far too eclectic to warrant any serious
and detailed engagement in terms of literary or cultural studies. If we do not,
there cannot be a common ground. In The Ideology of Ritual: Space, Time and
Status in the Priestly Theology, Frank Gorman addresses this issue:
In applying a sociological or anthropological model of interpretation to a text, there is
obviously no naive belief that sociology or anthropology, in the sense of statistical
analysis or field work, is being accomplished. Models provide a framework for
interpretation. This means that they supply the interpreter with a set of questions to ask
of the material to be interpreted (=data) and a way of integrating the answers derived
from those questions into a larger interpretative framework.35
This is basically true, although the tribal structure of the Israelites lends itself
more readily to an anthropological reading than does British society at the end
of the eighteenth century. This is why I use Turner's concepts rather as a
macrostructural device and complement it with a discussion of contemporary
institutional criticism as a further point of reference. It is always a challenge to
be true to a theory in its own terms and its application as an interpretative tool in
a different context. However, the concepts of social anthropology are apt to
enhance an understanding of Gothic fiction by providing a set of valuable
questions.
In my choice of primary texts I rely on the well-established canon of early
Gothic fiction, as it is sufficiently representative of the whole range of narratives
one is likely to encounter. My deliberate limitation to this early wave of Gothic
fiction has two practical reasons: first of all, it is difficult enough to establish a
cultural context for one particular era, and downright impossible to follow that
up through the centuries. Secondly, Victorian Gothic, by modelling its narratives
on court procedures and incorporating the principles of detective work,
34
35
Frye's approach is ultimately rooted in anthropological thinking: "Total literary history
gives us a glimpse of the possibility of seeing literature as a complication of a relatively
restricted and simple group of formulas that can be studied in primitive culture" (ibid., p.
17).
Frank H. Gorman, Jr., The Ideology of Ritual: Space, Time and Status in the Priestly
Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), pp. 30-1.
Introduction
15
gradually develops a particular strand, of which R.L. Stevenson's Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is the best example. Personal experience
becomes relevant as an eye-witness report within the larger framework of a
'case'. By and large, late-Victorian Gothic tends to treat deviations from the
establishment's point of view. It is in postmodern Gothic that authors rediscover
other essential concerns of the first wave. The experience of an isolated
individual again manages to become the central focus, with unreliable narration
as the most conspicuous narrative technique.
It may be prudent to give a preliminary definition of the basic terms used
in this thesis right at the outset. 'Ritual' is as broad or narrow a concept in
anthropology as 'genre' is in literary studies. In his entry on this subject in the
Blackwell Dictionary of Anthropology, Andrew S. Buckser, for example, states
that "rituals of transition [are] often referred to as 'Rites of Passage'".36 Although
I use 'rite' and 'ritual' interchangeably, I differentiate them from 'ceremony' in the
manner that Victor Turner does. A ritual is performed as an answer to a personal
or social disequilibrium that has the express purpose of (re)integrating the
affected person(s). A ceremony is usually a calendrical festivity that celebrates
social union and established order. In the first case, actual transformations in
social status or configuration are the result, whereas in the second, change is
represented predominantly on the symbolic level. It is, however, quite frequent
that the same cultural activity can have both effects, depending on individual
beliefs and expectations.
Finally I should make a few comments on spelling and formatting. The
Gothic is spelt with a capital G throughout this thesis as this is standard practice
in Gothic studies, as is, by now, the article. 'The church' refers to
institutionalized religion in general; 'the Church', with a capital C, to Roman
Catholicism. The year of publication given in bibliographical references is
always the first edition, no matter in what language the book was originally
published.
Research for this study was carried out within the frameworks of the
research project "Fantastic Body Transformations in British Fantastic Literature
from the Eighteenth Century to the Present" (April 2004-March 2008) and the
Interdisciplinary Research Centre: Metamorphic Changes in the Arts (IRCM),
both directed by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner at the University of
Salzburg.
36
Andrew S. Buckser, "Ritual", in The Dictionary of Anthropology, pp. 410-12, p. 410.