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Contemporary Scottish Gothic:
History, Identity, Monstrosity
MA Thesis Literature and Culture: Specialisation English
Universiteit van Amsterdam
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Contemporary Scottish Gothic: History, Identity, Monstrosity
Contents
INTRODUCTION
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CHAPTER 1
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Self-haunting: Multiple Selves and the Ontology of the Real in Alice
Thompson’s The Falconer
CHAPTER 2
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A Textual Self-Haunting: The Legacy of Stevenson and Hogg in Irvine
Welsh’s The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs and Marabou Stork
Nightmares
CHAPTER 3
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‘Gorgeous monster’: Bella Baxter and Scottish National Identity in Alasdair
Gray’s Poor Things
CONCLUSION
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WORKS CITED
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Contemporary Scottish Gothic: History, Identity, Monstrosity
Introduction
‘With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the
intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have
been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.’
(Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 55)
‘We are all subjected to two distinct natures in the same person. I myself have
suffered grievously in that way.’ (James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner 132)
The above quotes are taken from two canonical works in Scottish Gothic, both
of which concern themselves with notions of doubling – of the ‘other’ within. This
theme of self-haunting has come to be definitive of Scottish Gothic. Significantly,
while these foundational texts were written in the nineteenth century, there has been a
recent resurgence of the Gothic in Scotland in the last thirty-six years. Of course, at a
time of such political importance in Scotland – the devolution of Parliament occurred
in 1997, two referendums in 1979 and 2007 and, of course, whilst writing this thesis,
the Scottish National Party was re-elected with an outstanding majority in 2015 – it is
unsurprising that Scottish authors should return to a genre that has historically looked
inward to anxieties about origins and identity. Monica Germanà attributes this
resurgence of Gothic literature to the breakdown between the binary opposition of
Scotland/England; she argues, furthermore, that such devolution points to the
‘problematic diversity within Scottish culture’ (Women’s 2).
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The self-haunting prevalent in Contemporary Scottish Gothic is not a desire to
return to an idealised, unified past. Instead it utilises narratives of ‘otherness’ to
subsequently both reveal and challenge national anxieties by examining the instability
of origins in its own national narrative. All four novels examined in this thesis – Alice
Thompson’s The Falconer (2008), Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995)
and The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2005), and Alasdair Gray’s Poor
Things (1992) – employ the technique of self-haunting through a variety of techniques
and with a variety of consequences. However, all of the novels discussed see an
incursive, unstable past that continually interrupts and problematises the present. The
task of this thesis is to trace how this is achieved – through their intertextuality and
Gothic references to spectres, unreliable narrators, uncanny doubles or ‘gorgeous
monsters’ (Gray 91) – and to consider the larger impact they have on notions of the
self and national identity in Scotland.
Contemporary Gothic and the Search for Origins
The Gothic genre has historically always been in dialogue with uncertainties
about the past. Considered as the first ever ‘Gothic’ novel, Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto (1724) deals with the issues of a sixteenth century manuscript
discovered by an ‘ancient Catholic family’ (Walpole 59) which purports to relate a
story that dates from the eleventh century. Other famous Gothic novels such as Anne
Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) and
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) see the centre of the action unfold in ancient or ruined
castles – a spatial and physical embodiment of the past and a place for a recursive past
to unfold. Contemporary Gothic is not different in the respect that it constantly looks
to the past and its influence on the present. However, Contemporary Gothic often
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finds that the past it seeks to interrogate are its Gothic novel forefathers. It thus
becomes self-gothicising and self-perpetuating in its intertextual references to this
established tradition.
In his analysis of the Contemporary Gothic, Steven Bruhm argues, ‘to think
about the contemporary Gothic is to look into a triptych of mirrors in which images of
the origin continually recede in a disappearing arc. We search for a genesis but find
only ghostly manifestations’ (259). I find Bruhm’s argument highly useful in
considering the works explored in this thesis – all four abound with explicit or
implicit references to their Gothic predecessors. This is perhaps what aligns
Contemporary Gothic closely with Postmodernism: as it intertextualises earlier
narratives it surmounts issues surrounding representation and subjectivity and
problematises their epistemological foundations. From a deconstructionist, Derridean
perspective, one could argue that the pre-given ‘centre’ of Contemporary Gothic is
already unstable and ‘de-centered’ so that it never points to anything outside of the
text. As a result, the ‘real’, the ‘centre’ in Contemporary Gothic, and the Gothic more
generally, is always under scrutiny. Examples of this can be seen throughout the
novels discussed but perhaps are most prominent in instances where manuscripts,
letters and the recounting of events purport to be the basis of some kind of ‘truth’ or
‘reality’. In The Falconer, a found letter becomes a fantastical and frightening
indication of murder (Thompson 78), while ghosts and hauntings are left
unquestioned and appear somewhat banal. Welsh’s exploration of this occurs in two
very distinct and complex ways. Caroline Kibby’s discovery of her father’s journal
which reveals Danny Skinner to be her half-brother explicates a search for origins that
is still never fully resolved by the novel’s close and in Marabou Stork Nightmares;
Roy Strang is revealed to be an unreliable narrator in the final chapters, raising
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questions of truth and reliability throughout the text. Through his very explicit rewriting of Hogg and Stevenson in Marabou Stork Nightmares and Bedroom Secrets of
the Master Chefs respectively, questions of Scottish national identity become
explicated and challenged in their references to an uneasy and Gothic literary
tradition. Finally, Gray’s whole novel – a monstrous conglomeration of letters,
manuscripts and Gray’s own ‘Notes Historical and Critical’ – reveal a tapestry of
uncertainty as to where to locate the ‘real’ in the novel.
Myths and History: Contemporary Scottish Gothic
What is it about the four novels explored in this thesis that makes them
fundamentally Contemporary Scottish Gothic? Steven Bruhm’s ‘triptych of mirrors’ is
again a useful analogy here, since the ‘search for origins’ and defining the locus of the
‘real’ in these novels is so heavily intertwined with the narrative of Scottish (literary)
history itself. Subsumed by English literature and culture, Scotland has a history of
struggling to find its literary voice. The novel, which is considered so formative in
relation to nationhood, did not emerge in its ‘Scottish’ form until the works of Sir
Walter Scott in the eighteenth century. As Edwin Muir has argued, Scotland grappled
with the knowledge that ‘Scotsmen think in one language and feel in another’ (21).
Cairns Craig argues a similar vein, conceding that the educational system forms a
‘crucial part’ of the ‘literary infrastructure’ (Scottish Literature 2), but since Scottish
literature has only been taught under the guise of ‘English’ in Scottish and English
universities until very recently, much of the Scottish literary canon has been
subsumed into that of the English. Furthermore, ‘when the pattern of Scottish
literature failed to conform to that of English literature it was regarded as a deviant or
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deformed version of the true shape of literary development’ (Craig Scottish Literature
3).
In the absence of a coherent and independent literary tradition, it is
unsurprising that myths and legends have therefore had a major influence in Scottish
literary history. In his seminal study on the genre, ‘Heartlands: Contemporary Scottish
Gothic’, David Punter argues that Scotland’s position as a ‘stateless nation’ (101),
means it is often prone to turning to these myths and legends, such as, for example,
the Jacobite legacy, and in conjuring up these myths create a ‘romanticism which
continues to be inseparable from Scottish views of the past’ (102). If the volatile
relationship with history and origins forms the basis of Contemporary Gothic, then
Contemporary Scottish Gothic goes one step further in that its very history and origins
are unstable, mythical and fragmented.
The four novels discussed in this thesis therefore posit an understanding of an
unstable historical origin that is necessarily Scottish – either in its use of myth and
legend or recalling of Jacobite legacy in The Falconer; by explicitly re-writing
Scottish Gothic canonical works as in Welsh’s works, or by a monstrous embodiment
of the Scottish nation exemplified in Gray’s Bella Baxter.
A Scottish Self-Haunting
While novels such as Frankenstein and Dracula embody social anxieties that
can be located in an external ‘other’, Scottish Gothic has traditionally located its
anxieties inwards toward the self, as the quotes from the two canonical works by
Hogg and Stevenson at the beginning of this chapter show. This can be linked to
Scotland’s own uncertain historical origins and its impact on national identity.
Germanà claims, ‘Scottish culture…is pervasively haunted by a sense of its own
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uncanny otherness, the coexistence of the unfamiliar within the familiar’ (Sick Body
1). Forever torn between ideas of the self such as Scottish/British; pre-modern
primitive self/post- Enlightenment modern self, and mythical/historical, Scottish
identity straddles and permeates these often conflicting concepts. In 1919, the same
year as Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny was published, G. Gregory Smith coined the
term ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’, which defined Scottish culture as ‘the very
combination of opposites’ (19).
Inevitably, just as the Contemporary Scottish Gothic situates its anxieties in
the self, the ‘other’ within, in the four novels discussed, concerns about the self and
national identity find their locus in the body. In The Falconer, Daphne’s ghost finds
her ‘skin’ blisters into ‘black weals’ that spread all over her body (Thompson 92) as
the dark past of the Melfort family and Daphne’s involvement in it surfaces and
manifests itself on her ghostly body. Furthermore, Iris undergoes a metamorphosis
into her sister that sees the two become indistinguishable at points as their
appearances become more similar and their identities merge. Louis Melfort’s Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder sees him fit in terror as he recalls his time in the war to the
point where he can always feel it ‘at the pit of his stomach’ (Thompson 45). In
Marabou Stork Nightmares, Roy Strang’s comatose body allows for him to escape
into a fantasy world of varying levels of consciousness that is highly reminiscent of
Hogg’s Private Memoirs. Eventually, his past involvement in a brutal gang rape
means he is physically castrated by his victim. Danny Skinner and Brian Kibby in
Bedroom Secrets form Jekyll and Hyde-like doubles of one another as Kibby falls
victim to Skinner’s curse and his ‘id’ like qualities infect Kibby further. Reminiscent
also of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Kibby’s body bears the brunt of Skinner’s
excesses, with him eventually needing a liver transplant. Finally, Gray’s novel sees
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anxieties of origin, self and national identity fully embodied in the figure of his
‘gorgeous monster’ (Gray 91) Bella Baxter. A re-writing of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, Gray’s narrative traces Bella, created by Godwin Baxter from the body
of the suicide victim, Victoria Blessington, and the brain of her unborn child, as she
embarks on a quest for knowledge and origin. Bella can be read as a metaphor for
Scotland as she is torn between past and present – through her physical status as
Victoria Blessington and her subsequent ‘recreation’ as Bella Baxter.
The four novels reveal a fragmented image of self that is reflective of the
wider national identity question in Scotland (and perhaps national identity more
generally). As Scotland moves away from more ‘homogenous national culture’ in the
twentieth century (Bhabha 2), it once again is forced to look inward and examine its
own heterogeneous nature. Contemporary Scottish Gothic seeks to address the issues
inherent in such a turn – in particular, the reliance upon the past in our construction of
the present. While perhaps not offering hard and fast resolutions to questions of the
self and national identity, Contemporary Scottish Gothic seeks to expose such
questions, challenging and problematising them. In this thesis, I seek to examine how
these four novels achieve this. Beginning with Thompson, I look at her use of
traditional Gothic concepts of ‘haunting’ and the ‘spectre’ as exemplifying this ‘other’
within and questioning notions of a whole and unfragmented self. My second chapter
will look at the formal and thematic influence of Hogg and Stevenson – specifically
their focus on masculinity and its impact on the creation of a fragmented or doubled
sense of self – on two of Welsh’s Gothic novels. Finally, I will address Poor Things
and its interrogation of the self and Scottish national identity through the figure of
Bella Baxter.
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Chapter 1
Self-haunting: Multiple Selves and the Ontology of the Real in Alice
Thompson’s The Falconer
In the previous two chapters, I have highlighted, to varying degrees, how
intertextuality and the body become implicated in the current of self-haunting that
runs through Contemporary Scottish Gothic. Predominant ways in which selfhaunting has impacted the body are through doubling – as seen in Alice Thompson’s
The Falconer with Iris and Daphne, or in Irvine Welsh’s Bedroom Secrets of the
Master Chefs with Danny Skinner and Brian Kibby – or through illness as with Louis
Melfort’s PTSD in The Falconer or Welsh’s comatose narrator Roy Strang in
Marabou Stork Nightmares. However, what both of these effects highlight is a
permeability of the boundaries of the body, a permeability related to identity as
boundaries of the body become fluid or damaged and effect characters’ subjectivity.
The body furthermore relates to the intertextual elements of the novels, in that they
point to previous works in the Scottish Canon and their core themes of doubles and
schizoid selves. In this chapter, I argue that both intertextuality and the body become
interconnected to an even greater degree and to slightly different ends in Alasdair
Gray’s novel Poor Things (1992) through his ‘gorgeous monster’ (Gray 91) and main
protagonist – Bella Baxter. The novel re-writes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818),
as Godwin Baxter creates Bella Baxter from the suicide victim Victoria Blessington
by placing Victoria’s unborn child’s brain back into her body. In this chapter, I
examine Bella’s ‘monstrosity’, its relationship to the intertextuality of Gray’s novel,
and the wider implications of these two, closely linked themes in relation to Scottish
national identity.
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Alice Thompson’s contemporary Scottish Gothic novel The Falconer (2008)
predicates a form of self-haunting, that while persistent in all the novels to be
discussed in this thesis, finds its locus in what many have come to associate as
‘typically Gothic’ setting: ‘the apparent presence of a ghost, often finally explained
away by non-supernatural means; the very real presence of one or more members of
the aristocracy, with castles and other props to match; and a dominant love-plot…’
(Punter Literature of Terror 2). Alongside these universally acknowledged features of
the Gothic, Thompson’s novel purports a conscious re-examination of the past and
how it impacts notions of the present. However, what delineates Thompson’s novel as
necessarily a contemporary Scottish Gothic work can be attributed to three key
elements that I wish to discuss in this chapter. Firstly, each of Thompson’s characters
is haunted by their own past as it encroaches and infiltrates upon their present sense of
self. Secondly, as the past returns any notion of a rational, whole self is often
constructed as mythical and unstable: moments where the past collides with the
present disrupt time and space in the enclosed world of Glen Almain to a point where
even knowing and understanding the ‘real’ becomes problematic. Timothy C. Baker
foregrounds this as an important aspect of the Gothic. It is through this disruption of
reality that:
Gothic writings never leave the ‘real’ behind, but rather posit an
originary ‘real’ that remains untraceable. On the contrary, in Gothic the
‘real’ reappears in the guise of the fantastic: rather than being directly
accessible it is transmuted through ghostly or invasive means. (11)
Throughout the novel, the ‘real’ is exposed through supernatural or mythical means,
while that which is stated as rational or reasonable is shown to be thoroughly
irrational. This impacts the novel’s protagonists and their sense of self – rational,
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Cartesian thought that presents the self as whole and cohesive becomes subsumed by
irrational and fantastical forces that fragment and disrupt the self. While not
necessarily restricted to contemporary Scottish Gothic – the past in Thompson’s novel
is intrinsically linked to Scottish folkloric traditions such as fairies, witchcraft and
ghosts but also historical narratives of the Jacobite legacy and Scotland’s involvement
the First and Second World Wars. The third key element I will explore in this chapter
is that it is through this association that Thompson imbues the very landscape with a
sense of agency. Subsequently, the landscape too becomes haunted by its own past.
This chapter intends to examine closely how these elements are interlaced in the novel
to create a necessarily contemporary Scottish Gothic novel, where anxieties about the
real find their embodiment in the characters’ sense of self and in the landscape
surrounding them.
Ontology of the Real: the unstable past and unstable present
Iris Tennant, the novel’s central protagonist, is perhaps most affected by this
disruption of the ‘real’ upon her sense of self. She sees Glen Almain as the source,
the origin, of her sister’s death and travels there in order to gain answers and
understanding. Curiously, instead of offering such hard and fast, rational answers, the
novel forever foregrounds Daphne’s death as ‘more symbolic than real’ (Thompson
25) and often reveals more about Iris’ own personality. Subverting traditional Gothic
tropes, it is not in the ‘huge nineteenth century castle’ with its ornate and ‘formal
gardens (Thompson 4) but in the wild, remote Glen surrounding these that Iris first
begins to see apparitions of her sister, Daphne. For Monica Germanà, the Glen
denotes a particularly Scottish space for haunting due to its association with folklore
in literature (Women’s 136), as I will discuss in more detail later, but her linking of
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the ‘psychological dimension of spectrality and the revenant’s symbiotic relationship
with the haunted space’ (Women’s 135) is of particular interest here. She states that:
When entering a space whose legitimacy the revenant challenges,
temporal and spatial disruptions brought in by ghostly apparitions
amplify the sense of unsettling indeterminacy produced by spectrality
in the first place…By returning to haunt the living from the past, the
revenant defies the laws of time, disrupting the chronotopic linearity of
the ghost story...undermining, in turn, the ontological foundations of
the real. (Women’s 138)
Glen Almain becomes a centre of temporal and spatial disruption as Iris’ ‘logical
mind’ (Thompson 8) is challenged; what to consider as ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ is
problematised as she steadily confronts the past and her sister’s death. Strikingly,
these ghostly apparitions of her sister are never figured as frightening and nor is their
‘reality’ ever questioned by Iris. Instead, the objects, the ‘evidence’ around her
sister’s death, play on Iris’ rational mind and serve to question authenticity and
reality. The suicide note supposedly written by Daphne is a prominent example of
this. When Iris discovers the note, she realises that it is not written in Daphne’s
handwriting; she then begins a series of questioning:
Who had forged the note and why?...Iris’ mind was becoming
confused with possibilities. She was drawing up a list of names – not
of the war dead, but of the men who lived in the glen. The glen was
driving her mad, as it had driven her sister mad. Fantasizing about
murder. (Thompson 78, italics in original)
The note – something that has been presented as ‘real’ and tangible evidence – is what
becomes fantastical and frightening as it implies to Iris her sister was murdered and
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had not committed suicide. The way in which the appearance of Daphne’s ghost is not
surrounded by the same fear and questioning as the note, aligns with Germanà’s
assertion that the ‘ontological foundations of the real’ are undermined through the
revenant (Women’s 138). While normally a characteristic of magical realism and
fantasy, this technique of familiarising supernatural events and de-familiarising
seemingly banal ones can also be a particularly Gothic and postmodern trope. It is
precisely through the unquestioned appearance of Daphne’s ghost that we are
reminded that this is a place where temporal and spatial realms collide and the reader
must therefore be wary not to take things at face value. Brian McHale suggests of
fantasy that it ‘pluralizes the “real” and thus problematizes representation’ (75) and
achieves this through a
confrontation between the possible (the ‘real’) and the impossible, the
normal and the paranormal. Another world penetrates or encroaches
upon our world … or some representative of our world penetrates an
outpost of the other world. (75)
This certainly seems to be the case with the presence of Daphne’s ghost. When past
and present break-down, multiple temporalities are subsequently created and thereby
call into question what is being represented as ‘real’.
While Iris is haunted by the ghost of her sister, this can also be understood as a
form of self-haunting through the novel’s other fundamentally Gothic element:
metamorphosis. Sarah Dunnigan and Timothy C. Baker have both identified elements
of metamorphosis throughout The Falconer, typically associating it with the animallike transformations and comparisons of the central characters1 and Louis remarks
that ‘Glen Almain is a place of change, of metamorphosis’ (Thompson 71). However,
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See Baker pp 133-135 and Dunnigan pp 52-53.
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Iris’ metamorphosis is into that of her sister, rather than an animal form. This is
signalled in the very first chapter of the novel as Iris approaches Glen Almain on the
train and examines her reflection in the window:
just for a moment, the eyes became paler, more expressive, the nose
narrower and shorter, the mouth more sensual; her sister’s face looked
back at her, the backdrop of the reflected train carriage behind her.
(Thompson 3)
The sisters could be understood as doubles of one another, Iris representing the
rational mind and Daphne as the more sensual of the two: while Daphne ‘besotted
men’ (Thompson 25), Iris staunchly believes at the beginning of the novel that only
‘with reason can mankind progress. As long as we have reason, we have nothing to
fear. Reason will always master emotion’ (Thompson 15).
Yet, as the metamorphosis of Iris into Daphne escalates and the boundaries
between these two ‘opposites’ become fluid, their lives become somewhat
interchangeable. Iris initially resists comparisons to her sister so as not to reveal her
true purpose in coming to Glen Almain to the Melforts, but eventually she falls for
Edward and even borrows her sister’s dress in what seems like a conscious decision to
appear more like her sister and appeal to him (Thompson 100). Edward notices this
and remarks ‘But Iris, you’ve come in disguise too. You’ve come dressed as your
sister’ (101). Iris is also tasked with the same role as Daphne in aiding Lord Melfort
in dissuading the National Socialists against war. That she eventually, like Daphne,
becomes pregnant with Edward’s baby only further emphasises her metamorphosis.
Consequently, Daphne’s haunting of Iris becomes a mode of self-haunting as
Daphne reveals repressed elements of Iris’ personality, such as her sensuality: as is
explicit in her liaisons with Edward and the Falconer. However, the interchangeability
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of the two also is suggestive of a kind of optative mode. Andrew H. Miller states of
the optative mode that it presents the other ‘as an example of what I might have
become and focuses on the present as it stretches back into the past’ (199). The
optative’s emphasis is on alternative lives – lives one could be leading had one made
different choices at different times. The temporal focus is of significance here.
Daphne’s ghost, as I have discussed, disrupts chronology by appearing in the present.
She therefore serves as a representative of what could happen to Iris should she
remain at Glen Almain and make the decisions that she made. Iris, thankfully, when
pregnant with Edward’s baby, chooses instead to leave the glen. It becomes through
this metamorphosis that Iris’s journey to Glen Almain makes Daphne’s death ‘more
symbolic than real’ (Thompson 25) as these decisions reflect and alter Iris’s
personality rather than uncovering the main reasons behind Daphne’s death.
Unstable Selves
Iris’ uncanny metamorphosis thus questions ideas of the ‘self’ as a stable,
fixed whole. Germanà traces a pattern in Scottish modern conceptions of self that
‘emerges from the unresolved contrast between the post-Enlightenment, civilised self
and its pre-modern, primitive other self, which…returns to remind the modern
counterpart of its own spectral status’ (Sick Body 4). Iris’ metamorphosis embodies
this dichotomy: boundaries are blurred as the two sisters’ identities become fluid and
interchangeable. Iris, while having remained staunchly aligned with notions of a
‘rational’ post-Enlightenment self, eventually embraces Daphne’s ‘magical’ hauntings
that refer back to a pre-modern, folkloric sense of self. As mentioned, it is also
interesting to note that Daphne’s ghost resides not in the ‘typical’ Gothic castle but in
the glen itself. References that associate Daphne with Scottish folklore abound in the
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text. Hector states ‘Daphne besotted men…She cast spells on everyone she met’
(Thompson 25), suggesting associations with witchcraft. Similarly, the falconer states
that Daphne’s apparitions are actually that of ‘Queen Mab of the fairies’ (Thompson
57) . As Dunnigan states, ‘associations between women and witchcraft’ were
‘particularly prevalent in early modern Scotland, which associated spelling and
charming with fairy communion…That the fairies may claim Iris, just as Daphne,
recalls traditional narratives about fairy abduction as well as the popular belief,
largely of medieval provenance but especially strong in Scottish tradition, that fairies
represent the souls of the dead’ (52). Iris rebuffs such an association as ‘fanciful’
(Thompson 57), only for the fairies to speak to her moments later: ‘You, Iris, the
fairies whispered, will go through the glen, trampling over us, treading over our
paths, oblivious to our presence. But we will leave traces of wetness and dark red
clay, fern pollen and blue petal on your skin, as marks of our presence. As we once
did on your sister’ (Thompson 57, italics in original).
Such an undermining of this post-Enlightenment, rational and whole self is
fairly typical of the Gothic. Iris’ metamorphosis into that of her sister can be viewed
in relation to Kelly Hurley’s theories of the ‘abhuman’. Hurley traces a movement
away from this post-Enlightenment model of human identity at the fin-de-siècle
toward a more fragmented sense of self that continued into the twentieth century and
influenced theories such as structuralist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytical and
postmodernist (Hurley 11). She sees this as being highly exemplified in turn of the
century Gothic literature. Her theory therefore sees:
the ruination of traditional constructs of human identity that
accompanied the modelling of new ones at the turn of the century. In
place of a human body stable and integral (at least, liable to no worse
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than the ravages of time and disease), the fin-de-siècle Gothic offers
the spectacle of a body metamorphic and undifferentiated; in place of
the possibility of human transcendence, the prospect of an existence
circumscribed within the realities of gross corporeality; in place of a
unitary and securely bounded human subjectivity, one that is both
fragmented and permeable. (Hurley 3, emphasis my own)
As Iris metamorphoses into her sister, it renders the concept of a unified and whole
self mythical and unstable: as Germanà argues, it reminds such a self of its ‘spectral
status’ (Sick Body 4). Like the Gothic fin-de-siècle literature Hurley examines, this
divided, multiple self is not unusual within the context of Scottish Gothic itself – one
need only think of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde as an example of this. However, Stevenson’s narrative still perpetuated the
narrative of a fixed, whole sense of self, opposite which deviant and fragmented
Jekyll and Hyde could be constructed. For example, Gabriel Utterson in Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde provides a ‘total subject against whom the stereotype, the dark and evil
other, cannot prevail’ (Halberstam 81). In The Falconer, there is no such whole, fixed
subject that is privileged. Indeed, by leaving pregnant with Edward’s baby, suggesting
she has embraced her more ‘sensual’ and duplicitous nature, Iris leaves Glen Almain
with the possibility of a more positive future.
Such a positive future is perhaps denied to Louis Melfort: the novel’s other
main ‘victim’ of self-haunting. Suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after
the First World War, he too experiences the past returning to impact his present sense
of self. It is under this premise that Lord Melfort wishes to prevent another war and
sympathises with the Nazis: ‘He would never be able to forgive himself. He had
sacrificed his eldest child. He wanted peace now for his country, at any price’
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(Thompson 121, italics in original). Louis’ PTSD is highlighted in perhaps one of the
more disturbing moments of the novel when his mental illness comes to the fore and
he collapses to the ground with Iris by his side:
He started to shout out what at first seemed to her to be gibberish, and
then a foreign language she didn’t know. Then, slowly, she began to
make out the names of men: Donaldson, Macnab, Moncrieff, Fraser –
he was reciting a list of men’s names; he was naming the war dead.
(Thompson 43)
The past haunts his present moment to the point where he has fits as he remembers the
war dead. The war has so damaged him that he is now utterly consumed by fear; it is
always ‘at the pit of his stomach’ (Thompson 45, italics in original). Like Iris’
metamorphosis, Louis’ body becomes the site of almost ‘metamorphic’ change.
Without his traumatic past, Louis’ fears and traumatic past would not be influencing
his present corporeal state. However, unlike Iris, his fear of such a past means Louis is
forever threatening to be the monstrous presence in the text.
Presented as aggressive and unpredictable but simultaneously alluring and
intriguing, he finds peace in his Cabinet of Curiosities: an oppressive place of
taxidermy, precious stones and relics. Both Baker and Dunnigan argue that when Iris
first enters the Cabinet of Curiosities, she gains a sudden awareness of her own
mortality2. It is a passage worthy of slightly longer quotation:
A feeling of claustrophobia was overwhelming her, surrounded
as she was by these relics of nature. She felt she was becoming
petrified, like one of the objects herself, as if her life force was
gradually draining out of her. However, surrounded by his wondrous
2
See Baker pp 132 and Dunnigan pp 55.
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objects, Louis was growing ever more invigorated, as if meaning was
slowly being restored to him. His gestures were becoming increasingly
pronounced.
It was dawning on Iris that she was simply another object of the
natural world, and once dead would become another segment of hair or
bone. She would belong inside the Cabinet of Curiosities, as one of the
many objects Louis could add to his moonstruck, small world.
(Thompson 41)
In a profoundly parasitic, even ‘vampiric’, moment Louis gains strength and vigour
from the death surrounding him and Iris feels life physically ‘draining’ from her.
Confronted with these petrified objects, Iris realises her own mortality and, preempting the later discovery of one of her sister’s very fingers, she compares herself to
just ‘another segment of hair or bone’. In this moment, as in the moment where Iris
does discover her sister’s finger (Thompson 73), Iris seems to experience a sense of
abjection. The sense of her own mortality at seeing hair, bone or finger – the abject –
destabilises her sense of self, as Kristeva states the ‘“I” is expelled’ (4) when
confronted with the abject. Iris can no longer imagine her ‘self’ but ironically, in their
well-ordered cabinets, these objects become abject as they manage to disturb
‘identity, system, order’ (Kristeva 4).
The scene is revealing not just in terms of Iris’ sudden awareness of her own
mortality and this sense of abjection, but for its portrayal of Louis’s ‘insanity’
(Dunnigan 55). Like Iris, Louis is haunted by his past and by the war to the point
where it infiltrates and infects his present. Fear so consumes him, he now only finds
solace and strength in images of death. Displayed as a microcosm of Glen Almain, his
Cabinet of Curiosities contrasts with the glen not only for lack of ‘life’ but because
21
that which is in it can be classified and contained. It becomes ‘a deeply irrational
place, made to look rational with its particular categorization and labelling’
(Thompson 40). A place that even inspires a sense of ‘wonder’ (Thompson 39), such
a place can only be a place of abjection as it ‘simultaneously beseeches and pulverises
the subject’ (Kristeva 5). Just as Iris’ sense of selfhood is disrupted when confronted
by the cabinet, so too is Louis’. He draws strength from the objects that signify death
around him and becomes monstrous and ‘vampiric’ – terrifying and disrupting Iris’
sense of identity, he too becomes abject as a consequence. Dunnigan argues, that for
Louis the Cabinet is ‘a sign of his own fragile grasp of reality’ (55). However, Louis’s
irrationality battling against rationality is indicative of the wider themes of the novel
as a whole, as characters attempt to understand and interpret the ‘real’ against the
fantastical. As Louis struggles to make sense of the wild goings on of the glen, he
creates a petrified world that only ends up being more surreal than the glen itself. As
with Daphne’s suicide note, rationality once again becomes usurped by irrational
forces and any ‘ontology of the real’ is undermined.
Landscape, Past and the Self
The enclosed world of Glen Almain itself as the site of this action is what
allows for these concepts of the self to be challenged. As mentioned previously, glens
are often presented as a location of folkloric significance (Germanà Women’s 136).
Glen Almain is no exception in this regard, not only due to Daphne’s ghost but also
the numerous references to fairies, Queen Mab, witchcraft and of course, the elusive
Beast, all of which seem to reside in this ‘other-worldly’ space. It is precisely these
folkloric influences that the ‘post-Enlightenment self’ rejects so it is in this space that
22
this concept of the self can be questioned. Sarah Dunnigan sees the setting of the glen
and the landscape as an important tool for exploring notions of the self and identity:
Nature and landscape – the garden, the pool, the forest – constitute a
‘looking glass’ for the interiority of the novel’s protagonists. Memory,
desire, and dream find visual and sensory embodiment in the text’s
natural spaces; not only in the garden of statues and the woods of the
legendary beast but in birds, animals and objects. (53)
This reflecting of the protagonists’ ‘interiority’ is a crucial element. It implies a selfhaunting and reveals crucial, often repressed aspects of the characters personalities.
Examples of this can be seen in some of the most striking moments of haunting when
Daphne appears to Iris in the pool as if a reflection of her. The mystical beast that
haunts the glen is also of significance in this regard. When Iris asks the falconer
whether the beast is part of the glen’s ‘folklore’ he remarks: ‘Oh, no. He’s the beast in
all of us. The part of nature in us we like to hide. The beast’s as real as you or I’
(Thompson 55). This remark conjures up images of Jekyll and Hyde, of repressed
sexuality and the id. Indeed, Iris then dreams that she is transformed into the beast
‘running through the forest, panting, her mouth full of the taste of blood, weighed
down by her new animal nature and the full moon’ (Thompson 55). These moments
where some aspect of the self is reflected or revealed through the nature and
‘mysticism’ of the glen, once again problematise any concept of the ‘real’. In
presenting a space where this multiplicity of the self is revealed, the glen becomes a
place that ‘exists at the intersection of two worlds, at an imaginary point inside a
double-sided mirror that reflects in both directions’ (Faris 21). Although Faris’ claim
here is in reference to magical realism, it remains a useful metaphor through which to
consider the world(s) presented in Glen Almain. Elements of the self are exposed
23
through supernatural means that lead to the construction of a more ‘multiple’ self –
particularly, if we consider the doubling of Daphne and Iris, but also the beast in
relation to the ‘primitive’ ‘id’ complex and Iris as representative of the rational ‘ego’.
Reality and the self consequently become destabilised in the glen.
On the other hand, to simply see the glen as that which is a backdrop or
reflection to the protagonists sense of self, denies it a sense of agency: similar to that
which Louis achieves in his Cabinet of Curiosity, it removes the ‘life’ from it. The
glen has its own history and one that is also interpolated in the history of those who
inhabit it. Considering it in this sense, the folkloric takes on a greater significance: as
Germanà suggests ‘the Scottish supernatural shares a close kinship with the hardship
of its land’ (Spectral Self 1). The landscape in The Falconer, and all the ‘beings’ that
inhabit it, can thus be understood as:
not meant here as mere scenery, but as a balance of nature and culture
stratified through centuries of mutual adaption. It is a ‘warehouse’ of
common memories to humanity and nature, in which human and
natural life are dialectically interlaced in the form of a co-presence.
(Iovino 31)
That the glen and the history of Daphne share a ‘common memory’ is exemplified in
Iris’ belief that the answer to her sister’s death is ‘somewhere in the
glen…Somewhere amongst its streams and pools and mountains’ (Thompson 56).
After this moment, an apparition of her sister appears emerging from the ‘backdrop of
mother-of-pearl-light’ that then ‘dissolved into mist’ (Thompson 56), further
suggesting the history of her sister and that of the landscape are connected. Iris turns
to the landscape in the belief that in this sharing of memories – this co-presence – will
hold the key to her sister’s death.
24
The ‘common memories’ of Glen Almain and its inhabitants extend further
than the folkloric as Glen Almain also undergoes its own form of self-haunting. Iris
notes the ruined houses of the surrounding landscape to which Lady Melfort remarks:
The estate was given to my family as a reward for fighting against the
Jacobite cause. My ancestors were then responsible for clearing the
glen. Hundreds used to live here. Now there are just sheep and stones
and ferns. One day our family will be punished for the clearing of Glen
Almain. (Thompson 15)
The dark history of the Jacobite Rebellion leaves its traces on the very landscape and
the Melforts’ role in the clearances that followed ‘haunts’ Lady Melfort to the point
that she is sure that they will face judgement for it. The Jacobite Rebellion is a
common and important theme for Scottish Gothic and Scottish literature more
generally. Sienkiewicz-Charlish states that with the 1707 Union and the Rebellion that
followed ‘the Scottish nation became divided into three different groups…
Consequently, the nation lost its coherent identity with the people split between the
idea of being “Scottish” and that of being “British”’ (79). Evoking the Jacobite
Rebellion in The Falconer not only places the glen as a space of violence and
bloodshed, but suggests this loss of ‘coherent identity’ implicated in the construction
of Scottish identity.
It further constructs the glen as a space where identity is thrown into flux as it
too is haunted by a past that seems to encroach on the present. The ruined houses are
representative of a destruction that David Punter foregrounds in his discussion of
monuments in ‘Scottish and Irish Gothic’. He claims such monuments:
speak of history not as a living presence nor yet as an irrecoverable
absence, but as inevitably involved in specific modes of ghostly
25
persistence which may occur when, particularly in Scotland and
Ireland, national aspirations are thwarted by conquest or by settlement,
as they have been so often. (105)
The wider resonances of this reference to the Jacobite Rebellion, however, extend to
the overarching theme of war and German National Socialism present in the novel.
Aligning the Melforts with the unionists responsible for clearing the glen can be read
as an early indication of their Nazi sympathies. Sarah Dunnigan has noted that in
doing so, The Falconer displays qualities, of both ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ Gothic
(49). David Punter claims that ‘we might think of the “domestic Gothic,” in which the
traumas and defeats of the past are enacted on a home terrain, and the “foreign
Gothic,” in which they are displaced on to a fictionalized “third location”’(106-107).
In other words, the ‘civil and religious disputes’ (Punter 107) are displaced into a
fictional setting, removed from the possibility of a familiar setting – whether that is
home or abroad. However, while the novel certainly deals with what could be
considered a ‘foreign’ theme in its portrayal of German National Socialism, the
‘traumas and defeats’ are not displaced but remain very close to home – albeit a
fictional estate. As Baker argues, the ‘world of international politics is mapped onto
the Gothic, fantastic, isolated world of Glen Almain, itself a world in which nothing
can be certain’ (133): indeed, both ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ Gothic manifest in the
world of Glen Almain.
One such example of this is the family’s implied involvement with Gruinard
Island – the small island of the coast of Ullapool that was used for testing anthrax
during the Second World War (although the dates of the trials have been moved
forward by around ten years in the novel). Certainly, the fears and anxieties
surrounding the tests on Gruinard play out at one point on the very body of Daphne’s
26
ghost – her skin blisters turn to ‘black weals’ that spread all over her body and she
exclaims they are ‘the sickness of the glen’ (Thompson 92). The war and its
surrounding anxieties therefore do not find embodiment in a displaced ‘other’ but in
the glen itself and the figure of Daphne in particular. In Judith Halberstam’s Skin
Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, she argues that as a
consequence of Nazi Germany, monstrosity stopped being specifically localised in
one specific ‘body’ and instead Western society tends to view evil now as ‘banal
(meaning common to all)’, working more as a ‘system’ (162). That the Melfort’s
complicity and collaboration with the anthrax testing, as a deterrent to the Nazis,
appear on Daphne’s skin stresses Halberstam’s assertion that we ‘wear modern
monsters like skin, they are us, they are on us and in us’ (163). That these ‘monstrous’
occurrences took place on Gruinard Island, as actions of the allies, is suggestive again
of our inability to know or align with a whole, cohesive self: as monstrosity becomes
‘banal’, to use Halberstam’s term, it can no longer be ‘safely separated from self’
(163).
This chapter has tried to trace the ways in which, through a necessarily
Scottish self-haunting, Thompson’s novel constructs a self that is multiple and
fragmented – just as Halberstam’s comment on the banality of monstrosity seems to
suggest. Throughout the novel the monstrous ‘other’ is located in the self and revealed
when the past returns to disrupt the present. It returns in ghostly spectres to assert
Daphne’s ‘sensuality’ or in more sinister forms such as Louis’ PTSD, where only
images of death will soothe him. Set against the backdrop of Scotland’s historical
anxieties – a remote glen where the Highland Clearances and the trauma of the
Jacobean legacy have left their mark on the very landscape – folklore and the
supernatural forever problematise any concept of the ‘real’ in the novel. As my further
27
chapters will suggest, this permeates throughout contemporary Scottish Gothic. The
‘self’ and the ‘real’ become interpolated in a monstrous form that attempt to locate
their authority in an unstable past. While I have been unable to cover it more broadly
in this chapter, intertextuality plays a key role in how the self, reality and the past
function in contemporary Scottish Gothic. Thompson’s intertextual references link
back to both The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Emma Tennant’s
Two Women of London (1989) and The Bad Sister (1978) and mythical references to
Bluebeard and Ovid3. Aside from these allusions to other novels and narratives,
Thompson’s work looks to these traditional Gothic tropes, as I mentioned at the
beginning, but subverts them just slightly in order to create a more contemporary and
Scottish form. For example, Daphne’s ghost is not explained away by ‘nonsupernatural means’ (Punter Literature of Terror 2) and the indication is that such
supernatural activity is somehow inherent and imbued in the Scottish landscape and
psyche. The following chapters will examine how by utilising a similar concept as
Thompson, questions of a cohesive, whole self are challenged in Scotland and how
this is connected to broader questions of Scottish national identity.
3
See Dunnigan pp 52 for a broader contextualisation of Thompson’s mythical references.
28
Chapter 2
A Textual Self-Haunting: The Legacy of Stevenson and Hogg in
Irvine Welsh’s The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs and
Marabou Stork Nightmares
In my last chapter, I focused on the idea of self-haunting in Alice Thompson’s
contemporary Scottish Gothic novel The Falconer as representative of how the past
interrupts and disrupts the present in the form of spectral figures or in psychological
forms of trauma. This chapter will focus on another kind of self-haunting prevalent in
contemporary Scottish Gothic: intertextuality. Scottish Gothic novels often find
themselves referring to, and even completely re-working, two canonical Scottish
novels, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886)4. Indeed, even in The Falconer, Thompson gives a nod to this literary heritage
when the dark, foreboding falconer claims the beast roaming the grounds of Glen
Almain is ‘the beast in all of us. The part of nature in us we like to hide’ (Thompson
55), hinting at the doppelgänger legacy of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. Split
personalities, the fragmented self and doubling are the main focus of these two
canonical works, once again highlighting the tendency of Scottish Gothic to project
social anxieties and fears inwards onto the self, rather than an external ‘other’.
4
For example, Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978) and The Two Women of London: The Strange
Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1990) which are re-writings of Hogg and Stevenson’s works
respectively. Ian Rankin’s Hyde and Seek (1990) also references Jekyll and Hyde.
29
Certainly, these themes characterise Scottish literature more generally. In 1919
– incidentally also the same year of the publication of Sigmund Freud’s ‘The
Uncanny’ – G. Gregory Smith defined the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ where he claimed
Scottish literature, and more broadly the Scottish psyche, was a ‘zigzag of
contradictions’ (21). Cairns Craig in The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and
National Imagination, emphasises Smith’s point, stating, ‘the Scottish experience of
cultural dislocation finds expression in narrative terms in plots of biological
uncertainty or familial displacement. Such conditions are the breeding ground of those
schizophrenics, amnesiacs, and hypocrites who have so often been taken to represent
the essence of Scottish culture’ (111). Therefore, if historically Scottish identity is
associated with a sense of disjunction, the uncanny turn inwards to the ‘other’ within
in the genre of Scottish Gothic is reflective of anxieties about national identity and
historical origins. As Monica Germanà points out, Scotland’s history is ‘traumatic’
(Sick Body 2) and the discourse that emerges around it becomes equally as disjointed
and a ‘zigzag of contradictions’. She states:
Whilst supporting the rise of nationalism and national identity in
Scotland, the frequently romanticised history of battles for
independence simultaneously manipulates the past and represses the
nation’s darker sins. The opposition between the past and the
construction of historical narratives can be read in psychoanalytical
terms as the conflict between repressed drives and traumatic memory
(id) and idealised projection (superego), which informs the nation’s
own dialectical unconscious. The ensuing dichotomy emerges in the
suggestive disjunctions typical of the Scottish Gothic [.] (2)
30
Therefore, that the narratives of Stevenson and Hogg, which foreground the fractured
and fragmented self, become the reference point of much contemporary Scottish
Gothic implies that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century these concerns
and conflicts surrounding national identity remain unresolved within the Scottish
psyche. This perpetuates an intertextual self-haunting: novels in the Scottish canon
that reflect this uncertainty of origin and the fragmented self, contain an uncanny,
spectral presence. Irvine Welsh’s novels Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) and The
Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2005) are two such examples of this. In both
novels, the body becomes the site at which anxieties surrounding Scottish national
identity are realised, more specifically the male body. Often presented as permeable,
perverse, grotesque and sick, the monstrous state of bodies in Marabou Stork
Nightmares and Bedroom Secrets mirrors those in Hogg and Stevenson’s –
presenting fragmented or doubled selves that allow for an intertextual context through
which we can interpret Welsh’s novels. Developing this further, this chapter will
firstly consider the intertextual tropes of Welsh’s novels with a particular focus on
The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs – paying close attention to references of a
split, fragmented or doubled self. Secondly, this chapter will examine how this Gothic
intertextuality impacts on the concept of national identity in Scotland: specifically, the
notion of a present identity as being constructed through past historical narratives –
often those which have unstable or uncertain origins. Finally, I will then attempt to
unify themes of masculinity and national identity within Welsh’s novels.
Doubling and Split Selves
Just as the main protagonists of Jekyll and Hyde and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner undergo a fragmentation of self, so too do Welsh’s main protagonists. For
31
example, the narrative of Marabou Stork Nightmares mirrors James Hogg’s
Confessions of a Justified Sinner in that we are presented with an unreliable narrator,
Roy Strang, who, like Robert Wringhim, is coming to terms with a terrible crime – his
involvement in the rape of Kirsty Chalmers. We can also compare Gil-Martin’s
‘haunting’ of Roy Strang to both Roy’s fictional companion Sandy Jamieson and the
Marabou Stork he attempts to hunt in his subconscious.
Similarly, doubled selves that are reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde – and the
Wringhim brothers – are presented to us in The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs.
In a moment of sheer hatred for his co-worker Brian Kibby, inadvertently puts a
mysterious hex on Brian when he wishes:
wouldn’t it be fantastic if Kibby could take his hangovers and comedowns for him! If he, Danny Skinner, indulged in the pleasures of life
in the most wanton, reckless way and fresh-faced, clean-cut, mummy’s
boy wanker Kibby could pay the price! ... Skinner found those idle,
half-drunk ruminations evolve with an ockenblink into a violent prayer,
the ferocity and intensity of which shook him to the marrow. (Bedroom
Secrets 141)
From this moment on, Brian Kibby does indeed bear the pains of Danny Skinner’s
excesses. Danny becomes almost ‘Hyde’ like, often indulging in hard drugs and
violence the consequences of which – in another intertextual moment reflective of
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – play out on Brian’s body landing him in
hospital on multiple occasions and even in dire need of a new liver. Danny gains
favour at work but Brian’s ‘mysterious illness’ means he requires more and more time
off and eventually is forced into early retirement. Just as Freudian readings of Jekyll
and Hyde imply that Hyde is representative of the ‘id’, acting on primitive instinct
32
without any ethical reprimand from the superego, so too does Danny initially seem to
feel no ethical responsibility in his actions toward Brian. His attitude changes, of
course, when Brian’s health dramatically deteriorates and Danny realises Brian can no
longer work: ‘Everything is changing. Kibby can’t do this to me! How will I be able
to keep in touch, to see the effect of my powers on him? I…can’t lose him. I’ve lost
everybody else, never even had my dad. For some reason I can’t lose Brian Kibby! ...
He’s all I’ve got…’ (Bedroom Secrets 252). Danny’s longing for Brian to remain
alive is still troubled: on the surface it appears to be derived more from a sadistic
pleasure in seeing his double suffer than from a moral or ethical standpoint, but there
is an underlying awareness that he is somehow dependent on him.
This dependence becomes a form of inter-dependence as the doubles begin to
merge toward the end of the novel when Brian turns to drink in an attempt to deal
with the debilitating effects of the ‘curse’. It emerges that the curse can work both
ways, and Danny begins to feel the effects of Brian’s new found drinking habit.
Simultaneously, Brian also develops more ‘id’ like qualities, mostly involving sexual
fantasies towards women in his online gaming community Harvest Moon, his hillwalking companion Lucy and his co-worker Shannon. The permeability of boundaries
between the two thus becomes gradually more complex as the novel progresses,
aligning with David Punter’s statement that ‘Hyde is not Jekyll’s opposite, but
something within him’ (Literature of Terror 242). This is particularly hinted at
through Jekyll’s suggestions that he is utilising Hyde to indulge in certain illicit
pleasures and become ‘in secret the slave of certain appetites’5. The two, like Danny
and Brian, are inextricably bound as one’s behaviours and desires influences and
impacts upon the other.
5
This appeared in the original manuscript and early draft of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
33
These desires and behaviours in Bedroom Secrets can be linked to notions of
masculinity, a theme that is also prevalent in Jekyll and Hyde. I will return in more
detail to these themes later in relation to Welsh but for now, the thematic similarities
of the two novels is of particular interest. Jekyll creates Hyde in order to mask certain,
secret desires and retain an outward appearance of a respectable Victorian gentleman.
Linking this to Michel Foucault’s theories on the medicalisation of sexuality, Judith
Halberstam asserts that:
If Jekyll represents power, bourgeois power, Hyde represents the
pleasure denied and yet produced by the bourgeois subject. Hyde is
repressed, hidden and yet he springs forth from the very body, the very
desires of the respectable Jekyll. By conjuring up Hyde from the
mysterious recesses of his own desires, Jekyll forges a relation to his
own “perversity” – a sexuality that is onanistic, homoerotic and
sadistic – that imposes a perversion upon a set of behaviours that he
systematically disassociates from himself. Cursing himself for his
secret desires, Jekyll turns to science to find the way to both pleasure
and power, indulgence and repression. The doubled subject is split
between desire and respectability identifies power as the ability to be
“radically both”. (69)
Mapping this notion onto Danny and Brian, a similar pattern emerges. In particular, if
we look at the passage that immediately preceding Danny cursing Brian:
No matter how many of those self-justifying twats write in their
lifestyle columns in the mags and papers that you should be this kind of
man or that kind of man, that you should have responsibility to your
wife, children, employer, country, government, god, delete to taste, not
34
one of them can convince me that Kibby is not a fucking wanker and
I’m not a brilliant cunt. For however they spring-clean this
Responsible Man as a New Action Man or Renaissance Man, or a
Take-No-Shit Man, in real life he is invariably a fucking insipid bore
like Kibby. (Bedroom Secrets 140, italics in original)
Danny sees Brian as embodying the responsible type of masculinity perpetuated by
the media. By then deciding, in a sadistic turn, that it should be Brian who takes the
pains of Danny’s excesses, he, like Jekyll, expresses a desire to both indulge in his
secret pleasures but also to match up to these ideologies of a ‘Responsible Man’.
This uncanny doubling and permeability of boundaries between the two is
further foregrounded in the narrative structure of Bedroom Secrets. Just as the
boundaries between their bodies become more permeable, so too does the narrative
switch between their two voices often very seamlessly. A prominent moment where
this occurs is during Brian’s liver transplant. Danny, whilst in California, slumps to
the ground unable to speak just as Brian begins to undergo anaesthesia for the
operation:
I slump down on to the pavement, my body heavy and head spinning. I
lie groaning for a while, unable to speak, nobody stopping to help. I’m
totally immobilized; all I can do is squint up at the warm California
sun in my face and try to breathe slowly.
I close my eyes and seem to be falling into nothingness.
It’s so cold and I’m quivering in these robes on the gurney as they
wheel me into the ante-room of the operating theatre. (Bedroom
Secrets 282)
35
Through focusing on the bodily experiences of each, the narrative moves from
Danny’s first person narration to Brian’s with disorientating effect that takes the
reader a moment to register that the voice has switched. Without the help of the
missing line, it would be difficult to ascertain who is speaking.
(Un)reliable Voices: Intertextuality and National Identity
Both Marabou Stork Nightmares and The Bedroom Secrets of the Master
Chefs offer a variety of voices within the narrative. The comatose narrator, Roy
Strang, of Marabou Stork Nightmares narrates us through three levels of his
(sub)conscious. These three levels consist of Roy’s fantastical journey through South
Africa to hunt the Marabou Stork with his fictional companion Sandy Jamieson; the
recollection of events from his childhood leading up to the brutal gang rape of Kirsty
Chalmers and his subsequent attempt at suicide afterwards, and finally Roy’s
narration of the ‘present’ moment in the hospital room, as he narrates the
conversations and comments he overhears his family and the hospital staff having
around his bed and to him. This fracturing of the sub(conscious) into three levels, in
spite of it all occurring from ‘inside’ Roy’s head, creates a multitude of voices within
the text. Furthermore, these voices are divided by the layout of the print that
‘continually mutates and merges differing typefaces and registers’ (Kelly 101) and
often can have a disorientating effect on the reader.
In Bedroom Secrets, voices alternate between the first person narration of
main protagonists such as Brian, Danny and, to a lesser extent, Brian’s sister Caroline,
and those of minor characters such as Greg Tomlin and Raymond Boyce. Most often,
the narration takes the form of a third-person omniscient narrator and all the narrative
36
perspectives are interspersed with moments of free indirect discourse from other
characters.
The array of narrative voices in Bedroom Secrets and Marabou Stork
Nightmares, each vying to be heard, mimics the narrative structure of both Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Both novels offer several
narrative perspectives, although these perspectives are typically offered in the form of
letters, manuscripts and confessions (with an added opinion by either the Editor in the
case of Confessions of a Justified Sinner, or by Gabriel Utterson as an investigator in
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). This effect of the abundance of voices explicating things
through text is outlined by Timothy C. Baker in his discussion of the ‘Found
Manuscript’ in Gothic literature: the narrative technique can ‘highlight the
problematic relationship between text, language, and the past’ (55). That is, it
emphasises problems of authenticity and reliability as textual remnants from the past
re-surface and cause the present to be interrogated. However, while in Victorian
Gothic the Editorial perspectives offered purport to offer a voice of authority and
stability to the narrative – for example, Gabriel Utterson is considered a fixed stable
whole, a ‘total subject’ (Halberstam 81) against which Jekyll’s fragmented self is
contrasted – in the postmodern, that which is considered a voice of authority in the
present is also interrogated. This technique is highlighted to an even greater degree in
my discussion of Poor Things but also offers some significance here in relation to
present anxieties about identity and origin.
The interrogation of the past through the ‘found manuscript’ aligns with the
inherent anxieties in Scottish Gothic about the past, history and origins. Bedroom
Secrets, in particular, is highly concerned with this theme as Danny Skinner searches
tirelessly to discover who his father is, hoping it will give him further insight into
37
some part of his identity. He often compares himself to those he believes to be his
father and wondering how his father would feel about his actions. For instance, Danny
asks, ‘What do I really feel? Who the fuck am I? What about my old man, would he
criticise or praise my behaviour? De Fretais. He’d approve. I’m sure of that… He
might not be the slim, fit suntanned old boy that I imagined, but he’s a drinker and,
and he’s successful’ (Bedroom Secrets 180, italics in original). However, in a
significant moment of ‘found manuscript’ Danny’s anxieties about his father and his
quest for ‘origins’ seems to be resolved within the diaries of Keith Kibby, therefore
linking well with Craig’s argument that ‘cultural dislocation’ finds its manifestation in
narratives of ‘biological uncertainty or familial displacement’ (111). In the diary
extract Caroline reads, he confesses to disfiguring Donnie Alexander, his rival for
Beverley Skinner’s affections. He also confesses to his family – Brian, Caroline and
Joyce – that he believes Danny to be his son. Even though this discovery is made,
there remains some uncertainty. Keith claims ‘I know that he was my son, I just do’
(Bedroom Secrets 412), suggesting there was never any biological proof to the claim.
This uncertainty is further perpetuated by the fact that Beverley ‘remembered with
fondness and guilt that over the course of that bizarre evening she’d taken not one, or
even two, but three lovers’ (Bedroom Secrets 421). While in Stevenson, the found
manuscript, Jekyll’s final confession, offers something of a resolution to the mystery
for Utterson, such a resolution is denied in Welsh’s novel. We never truly know for
certain if Keith Kibby is in fact Danny Skinner’s father. Thus the uncertainty of the
diary’s ‘confession’ does not neatly tie up any sense of origin or identity for Danny.
In addition, the ambiguous ending of Danny’s search for his father and the
subsequent ambiguous resolution that is offered, characterises Scotland’s uncertain
position with regards to history and origins as suggested by Germanà’s statement that
38
‘Scottish gothic is the coming to terms of the fear of not knowing what one is’ (5,
emphasis in original). Germanà argues that this fear means ‘a pervasive sense of
alienation is generated by the gap between present identity and its bogus foundations
based on forged narratives of the past’ (4). Bogus precisely because they are based on
unstable or uncertain versions of history – whether that is through allusion to myth
and folklore, or by romanticised versions of historical narratives such as the Jacobite
legacy. Danny Skinner’s sense of alienation is created through the feeling he has
something ‘missing’ from his present identity that can be found through finding his
father but also an awareness that his mother has never been fully honest about her
past, manipulating and withholding information so it is forever uncertain who his
father could even be. The alienation even extends to Caroline Kibby when she reads
the diary and discovers that her father was at one point a brutal alcoholic, capable of
disfiguring Donnie Alexander. Her own sense of identity is thrown into flux as she
realises what she believed about her father is based on ‘bogus foundations’.
The ‘bogus foundations based on forged narratives of the past’ come to the
fore in Marabou Stork Nightmares in a different form. We learn that Roy is an
unreliable narrator through Kirsty’s final visit to him in hospital. While he initially
claims it was ‘LEXO, no me, LEXO’, it emerges it was actually Roy who was the
main perpetrator (Marabou 259, emphasis in original). In the final, brutal scene of
Roy’s castration, the ‘truth’ is apparently revealed. He states, ‘AH’M RUNNIN THIS
FUCKING GIG! AH SAY WHIN THE SLAG’S HUD ENOUGH!’ (262). Indeed, his
unreliable narration is hinted at earlier in the novel when Bernard visits Roy in
hospital and hints that Roy was raped by their Uncle Gordon, whereas Roy has merely
suggested that they actually ‘DID NOWT…IT WIS A WANK, THAT WIS AW…’
(Marabou 127). Finally, his unreliable narration is compounded in Roy’s final
39
statement, ‘I have no visible ears, I never really had much in the way of ears, it was
always my nose, Captain Beaky, they used to call me at the school…it wasn’t the
ears, my memory hasn’t been so good, nor has my hearing but I can think more
clearly now’ (Marabou 264). It emerges that Roy has even lied to the reader about
being bullied at school for his large ears. As Aaron Kelly asserts:
Not only has Roy’s narrative misrepresented the rape scene but here a
different self emerges – his tales of being taunted at school for having
large ears (‘Dumbo Strang’) are erased as he presents us with a revised
picture of himself that completely undermines not merely our sense of
his physical appearance but also the suffering he endured on account of
it. If such important details are revealed to be unfounded can any of the
narrative be trusted? By extension, can we fully understand – rather
than condemn – Roy’s life and actions if their narration is entirely
fictitious? Is the narrative finally another trick from a character who in
his school days and adult life evaded punishment for his violent actions
by duping teachers, police officers and courts through his adoption of
various personae…? (125)
Kelly’s argument can be applied, in a wider sense, to Baker’s discussion, mentioned
earlier, of the found manuscript’s ability to problematise notions of the past, history
and identity (55). As readers we are ‘duped’ into the notion that Roy’s narration must
somehow be truthful, in spite of its movement into the fantasy hunt for the Marabou
Stork. The disorientation that we are left with after the final scenes stresses
contemporary Scottish Gothic’s ability to challenge the boundaries of reality – a point
I highlighted in my previous chapter.
40
As with Danny Skinner and Brian Kibby, a plurality of the self – also
reflective of the postmodernist sense of self – and a plurality of temporalities emerges
so that one becomes uncertain of how to really perceive the ‘truth’ or ‘reality’. This is
further stressed by Roy, who consistently attempts to evade confronting the past and
his role in the rape of Kirsty. In an interview Welsh claims:
The text moves all over the place, in and out of different realities, like
Roy does in order to suspend the truth. The text is a dislocator, so he
can escape the real world of the rape and his confusion.6
That the text moves ‘in and out of different realities’ suggests a permeability of
boundaries that is also typically Gothic. Additionally, that the text functions as a
‘dislocator’ – that the different typefaces and fonts used signal moments where we
switch between Roy’s levels of (sub)conscious – stresses this uncertain relationship
we have with the text as readers. Roy is clearly trying to evade his guilt and confusion
throughout all his narratives, leaving us as readers also profoundly misled and
confused by what to perceive of as true or ‘authentic’.
Uncertainty surrounding truth and authenticity can be linked to the
intertextuality at play in both novels. As Baker points out:
Metafictional elements, including found manuscripts and clear
forgeries, arguably highlight the extent to which any text, or work of
language, fails to represent the past objectively or completely. In his
own first novel, Andrew Crumney makes the related but opposed point
that the past can only be known through language…this does not point
to any harmonious truth: ‘the past is a thing without substance, without
meaning, unless it is interpreted. And to interpret is to rewrite.’ (55)
6
Quoted in Kelly pp 101 who cites it from Berman, Jennifer, ‘An interview with Irvine Welsh’, Bomb
Magazine 56, 1996. 58.
41
While not wholly ‘metafictional’, Roy’s narrative utilises the doubling, split
personality and ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ themes of Hogg and Stevenson. In both of
Welsh’s novels discussed, the uncertainty of historical origins that they point to
implies a struggle to represent or interpret the past ‘objectively or completely’. The
intertextuality the novels exhibit and subsequent struggle with the past, can be linked
to Homi K. Bhaba’s theory ‘DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the
modern nation’ in The Location of Culture and Benedict Anderson’s work on the
novel and nationhood in his seminal book Imagined Communities. Both Anderson
and Bhabha argue that narratives are implicit in the formation of the nation. However,
Bhabha states that for ‘the people’ of a nation, this narrative strategy can be
problematic:
We then have a contested conceptual territory where the nation’s
people must be thought in double-time; the people are the historical
“objects” of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority
that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin in the
past; the people are also the “subjects” of a process of signification that
must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to
demonstrate the prodigious living principles of the people as
contemporaneity: as that sign of the present through which national life
is redeemed and reiterated as a reproductive process. (209)
The ‘double-time’ is subsequently created by this tension between the pedagogical
and the performative. The pedagogical form is the narrative strategy through which
individuals form the ‘people’, and are considered, in Anderson’s terms, as part of an
‘imagined community’. This pedagogy, as Bhabha stresses, is necessarily considered
as a ‘pre-given’, which he describes as both ‘archaic’ and ‘atavistic’ (213) and
42
existing in ‘homogenous empty time’ (226). By contrast, the ‘repetitious, recursive’
(209) nature of the performative posits a more heterogeneous time where these
mythical and archaic pedagogies are repeated. However, in their repetition they
simultaneously make visible the heterogeneous essence of a people always in a state
of ‘emergence’ within never-ending cycle of re-signification. This heterogeneity is
highlighted in Welsh’s novels by the plurality of voices and narrative perspectives in
the text. In the context of Marabou Stork Nightmares and Bedroom Secrets, though, it
is paradoxical that in the performative act of intertextually referencing Stevenson and
Hogg they simultaneously re-iterate Bhabha’s theory and also point to the futility of
‘national’ narratives forming ‘national’ identity because the earlier narratives they
base themselves upon are already problematised by being necessarily Gothic in their
trope. Such narratives are already conscious of this ‘double-time’ and of a split and
fragmented identity.
Scotland’s sense of national identity is continually embodied in this sense of
duplicity. As Craig concedes in The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the
National Imagination, the Welsh and Scots feel that their ‘identities are put in double
jeopardy by the fact that they are also participants in the British state’s construction of
a monarchic national identity, whose traditions are revealed to be equally a tissue of
fictions’ (13). These moments where identity is conceived of as in ‘double jeopardy’
due to the ‘tissue of fictions’ embodied in British traditions, are stressed in Roy’s
description of he and his friends attempting to re-enact adventure narratives from Enid
Blyton on his Muirhouse estate. He and his friends:
would think aboot running away and going camping, like in the Enid
Blyton books. We usually just got as far as the fuckin beach, before
getting fed up and going hame. Occasionally we’d walk to snobby bits
43
like Barnton, Cramond or Blackhall. The polis would always come
around and make us go hame, though. People in the big hooses, hooses
that were the same size as our block, which sixty families lived in; they
would just go away and phone the polis. (Marabou Stork Nightmares
26)
While Aaron Kelly pointedly argues that this can ‘show how masculinity is
constructed through the raw materials of adventure stories, comics and boyhood yarns
in Roy’s submerged unconscious’ (104), it simultaneously signals how the narrative
of idyllic, traditional English childhood was impossible for the working-class,
modern Scottish child and points to the tension inherent between the pedagogical pregiven narrative of the adventure stories and the futility of the action of the
performative, present reiteration of these.
Aligning Thoughts on Masculinity and Scottish National Identity
As mentioned, the
body becomes the site at which anxieties surrounding Scottish
national identity are realised, more specifically the male body. Strikingly, Hogg and
Stevenson both used the concept of the fractured and fragmented Scottish male to
reflect anxieties about masculinity in the nineteenth century – a theme that is also
highly prevalent in Welsh. Consequently, there seems to be a relation between
presentations of masculinity in Scottish Gothic and national identity. Linking back to
Bhabha, both the self and the nation remain narrative constructs. Furthermore, as they
emerge in the late twentieth century – particularly in the advent of postmodernism –
both move away from a homogenous, unified narrative to one that is more
heterogeneous and fragmented. Interestingly, the supposed ‘crisis’ of masculinity
reflected in Welsh’s novels, mirrors the ‘crisis’ in national identity in Scotland.
44
Berthold Schoene-Harwood posits that the late twentieth century ‘“crisis” of
masculinity derives from men’s exposure to two antagonistic sets of imperatives – one
patriarchal, the other feminist or post-patriarchal – resulting in a behavioural and selfconstitutive predicament that is experienced as utterly unresolvable’ (Nervous Men
123). Scottish national identity, as mentioned earlier, also sees itself put in ‘double
jeopardy’ (Craig Scottish Novel 13) by being a part of the older British/ English
national narratives of patriarchy and dominance and new conceptions of Scotland as
independent from these narratives.
In the context of Welsh’s novel, the construction of the ‘dysfunctional urban
male…colloquially known as the “hard man”’ (Whyte 274) is the embodiment of this
patriarchal form of masculinity. Danny Skinner positions himself as this type of man
in Bedroom Secrets and sees himself, as mentioned earlier, in opposition to the ideal
of the ‘Responsible Man’ (Bedroom Secrets 140). Danny’s death at the hands of Brian
ultimately points to the impossibility of reconciling these two notions of being the
respectable man but also indulging in pleasure and excess. His ‘performative
reiteration’ of this ‘Responsible Man’ ideal, even before the curse, consistently falls
short, thereby highlighting the unstable origins of its construction. For example, he is
continually unable to resist over-indulging in alcohol and drugs even when aware of
his ‘responsibility’ toward work or toward Brian’s liver and life. When it is revealed
the curse can work both ways, it becomes apparent Brian cannot also represent the
‘Responsible Man’ ideal after the curse – becoming more excessive, sexualised and,
ultimately, violent and murderous.
In Marabou Stork Nightmares, Roy also is representative of the ‘hard man’
ideology but his torn and fragmented self reveals the irresolvable tension between this
version of masculinity and the one posited by the late-twentieth century. For example,
45
the mythical quest for origins embodied in Roy’s fantasy journey for the Marabou
Stork sees an odd contrast between English/ British colonial narratives of masculinity
and the Muirhouse council estate form of masculinity he is brought up with. The
former perpetuates a narrative of patriarchy that seeks to civilise and empower men,
while the latter is in the novel is constructed as disempowered and even emasculating.
The parodying of the colonial adventure narrative expresses Roy’s wish to assimilate
within the dominant model of patriarchal power. However, even though this is deep in
Roy’s subconscious, he is unable to fully assimilate into this model of masculinity and
it is continually proven to be socially and culturally constructed. Like Robert
Wringhim’s fragmented self and double Gil-Martin in Confessions of a Justified
Sinner, there are moments of homoerotic tension between Sandy Jamieson and Roy,
for example, Roy watches Sandy stretch his ‘long, tanned, muscular legs’ (Marabou
Stork 4). Kelly argues that this homoerotic turn toward Sandy by Roy parodies the
homosociality of traditional adventure narratives and demonstrates ‘how traditional
adventure constructs an almost exclusively male world based upon the strong bonds
of empowered men yet also seeks to repress its own construction of a profoundly
homosocial – and in its own fears – homosexualised world and to declare itself
normatively and aggressively heterosexual’ (111). Therefore, this dominant model of
masculinity is subsequently undermined by Roy’s homoerotic turn, signalling the
contradictions inherent in its construction.
The opposing, Muirhouse version of masculinity is, however, no less fallible
and inauthentic. Disempowered by the post-industrial age of late capitalism in
Scotland, Kelly argues that ‘Welsh’s fiction is strewn with working-class men who
struggle to embody the myths of masculine power propagated by patriarchy that are
ultimately irreconcilable with their daily lives’ (20). While Roy’s fantasy hunt for the
46
Stork certainly can be seen as exemplary of Kelly’s argument, the family’s move to
South Africa is also routed in such a ‘myth of masculine power’, believing it possible
for them to make themselves a better life there away from the disempowering poverty
of the scheme. Analysing the Strang’s emigration in terms of the South African
apartheid and the de-industrialisation in Scotland at the time, Berthold SchoeneHarwood posits that, ‘While living under the South African apartheid regime Scottish
“schemies” may pass for legitimate members of the master race. In Britain, however,
they represent a severely disadvantaged underclass, of which the men especially find
themselves at risk of “losing their marbles” to the constant taunts and provocations of
systemic emasculation’ (Writing Men 152). Schoene-Harwood’s comment here allows
us to align notions of masculinity alongside those of Scottish national identity. The
de-industrialisation of Scotland in the late twentieth century meant the working-class
Scottish men, many of whom were made redundant as a consequence, led to the
impossibility of them assimilating with the dominant form of masculinity that
‘emphasises doing’ (Kelly 102, emphasis in original). The rupture in society caused
by this de-industrialisation was therefore not merely one of class but also one of
gender and signalled a splintering and fragmentation in Scottish culture. Roy’s father
attempts to change this by re-positioning the family in a position of dominance in
apartheid South Africa. However, Roy’s father is unable to get a stable job and ends
up being arrested for assaulting a taxi driver and they are forced to move back.
Roy’s fantasy hunt for the Stork in South Africa can therefore be seen as
mirroring his father’s decision to emigrate. Both seem to be a type of hunt for an
empowering, dominant form of masculinity. However, the reminder of Roy’s
involvement in the rape continually threatens to resurface but he suppresses it
continually believing that the ‘Stork’s the personification of all this badness. If I kill
47
the Stork I’ll kill the badness in me’ (Marabou Stork Nightmares 9). Continuing from
the interview quoted earlier, Welsh asserts that the Storks function as ‘doppelgängers
for his fears’7, which suggests that his fears are manifest in this form of dominant
masculinity that is continually under threat. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues
Confessions of a Justified Sinner, alongside other early Gothic novels, ‘is about one or
more males who not only is persecuted by but considers himself transparent to and
often under the compulsion of another male’ (91). Therefore, the Stork seems to
function in a similar capacity as a metaphor for the destructive power of this dominant
form of masculinity. By constructing this fantasy world, he attempts to escape this
notion but it proves absolutely inescapable as it transpires he is the stork (Marabou
Stork Nightmares 264). Subsequently, the duplicitous function of the Stork as both
doppelgänger and Roy himself points to the instabilities of this hegemonic
masculinity. It can only exist as a projection of Roy (or his father’s) subconscious and
is never fully realised.
Returning again to Sedgwick’s quote, we can perhaps view Scotland’s
narrative of fragmented national identity as being that which finds itself persecuted by
but also ‘transparent to and often under the compulsion of’ (Sedgwick 91) another,
more dominant power. The fragmented Scottish national identity sees itself seeking
historical origins that are simultaneously interconnected with narratives of English/
British dominance and patriarchy but also victimised and persecuted by such
narratives. Alan Freeman claims that this is shown in Marabou Stork Nightmares
through the Strang’s trip to South Africa which ‘provides an interesting reminder of
the ambivalent status of Scots, as colonisers and colonised, reflecting the relativism of
power and powerlessness which is always present in Welsh’s work’ (137).
7
See footnote 3 for citation.
48
Masculinity, like colonialism, in both novels, strives to assert itself through acts of
bodily power and control – such as Danny’s curse on Brian or Roy’s rape of Kirsty.
However, in both instances, such reiterations of this form of dominant masculinity
render those who try to perform it powerless: Danny too feels the effects of Brian’s
curse and is eventually murdered and Roy is rendered in an inert comatose state and
also eventually murdered. Masculinity and national identity therefore become
interconnected in contemporary Scottish Gothic in that they both become fragmented
or utterly deconstructed in the novels when they attempt to form a homogenous,
unified narrative.
In conclusion, this chapter has sought to examine the intertextuality of
Welsh’s novels and their reference to the Scottish Gothic canon of Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In doing so, I have attempted to stress how this
intertextuality highlights Scotland’s own problematic relationship between the past
and the present, since the historical and national narratives referenced are troubled in
themselves by issues of identity and duplicity. Such a tension results in a
fragmentation or doubling that is reiterated in the bodies of Welsh’s characters.
Furthermore, that it is the masculine body through which such tensions surrounding
national identity are realised, posits an understanding that ‘masculinity’ is also
problematised. Aligning these notions of identity in the context of Scotland, SchoeneHarwood argues:
Scotland’s crisis of nationhood mirrors the predicament of the
contemporary masculine self, keen to become part of new, communal
49
configurations, yet held back by pomophobic8 anxieties over its exact
status and position: if nationhood and/or masculinity were to yield
wholeheartedly to postmodern diversification, how – if at all – might
they come to reassemble? The nation and the masculine self have
therefore become highly volatile entities, prone to violence and
hypersensitive to hysteria. (Nervous Men 124)
In the context of Welsh, I agree with Schoene-Harwood that such configurations of
national identity and masculinity struggle to reassemble themselves. Tensions
between old pre-given narratives and new contemporary ones remain unresolved
within the novels – and in the context of masculinity, these conflicting narratives
often result in inertia and death. However, given the context of my next chapter, I
refuse to be as pessimistic as Schoene-Harwood in my outlook. When anxieties
surrounding national identity find their locus in the monstrous, female body of Bella
Baxter in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things they subsequently embrace postmodern
diversification. Furthermore, Bella’s configuration as the juxtaposed ‘gorgeous
monster’ (Gray 91) stresses that narratives of identity, specifically nationhood, need
not reassemble themselves as a unified whole but rather they can be reassembled to
form a national narrative that embraces heterogeneity, plurality and difference.
8
Schoene-Harwood uses Thomas Byers’ definition of pomophobia here as meaning ‘the persistent
fears on the part of the formerly dominant order that has begun to recognize it is becoming residual’
(Byers as quoted in Schoene 124)
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Chapter 3
‘Gorgeous monster’: Bella Baxter and Scottish National Identity in
Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things
In the previous two chapters, I have highlighted, to varying degrees, how
intertextuality and the body become implicated in the current of self-haunting that
runs through Contemporary Scottish Gothic. Predominant ways in which selfhaunting has impacted the body are through doubling – as seen in Alice Thompson’s
The Falconer with Iris and Daphne, or in Irvine Welsh’s Bedroom Secrets of the
Master Chefs with Danny Skinner and Brian Kibby – or through illness as with Louis
Melfort’s PTSD in The Falconer or Welsh’s comatose narrator Roy Strang in
Marabou Stork Nightmares. However, what both of these effects highlight is a
permeability of the boundaries of the body, a permeability related to identity as
boundaries of the body become fluid or damaged and effect characters’ subjectivity.
The body furthermore relates to the intertextual elements of the novels, in that they
point to previous works in the Scottish Canon and their core themes of doubles and
schizoid selves. In this chapter, I argue that both intertextuality and the body become
interconnected to an even greater degree and to slightly different ends in Alasdair
Gray’s novel Poor Things (1992) through his ‘gorgeous monster’ (Gray 91) and main
protagonist – Bella Baxter. The novel re-writes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818),
as Godwin Baxter creates Bella Baxter from the suicide victim Victoria Blessington
by placing Victoria’s unborn child’s brain back into her body. In this chapter, I
examine Bella’s ‘monstrosity’, its relationship to the intertextuality of Gray’s novel,
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and the wider implications of these two, closely linked themes in relation to Scottish
national identity.
Bella Baxter: Monstrosity and Identity
As with Frankenstein’s creature, attributing ‘monstrosity’ to Bella Baxter can
be problematic due to the ambivalent and multifaceted notion of ‘monstrosity’ itself.
When Frankenstein’s creature is portrayed in films he is often depicted as hideous as
the description given in Mary Shelley’s novel: a ‘wretch’ whose ‘yellow skin scarcely
covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath’ (51). Bella Baxter, by contrast, is
described by Archibald McCandless as ‘tall, beautiful’ and with a ‘full-bodied figure’
(Gray 29). Her monstrosity cannot therefore be attributed to her appearance but
instead, like Frankenstein’s creature, her supposed monstrosity evolves from the
relationship with her creator and those around her. Therefore, monstrosity in relation
to Frankenstein’s creature and, by extension, Bella Baxter, can be perceived of as
subjective. As a result, where to locate monstrosity in Frankenstein often becomes a
moral, ethical and humanist argument. Percy Shelley, in the preface to the 1832
edition of his wife’s novel, encouraged such a reading:
In this the direct moral of the book consists; and it is perhaps the most
important, and of the most universal application, of any moral that can
be enforced by example. Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked.
Requite affection with scorn; – let one being be selected, for whatever
cause, as the refuse of his kind – divide him, a social being, from
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society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations –
malevolence and selfishness. (311)9
Readers of Frankenstein are consequently forced to consider whether the monstrosity
of Frankenstein’s creature is borne out of the fact that he has been treated badly by
those around him and whether the real monstrosity lies within Victor Frankenstein’s
own obsessions, fears and desires.
On the surface, it is easy to overlay the main characters and plot of
Frankenstein onto Poor Things but Gray denies us such a straightforward ethical
reading. Joanna Malecka offers a deconstructionist approach to reading Poor Things,
which is particularly helpful in this instance. She posits that:
While Shelley’s discussion of monstrosity leads to an ethical
conclusion, the way Poor Things further questions the concept of
monstrosity not only discredits such a moral stance, but also discards
any possibility of drawing a conclusion on the discussion. Instead, it
allows for different readings of monstrosity and shows the
impossibility of attaining a final understanding of its meaning even as
it seems to change at each approach and in the end remains open to
uncertainty. (151)
Malecka’s point here is valid but I feel her subsequent analysis of Bella’s monstrosity
only begins to scratch at the surface. Although Malecka identifies Bella’s monstrosity
as similar to Frankenstein’s creature in the sense that they are both ‘a “construct”
made of unsuitable parts put together’ (152), she fails to acknowledge that their
monstrosity must be historically conditioned. A pure comparison between
9
Quoted from Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. D.L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf. Second
Edition. Canada: Broadview Press, 2005. All other Frankenstein quotations are taken from the 2012
Penguin Classic Edition.
53
Frankenstein’s creature and Bella fails to consider how, or even if, what was
considered monstrous in a nineteenth century context can even be attributed or
considered in a postmodern age, due to the supposed fractured and fragmented
subjectivity associated with postmodernism. If ‘monstrosity’ is subjective, or
‘ascribed’ (Graham 64), then altering it for a postmodern subjectivity is essential.
In her work Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters,
Judith Halberstam charts the shift in our conception of monsters from the nineteenth
through to the late twentieth century. She argues that our conception of monsters in
the nineteenth century can be helpful for examining monstrosity in the postmodern
age but warns us that the position of monstrosity in the postmodern has ‘shifted’ (27).
She claims that:
The monster, eventually, is no longer totalizing. The monstrous body
that once represented everything is now represented as potentially
meaning anything…Within postmodern Gothic we no longer attempt
to identify the monster and fix the terms of his/her deformity…The
monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction
of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so we need monsters
and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosity. (27)
Halberstam’s point here is helpful in relating back to Malecka’s assertion that
monstrosity in Poor Things evades easy understanding and definition. Halberstam
identifies Frankenstein’s creature as a ‘totalizing monster’ (29) that functions as the
embodiment of a whole host of nineteenth century fears and anxieties. By contrast,
monstrosity in the postmodern is now linked to ‘facets of identity; the sexual other
and the racial other can no longer be safely separated from the self’ (Halberstam 163).
Through this mechanism, monstrosity in the postmodern warns us to be careful of
54
how we construct our notion of self and other, monster and human. As Malecka notes,
the subject chapters ‘Making Me’, ‘Making Godwin Baxter’, ‘Making Bella Baxter’
and ‘Making a Maniac’ all posit an understanding that Bella is ‘not necessarily the
only monster in the novel…Gray implies that all of his characters resemble Bella as
constructs of different and often incongruous ideas’ (Malecka 152). Like Bella, the
other characters embody a form of postmodern monstrosity that evades easy
definition because it is no longer embodied in one centralised ‘totalising’ other but
instead monstrosity can be a feature identifiable in all of us.
Halberstam does rightly contend that nineteenth century monstrosity can be
useful in examining postmodern notions of monstrosity. Monsters, Frankenstein’s
creature included, all straddle the boundaries through which subjectivity is formed.
Elaine L. Graham contends that, ‘Insofar as the creature at the heart of the tale is both
(and neither) alive nor dead, born nor made, natural nor artificial, he confuses the
boundaries by which normative humanity has been delineated’ (62). This too can be
argued of Bella Baxter: she exists on the borders of what is considered ‘normative
humanity’ and threatens the established social norms because she breaks down binary
oppositions that construct an understanding of the self as whole and unfragmented.
Gray is consequently not only critical of the ambivalent assumptions of the
‘monstrous’ but critical of the hegemonic ‘humanist’ ideology that functions as its
opposite. An example of such critique is apparent in his complete deconstruction of
the mind/body Cartesian dualism at the centre of Bella’s identity. Godwin Baxter
critiques this dualism at the beginning of the novel when he states that his
contemporaries in medicine ‘treat patients’ bodies as if the minds, the lives were of no
account’ (Gray 17, emphasis in original). Indeed in creating Bella, he instantly shows
that the dualism is fallible. He argues that when Bella meets Archie McCandless he
55
can see her attraction to him: ‘I saw her sense it through the finger tips. Her response
showed that her body was recalling carnal sensations from its earlier life, and the
sensations excited her brain into new thoughts and word forms’ (Gray 36). The mind
body split is further deconstructed when Bella seems to almost remember the General:
‘something in your voice and appearance does seem familiar’ (Gray 216). It is upon
the General’s touch that Bella remembers – ‘You are horrible!’ (Gray 216). As
Malecka rightly notes, this is also the same thing Victoria states when she leaves her
husband (Malecka 153) and therefore, ‘although Bella seems to be generally unaware
of her past, and her mind is overall a tabula rasa, memories from Victoria’s life from
time to time mysteriously break through and make their way to Bella’s awareness’
(Malecka 153). This suggests that the mind and body do not exist independently of
one another – since Bella’s/Victoria’s physical body, when touched by the General’s,
seems to trigger an emotional response, if not full memories, in Bella’s brain.
Furthermore, it signifies an understanding of a kind of plural subjectivity existing
within Bella that is fundamentally postmodern.
Gray’s not only rejects and undermines the humanist ideology of the
mind/body split but rewrites humanism through his emphasis on discourse or
narrative as a means of constructing the self. Such a focus aligns closely with David
Hume’s theories on identity. Donald P. Kaczvinsky makes this connection and argues
that, through Bella, Gray echoes Hume’s suggestion that, ‘All the disputes concerning
the identity of connected objects [for example, selfhood] are merely verbal, except so
far as the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction or imaginary principle of union’
(Hume 262)10. Hume’s notion of ‘objects’ throughout A Treatise of Human Nature
10
As quoted in David Kaczvinsky pp778.
56
can be somewhat confusing at times due to the many meanings he attaches to them11.
However, here ‘connected objects’, I believe attributes to the notion of ‘impressions’
(Hume 261), and their fainter relation to ‘ideas’ (Hume 261) as the items through
which he claims we construct our selfhood. Hume’s hypothesis is therefore that the
self is a fiction and any sense of it arises from language. Taking up this ‘predeconstructionist’ approach, Gray’s novel works to exactly that end in its very form
and narrative style. Questions of selfhood are thrown into flux by the novel’s very
intertextuality and ‘monstrous’ form. This is brilliantly foregrounded before the novel
even begins on the fifth page in the 2002 paperback edition. A list of reviews – many
of which point to the ‘inauthenticities’ of Gray’s novel – are cut across by a skewed
rectangle, inside of which claims ‘erratum. The etching on page 187 does not portray
Professor Jean Martin Charcot, but Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac’12. Thus,
Gray brilliantly establishes the tone of the rest of Poor Things: even as we are
presented with what seems to be ‘factual reviews’, they are undercut by Gray’s
‘erratum’, which despite pointing to the main body of the text, undermines the very
concept of ‘fact’ or ‘truth’ before he even begins. What follows subsequently is a
series of ‘interpretations’ of events: Gray’s introduction, which outlines how he
encountered Archie’s manuscript; Archie’s manuscript itself, comprised also of letters
from Duncan Wedderburn and Bella; Victoria’s ‘corrections’ of the manuscript, and
finally, Gray’s own ‘Notes Critical and Historical’. The multitude of interpretations of
events leads the reader through a number of supposed ‘realities’ that causes her to
question what is to be perceived as ‘truth’ and how text and literature can both
foreground and obscure notions of selfhood.
11
See Grene, Marjory ‘The Objects of Hume’s Treatise’. Hume Studies Volume XX, Number 2.
November, 1994. 163-177.
12
As quoted in the 2002 Bloomsbury Edition.
57
The letters in the novel from both Bella Baxter and Victoria Blessington are
the most prominent examples of this deconstructionist approach to language and how
it mediates a ‘self’. Bella’s initial letters to Archie and Godwin are missing vowels
and are written in huge letters, like an infant child learning to write: “DR GD I HD N
PC T WRT BFR/ W R FLT PN THS BL BL S” (Gray 101). However, Godwin
interprets them and even constructs a title for them: ‘MAKING A CONSCIENCE’
(Gray 102), and as Archie notes, ‘The following letter is given, not as Bella spelled it,
but as Baxter recited it’ (Gray 102). Bella is interpreted and reproduced – just as in
the way she was created – by the men around her who, by re-interpreting her,
misinterpret her through language. The only moment where Godwin is almost
incapable of ‘deciphering’ her letters is in her moment of trauma in Alexandria. He
claims in this moment that she states:
no no no no no no no no, help blind baby, poor little girl help help
both, trampled no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no, where my daughter, no help for blind babies poor little
girls I am glad I bit Mr. Astley. (Gray 151)
Yet, as Timothy C. Baker notes, and the pages in the novel itself show (Gray 145151), the repetitions of ‘no’ that Baxter translates ‘are a series of jagged strokes
without separation; for the reader, if not for Baxter, they appear merely as marks
without signification’ (61). The figure below shows the two pages to which Baker
refers.
58
(Gray 145 and 147-148)
As the above images show, the parts that Baxter interprets as meaning ‘no’ do simply
appear to be merely lines and scratches on the page that are difficult to decipher or
interpret. Baker claims that it is in the moment where the marks have no signification
that Bella’s letter ‘can initially be seen as the locus of the real in the novel, or what
remains when all of the intertextual layers have been stripped away’ (61). Bella’s
sense of self – her experience in Alexandria and the ‘real’ essence of this experience –
is not capable of being fully articulated. Any attempt to do this undermines the true
nature of this experience and her self and implies language’s inability to fully
articulate or express the ‘real’ – as is further emphasised by Godwin’s translation
which is read ‘in a steady and uninflected voice’ (Gray 151).
Bella’s experience, the ‘real’ – a definitive moment for her that in turn
influences her sense of selfhood – becomes reiterated as signs by her initially on the
page and then, removed further as they become as simulacra by Godwin that never
again truly reflect, nor comprehend, the actual moment of experience. Additionally,
Victoria Blessington’s epilogue letter perpetuates such removal of the ‘real’, further in
59
the novel because it by dismissing Archie’s manuscript as false, it also dismisses the
‘real’ experience of Bella at Alexandria. This is precisely the point Baker
acknowledges of Poor Things and one that he subsequently attests can be applied to
the whole project of the novel. He states, ‘the questioning of authenticity makes
access to, and understanding of, the real impossible, even as it fails to replace the
desire for the real. This is the paradox Gray explores in Poor Things, where every
recognition of mediation foregrounds the readers’ and characters’ desire for
unmediated experience’ (63).
The ‘recognition of mediation’ is suggestive of the concern within
Contemporary Scottish Gothic about the stability of origins, history and authority that
I have discussed in previous chapters. The variety of texts that make up the monstrous
body of Poor Things straddle various temporalities and point to language’s inability to
fully access and understand the past. For example, Gray’s ‘Notes Critical and
Historical’ (emphasis my own) are full of inconsistencies and falsities. Gray
references Hugh MacDiarmid’s published autobiography in Poor Things (Gray 315).
However, while the reference he makes to it ‘ably mimics MacDiarmid’s style. The
passage is not present in the original’ (Baker 59). Poor Things thus aptly recalls Homi
K. Bhabha’s theory on ‘DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the
modern nation’, which I mentioned in the previous chapter. The novel exists in the
tension of the double time created by the pedagogical, pre-given historical origins, for
example through its intertextuality, and the performative reiteration of it in the present
moment through the re-writing and repeating the forms it seeks to question (Bhabha
228). Bhabha’s theory can be applied to the novel as a whole, in particular its textual
referents, but it is most fully embodied in the monstrous figure of Bella Baxter. She is
physically caught between these temporalities – the pre-given past of Victoria
60
Blessington and the performative reiteration of this in her embodiment, but also in her
quest to discover her origins. Her monstrous straddling of boundaries – the pull and
flux between past and present that she occupies – makes her the perfect Gothic
representation of Scotland (a metaphor Gray makes explicit in his illustration of her as
‘Bella Caledonia’ on page 45). She, like so many other characters discussed in this
thesis, becomes self-haunted by her past as it disrupts and interrupts her present.
Bella as Scotland
That Bella is represented as a form of ‘amnesiac’ to some degree makes the
representation of her as ‘Scotland’ all the more poignant. Gray has stressed the
association of narrative as formative of a nation’s history. In a conference at Avignon
University he stated, ‘I regard literature as being the memory of history. I don’t just
mean history books, but the reality of the past is in the works of art that have survived
and in the stories and poems that have survived’ (Gray as quoted in Pittin-Hédon,
‘Literature against Amnesia’, 15). The scene where Bella encounters the Russian is
therefore of particular interest here, since due to her ‘amnesia’ she is unable to
‘remember’ or have read much Scottish literature. Bella prefaces her discussion of
literature with the Russian by stating, ‘Of all the nations I have visited the U.S.A and
Russia suit me best. The people seem more ready to talk to strangers without being
formal or disapproving. Is this because, like me, they have very little past?’ (Gray
115). This also sets up the notion of Scotland having very little ‘past’ because they
have a slightly more limited literary history and ‘a nation is only as old as its
literature’ (Gray 115).
61
Indeed, the ‘Scottish novel’ was not really considered as such until the works
of Sir Walter Scott were in common circulation in the nineteenth century (Kaczvinsky
782). The Russian takes up this point, stating:
Our literature began with Pushkin, a contemporary of your Walter
Scott…Before Pushkin Russia was not a true nation, it was an
administered region. Our aristocracy spoke French, our bureaucracy
was Prussian, and the only true Russians – the peasants – were
despised by rulers and bureaucracy alike. Then Pushkin learned the
folk-tales from his nursemaid, a woman of the people. His novellas and
poems made us proud of our language and aware of our tragic past –
our peculiar present – our enigmatic future. He made Russia a state of
mind – made it real. Since then we have had Gogol who was as great
as your Dickens and Turgénieff who is greater than your George Eliot
and Tolstoï who is as great as your Shakespeare. But you had
Shakespeare centuries before Walter Scott. (Gray 116)
The Russian’s muddling of Scottish and English writers prompts Bella to correct him
but also to state that ‘most folk thought novels and poetry were idle pastimes – did he
not take them too seriously?’ (Gray 116). Bella’s ‘amnesia’ places her in an uncertain
position:
“People who care nothing for their country’s stories and songs,” he
said, “are like people without a past – without a memory – they are a
half people.”
Imagine how that made me feel! But perhaps, like Russia, I am making
up for lost time. (Gray 116)
62
Bella’s precarious ‘memory’ means that, like Scotland, she becomes subsumed by an
English tradition and history and suffers a crisis of identity – compelled to make up
for ‘lost time’. However, the reference to Shakespeare by the Russian reminds us that
prior to this discussion, Godwin Baxter was reciting Bella’s letter in iambic
pentameter but Bella/Godwin contests, ‘I will not write like Shakespeare any more. It
slows me down…’ (Gray 115). Bella/Godwin’s inability to continue in this formal,
Shakespearean way evokes Edwin Muir’s famous assertion that ‘Scotsmen feel in one
language and think in another’ (21). Conceding this point, Kaczvinsky argues that
‘Bella’s difficulties with her own identity, are, not surprisingly one of language’
(784). Kaczvinsky points to the passage quoted earlier, where Godwin asserts that
Bella’s speech must be learned gradually (Gray 34), and argues that her childlike
speech and handwriting ‘parallels the development of literary Scottish’ (Kaczvinsky
785), once again suggesting that literary history in Scotland is forever caught in a
state of contention between the Scottish/English dichotomy.
Bella ‘as Scotland’ has another implication in terms of her gender. By
associating Bella Baxter with Bella Caledonia, one cannot help but consider Scotland
as represented as a ‘female’ nation. This is a reading that Kirstin Stirling proposes in
an article for the Scottish webzine Bella Caledonia in 2010, in which she argues that
using the monstrous female figure of Bella as representative of nation is problematic
since:
Female personifications of nation are always conceptually deformed in
some way, if only because symbolically elevating the female figure at
the same time symbolically disenfranchises women from the role of
national citizen. The Scotland-as-woman figure, however, is subject to
additional distortions due to Scotland’s particular political situation.
63
She is pulled in different directions by the clash of national and
political boundaries, and this is reinforced by a critical tradition that
sees Scotland and Scottish culture as essentially divided.
Bella perfectly symbolises this definition. Not only is she subject to the ‘essential
divide’ that sees her mind and body literally split but her position as a split and
deformed ‘gorgeous monster’ (Gray 91) leaves her torn and straddling the boundaries
between Scotland/England and past/present. Her relationship to the male characters in
the novel – Godwin, Archie, Duncan and General Blessington – further underscore
Bella’s positioning as Scotland as she is pushed and pulled in a multitude of directions
by the supposedly ‘dominant’ powers around her. However, Bella’s ‘monstrosity’ as
representative of a nation, I feel, extends further than this since Gray has consciously
chosen to re-write Frankenstein with a female ‘monster’.
While the novels discussed in my previous chapter on Irvine Welsh were
reinterpretations of fundamentally Scottish Gothic novels, Gray’s choice in re-writing
Mary Shelley can be seen as somewhat reactionary: is Bella the female monster that
Victor Frankenstein/Shelley was too frightened of and paranoid about to create?
Victor Frankenstein is both attracted and repulsed by ‘birth, embodiment and finitude’
(Graham 64) – in other words, by the figure of the female. He is so disgusted by these
notions that he tears the female monster limb from limb and leaves the ‘remains of the
half-finished creature…scattered on the floor’ (Shelley 175). If Bella is representative
of ‘Scotland’, then the fear manifest in her reproductive capabilities insinuates
England’s fear of Scotland’s devolvement and independence. Kaczvinsky argues this
is implied in the marriage between General Blessington and Victoria/Bella (787). The
same narrative strand of disgust at the female body and its reproductive capabilities
seems to occur to General Blessington when he exclaims:
64
I wanted you out of the house, out of my sight as soon as possible. I
was afraid you would go into labour and I HATE women near me
when they are whelping, hate the blood, screams and stinking mess
they make, ugh, the thought of it makes me want to retch. (Gray 232)
However, Alasdair Gray does not have the same ‘fear’ of reproduction and femininity
in his creation of Bella. This is in part emphasised by the illustration of female
reproductive organs at the beginning of the chapter ‘Bella Baxter’s Letter: Making a
Conscience’ (103). It could be argued that this image, as a medical image, is an
attempt by males to dominate, interpret and control the female. Similarly, in the
passage that follows, Bella’s letter is actually read and interpreted by Godwin Baxter.
However, Gray undermines this assumption since attempts to control and dominate
Bella always fall short of success: she runs away from Godwin and Archie, drives
Wedderburn mad, and runs away again. The final ‘Last Stand’ (Gray 234) between
her and General Blessington exemplifies perfectly the inability of the male characters
to control her.
Blessington attempts to use Victoria/Bella’s gender and sexuality against her.
Not only does he insinuate that her sexual desire is the result of madness (Gray 219)
but he insists that mutilating her was the only option to ending this (Gray 218). Bella
reacts by bravely standing up against the General before he resorts to complete
violence and kills Godwin, which results in her being shot in the foot (Gray 236).
Halberstam argues that, ‘Narrative resolution in Gothic fiction, of course, usually
resolves boundary disputes by the end of the novel by killing off the monster and
restoring law and order’ (36). However, in Poor Things, the ‘gorgeous monster’ of
Bella is not destroyed by the shooting. Instead, in a cathartic moment of laughter, she
turns the General’s accusations on their head:
65
“I remember you now, from the Dungeon Suite of the Hôtel de NotreDame, in Paris. You were the man in the mask – Monsieur
Spankybot.”
Then between bursts of laughter she cried aloud, “General Sir Aubrey
de la Pole Spankybot V.C., how funny! Most brothel customers are
quick squirts but you were the quickest of the lot! The thing you paid
the girls to do to make you stop coming in the first half minute would
make a hahahahaha make a cat laugh! I think the rottenest thing about
you (apart from the killing you’ve done and the way you treat servants)
is what Prickett calls the pupurity of your mumarriage bed. Fuck off,
you poor daft silly queer rotten old fucker hahahahaha! Fuck off!”
(Gray 238)
Bella diverts his charges against her sexuality and objectifies him for his. Laughter,
rather than the violent mutilation or destruction of Bella, resolves the crisis and she
emerges triumphant and independent – free from the constraints of her union with
General Blessington. It is also in this moment that Bella marks General Blessington as
monstrous, rather than her. He is responsible for being cruel, murdering others but,
according to Bella, his misogyny is what is most monstrous about him.
On the one hand, Victoria’s epilogue letter at the end of the novel can be seen
as destroying the monster at the end of the novel and restoring order. However, on the
other hand, we are wary of Victoria’s letter as truthful or ‘authentic’ since Gray warns
us at the beginning not to dismiss Archie McCandless’ account of events for ‘a
grotesque fiction’ (Gray IX). Poor Things is forever in a state of uncertainty, where
the ‘real’ is forever foregrounded and then dismissed, and where monstrosity takes on
a postmodern form. It is this that prevents Bella from becoming ‘a pile of “remains,”
66
the leftover material, the excess of the narrative, the excess that renders the narrative
Gothic’ (Halberstam 52). The monstrosity in Poor Things exists in Bhabha’s ‘double
time’ – both in terms of narrative structure and in Bella’s character and embodiment.
Unlike the tension created by the intertextuality of Welsh’s novels, Gray’s seems
much more optimistic. The passage with the Russian can be read as also pointing to
the positioning of Gray’s own novel within the Scottish national canon. With such an
amalgamation of intertextual references to both Scottish and English literary
traditions, one cannot help but feel that it is Gray ‘making up for lost time’ (Gray 116)
and looking, not negatively toward a uncertain literary past but forward toward the
creation of a canon in Contemporary Scottish Literature that, like Bella, is celebrated
for being a ‘gorgeous monster’.
67
Conclusion
Ending the Search for Origins
“Glasgow is a magnificent city”, said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly
ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here”, said Thaw.
McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, ‘If you want to explain that I’ll
certainly listen.”
“Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting
them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in
paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been
used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.
What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football
park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets? That’s all. No,
I’m wrong, there’s also the cinema and the library. And when our
imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome
under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century,
anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a musichall song and a few bad novels. That’s all we’ve given to the world
outside. It’s all we’ve given to ourselves”. (Alasdair Gray, Lanark 243)
In this famous exchange from Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Thaw speaks of
Glasgow’s capacity to function as – to use Benedict Anderson’s term – an ‘imagined
community’. Applying Thaw’s sentiments to Scotland as a whole, this lack of an
artistic or literary tradition, considered so formative in our construction of the nation
and national identity, is precisely what the Contemporary Scottish Gothic authors
68
discussed in this thesis have set out to examine and challenge. The genre allows for
such a dialogue with the past precisely because it opens up the boundaries between
past and present through its Gothic tropes. Strikingly, what emerges is that the ‘past’
they examine is often necessarily Gothic, mythical or unreliable in its essence and
consequently they expose that such a turn to the past can never truly represent the
‘real’. The consequences of this are twofold – firstly, it reveals the inconsistencies
and problems inherent in such a construction of ‘national identity’ and secondly, it
destabilises the Cartesian belief in a whole, impermeable sense of self. The uncanny
double nature of Scottish identity I have mentioned so far – the constant straddling
between Scotland/British; primitive pre-modern self/post-Enlightenment modern self;
mythical/historical – is not fundamentally negative. Indeed, the endings of most of the
novels discussed inevitably embrace such a double nature, emphasising and stressing
the need to dissect binary oppositions that posit an understanding of the self as whole
and unfragmented. In The Falconer, Daphne leaves the Glen, pregnant with Edward’s
baby, suggesting both that she has accepted the sensual side of her that is more closely
aligned with her sister Iris but that she also acknowledges and recognises her rational
side and moves forward away from the Melfort’s oppressive grip. As I discussed in
my final chapter, Gray’s ending sees a positive resolution to the crisis of whether
Bella’s monstrous body should return as Victoria Blessington to her oppressive
husband as she laughs him out the room, consequently asserting her independence and
‘monstrous’ identity. The exception, I would argue, would be Welsh’s novels, as he
refuses the readers a neat and tidy resolution to these ‘split selves’ at the end of both
novels. However, Welsh’s narrative structure, his myriad of voices constructed
through his frequent use of free indirect discourse, understands and privileges the
heterogeneous nature of Scottish identity and culture.
69
The result of embracing of this fragmented, Gothic double self aligns well
with Homi K. Bhabha’s movement away from a ‘homogenous national culture’ in the
twentieth century (2). Such a strategy stresses:
the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial
subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are
produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in between’
spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of self-hood –
singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and
innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation in the act of defining
the idea of society itself. (Bhabha 2)
While Contemporary Scottish Gothic certainly searches for its origins, in finding only
their ‘ghostly manifestations’ (Bruhm 259), it exposes the fallacy of the necessity of
these origins and creates the ‘in-between space’ where the influence of these origins
on the present moment can be interrogated and a new sense of identity can be
constructed. It is striking that in these novels, the consequences of such an
interrogation play out on the body. Considering this further, it would be interesting to
examine how such a strategy impacts and includes minority groups within Scotland.
A study such as this could further challenge concepts of national identity and selfhood
and expose an even more heterogeneous culture within Scotland. Monica Germanà
has certainly made headway with her book Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic
Writing: Fiction since 1978 – a work I have found useful throughout this thesis. There
has been some work examining certain works by Irvine Welsh from a queer
perspective13 – albeit relatively limited – however, applying such a reading alongside
13
See, for example: Jones, Carole. ‘State of Transformation: Drag Queen Masculinity in Two Scottish
Texts' Genders, no. 50. 2009. Online. Strachan, Zoe. ‘Irvine Welsh: Alan Warner: Queerspotting:
Homosexuality in contemporary Scottish fiction’. Spike Magazine. May 1, 1999. Online.
70
one that acknowledges Welsh’s Scottish Gothic heritage could offer new insights into
the construction of identity and masculinity.
Returning to my earlier quote from Thaw, I would certainly like to end my
thesis on a somewhat more optimistic note than he posits. The trend of Contemporary
Scottish Gothic shows no signs of slowing down and certainly suggests Scotland is
offering more than just ‘a music hall song and a few bad novels’ (Gray Lanark 243).
Whilst writing this thesis Irvine Welsh has published another novel, A Decent Ride
(2015), Kate Atkinson has published A God in Ruins (2015) and in 2014, Val
McDermid wrote Northanger Abbey, a re-writing of the Austen novel from a Scottish
perspective. As Scotland potentially moves closer to independence, it becomes more
imperative to examine these issues of identity but Contemporary Scottish Gothic does
not return to the past in order to close off any doors or offer any distinct resolutions to
these issues. Instead, it creates a platform from which new identities can emerge and
are celebrated for their monstrosity and difference.
71
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