2.3 (July 2002): 327-333
© 2002 National Communication Association

Gothic Revisited

Joan Hawkins

Valdine Clemens. The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from The Castle of Otranto to Alien. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1999. ix + 274 pages. $59.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

“The usual interpretation of the historical connection between Gothic horror and periods of social unrest,” Valdine Clemens writes, “is that Gothic registers or reflects . . . moments of radical cultural shift”; it identifies “a gap between official ideology and actual reality” (6). While this may be true, it also has become increasingly meaningless, as “moments of radical cultural shift” have expanded to cover two and a half centuries of cultural upheaval and Gothic popularity.  Since the mid-eighteenth century, when The Castle of Otranto (1764) first appeared, Anglo-American society has existed in a permanent state of “radical cultural shift.” Furthermore, as contemporary literary studies of Shakespeare and the Medieval fabula have shown, literature of every age can be read for its “subversive” content. That is, there is always a “gap between official ideology and actual reality,” and popular culture—from folktales to Gothic fiction—has historically delighted in exploring and poking fun at that gap.

So, what else can we say about the historic connection between Gothic horror and the rise of modernism, industrialization, and, ultimately, post-industrialism? Quite a bit, Clemens assures us. Calling for “a more multidisciplinary approach and particularly for one that brings together . . .  psychology and sociopolitical history,” Clemens attempts to expand discussions of the Gothic beyond both the ahistorical Freudian analyses and the commonplace “radical cultural shifts” readings that have come to dominate discussion of the genre (11). While I’m not sure that Return of the Repressed ultimately delivers the radical new approach to the Gothic genre that Clemens initially appears to promise, it does provide a lot of interesting historical data, and some fresh new reads of Gothic texts. And it does so in a prose style that is interesting, lively, and devoid of jargon.

The book can be divided into roughly three parts that correspond to historical periods: three chapters are devoted to key works of the eighteenth century, three chapters are devoted to key works from the nineteenth century, and two chapters address twentieth-century novels. The strength of Clemens’s book lies mainly in her use of historical detail and in her close readings of texts, rather than in any startling, new, over-arching argument. That said, I should also add that her opening discussion of the historical evolution of the Gothic, starting with its antecedents in the Middle Ages, is compelling and beautifully done. Here she traces the genre’s forebears from Medieval literature, through late Renaissance and Jacobean drama, to Shakespeare and German romanticism, and sets up the categories that dominate her genre discussion throughout the book. For Clemens, the main characteristics of the Gothic are: (1) the use of fantastic, non-realistic, or “romantic” settings to enact a Gothic “strategy of displacement” (31); (2) the representation of unruly masculine sexuality, which inevitably poses a threat to women, children, and the institution of the family itself; (3) the tendency to take aim at “cultural blind spots” and to use strategies of displacement in order to critique specific pieces of legislation or social ills; (4) the dependence on affect and sensationalism to make an effective point; and finally (5) a tendency to work against “whatever form of censorship . . . societies have imposed” (213). As Clemens rightly notes, all of these generic traits exist in literature that predates the rise of the Gothic and in genres other than Gothic horror or romance. But British family legislation of the eighteenth century provided an impetus for them to coalesce in a particularly melodramatic way that we have come to identify with the Gothic novel. 

For Clemens, The British Marriage Act of 1754 becomes the key factor to explaining the Gothic’s appeal for the eighteenth-century popular imagination. The Act, which forbade clandestine marriages, gave parents—read “fathers”—total control over their children’s nuptial contracts (if unhappy lovers eloped under this act, not only would the marriage be null and void, but the elopers would be subject to criminal prosecution). Opposition to the law was frequently couched in class terms. Liberal Members of Parliament (MPs) denounced the law as a thinly veiled aristocratic attempt to strengthen class power “by monopolizing England’s new wealth” (32). By virtually ensuring that aristocrats would ALWAYS marry aristocrats, the law cut off one of the few channels (inter-class elopements) through which aristocratic wealth could trickle down to the emerging professional classes.  A few liberals, however, added that the Act “undermined individual liberty” (32). It prevented people from marrying for love. One of the staunchest “libertarian” (marry for love) opponents of The Marriage Act was MP Horace Walpole, who denounced the Act in Parliament and in print. Ten years after the Act was signed into law, Walpole anonymously wrote and published the first major Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764).

Many of the themes treated in Otranto—unruly male sexuality, rape, incest, absolute patriarchal privilege—were not original. Rather, it was the treatment of them that seemed to announce the emergence of a new genre, one suited to Walpole’s grim perception of the times in which he lived. “In his presentation of unruly masculine sexuality,” Clemens writes, “Walpole abandons the conventional humorous or moral/sentimental treatments in favor of one that vividly conveys the victim’s sense of terror” (34). And in his depiction of absolute paternal privilege, Walpole abandons the stock comic paternal figure already familiar to readers, in favor of a character who is a “nearly daemonic force of destruction” (34). In order to give something of the flavor of what has come to be known as characteristically “Gothic,” I quote Clemens’ synopsis of the novel at length.

The villain of Otranto, Prince Manfred, seeks to dispose of his devoted wife, Hippolita, in order to marry the lovely young Isabella. Isabella had been betrothed to Conrad, the son of Manfred and Hippolita, before the young man had been mysteriously crushed under a giant helmet shortly before their wedding day. Most of the story is devoted to Manfred’s frenzied pursuit of Isabella through the halls and underground passages of the Castle, a chase which is punctuated by mysterious supernatural events and culminates in his murdering his own daughter, Matilda. He stabs her to death, under the mistaken impression that she is Isabella. Isabella ends up marrying the noble young Theodore, who has been assisting the maidens in their troubles and who at the end of the story assumes his rightful place as heir of Otranto. Manfred, sufficiently chastised by both natural and supernatural events (which include the collapse of the castle walls) willingly gives up the throne, which his grandfather had usurped; he and Hippolita both retire to nearby convents (29).

As Clemens points out, Manfred’s mistaken murder of Matilda reveals something of the dark underbelly of patriarchal life, as it links the father’s desire to control his daughter’s sexuality (determining whom she will marry) to his own illicit desire for her (incest). This is further bolstered in the novel through a series of dreams in which Matilda and Isabella stand in for each other in disturbing ways, so that Manfred’s desire for Isabella (his son’s fiancée) becomes a thinly veiled, or displaced, version of his unnatural desire for his own daughter, Matilda. In addition, the Oedipal theme of father-son rivalry over a woman (the father desiring his son’s fiancée) demonstrates the degree to which the Gothic seems to lend itself to (and even beg for) a Freudian reading. Clemens reverses this trend by bringing Jungian material to bear on the stories and keeping Freudian interpretation to a minimum. While this at times makes for interesting new “reads,” I’m not as convinced as Clemens is that the more optimistic Jung provides the right “psychology” for her multidisciplinary approach.

What I do find intriguing is the fact that an MP would turn to writing sensational popular fiction to make his social critique. And, according to Clemens, Walpole wasn’t the only one who did so. The Monk (1796) was also written by an MP, Matthew Lewis. Concerned with a monk named Ambrosio “who knowingly commits rape and murder, and then later learns that he has unknowingly committed incest and matricide” (59), the book caused a furor when it was first released. At the time, Clemens tells us, “literary censorship had become one of the government’s main tools for suppressing radical political dissent, and it was perhaps for this reason that the critics who derided Lewis’s impropriety also failed to grasp The Monk’s pervading argument, which concerns the dangers of excessive repression in both the individual and social spheres” (59). In fact, The Monk, Clemens argues, “presents a characteristically Gothic warning about the dangers of censorship,” and “the topical issue” the novel addresses—”the government’s current program of inhibiting free speech” —is just one of the ways in which the novel makes its anti-censorship message clear (88). Clemens does a nice job here of showing how the novel addresses a contemporary political concern, and she makes an interesting link between the kind of political suppression that concerned Lewis and the suppression of feminine discourse and self-determination, which is the staple Gothic familial crime. Given the sociohistorical bent of the argument, though, I would have welcomed more discussion of the conscious intentions Walpole and Lewis had for their works. Was penning Gothic novels their intended way of taking social issues directly to the people (especially to women), as Clemens seems to hint? Or was it just a diversion from the rigors of a demanding job—in the same way that reading sentimental novels appears to be for the proper butler in Remains of the Day? These are questions that Clemens does not directly address.

In contrast, the chapter on Ann Radcliffe does take up the question of authorship, and it does so in a way that is both intelligent and sensitive to the sociohistorical climate in which Radcliffe lived. Walpole and Lewis aside, Gothic novels rapidly became novels written by and for women. And feminist critics have often wondered why the novels penned by women so frequently ended up reaffirming a rather conservative view of women’s place in the family and in society. That is, why are they so much more socially conservative than the novels of Lewis and Walpole? Partly, as Clemens points out, the social conservatism of the female Gothics stems from the fact that “the women novelists called ‘Gothic’ were actually working in two different modes: the Gothic novel as inaugurated by Walpole and the novel of sentiment and sensibility [a much more conservative genre], that had been popular throughout much of the century” (42). In part, however, the social conservatism of the novels is caused by the economic realities governing their production. Many women, Clemens writes, turned to writing because it was one of the few remunerative professions open to them, “a fact that helps to explain the allegiance to conservative values in their novels. These women literally could not afford to be too radical. A number of them had personal histories of economic hardship and struggle, several having been left in a state of poverty by their improvident and/or deceased husbands, often with a brood of needy children to clothe, feed and educate” (47). In other words, Gothic novels were often penned by women who found themselves in something of a Gothic situation; women whose livelihoods depended on the “good offices” of men.

In addition to elaborating the physical realities of life for middle-class working women in the eighteenth century, the chapter provides an excellent discussion of the “cult of sensibility” (the eighteenth-century doctrine that rested on the notion of a morally superior elite, an elite with whom the middle classes identified, against the decadence of the aristocracy and “the more rough tumbleweed world of the lower classes” [43] ).  Clemens also does a nice job here of showing how women managed to slip subversive messages into seemingly conservative texts, and thereby helped to shape the Gothic novel into a genre concerned largely with “women’s issues.”  And her specific discussion of Radcliffe is excellent.

I have discussed the opening chapters at length, because they comprise the strongest section of the book. Clemens brings a great deal of terrific material to bear on her readings of the eighteenth-century novels, and her readings provide a much needed corrective to the ahistorical readings we have gotten in the past. Skipping ahead to the twentieth century: the chapters on The Shining and the end discussion of Alien provide good, solid analyses of the texts, but nothing really startling or new. Interestingly, it’s the nineteenth century that suffers here. In part this is because the nineteenth-century novels under consideration—Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula—have been better served by already existing scholarship than have the eighteenth-century novels. And in fact it’s the reluctance to directly address that scholarship that weakens this section of the book. Despite Clemens’ interest in sociopolitical readings, there is no direct mention of the New Historicist work that has been championed by such journals as Representations, and key names (Christopher Craft, Catherine Gallagher, Thomas Laqueur, and David Miller, for example) are notable by their absence from the bibliography. As a result, the readings of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula seem weak to me, as they make very little mention of the sexual issues that dominated the sociopolitical and medical discourses of the time, and tend to reduce rather than expand the novels’ scope. In addition, there are gaffes. A lengthy discussion of the use of technology in Dracula will seem familiar to anyone who has read Nina Auerbach’s 1995 Our Vampires, Ourselves, for example. The fact that Auerbach is not mentioned here and that her 1995 work is missing from the bibliography is an unfortunate gap in the scholarship.

The chapter on Frankenstein, on the other hand, is interesting, as it draws on material that Mary Shelley was reading at the time she wrote the novel, as well as on the influence of her parents, husband, and friends. While Clemens’s key point—namely, that the novel criticizes certain uses of science and technology—is not original, the way she situates the novel within the generic traditions of the gothic is quite good, and the publishing history she provides should stimulate some lively classroom discussion. Published anonymously in 1818, Frankenstein didn’t sell well enough to warrant a second printing. Five years later, Richard Brinsley Peake staged a dramatization—Presumption or The Fate of Frankenstein. It was the play that stimulated enough interest in the novel to justify a reprinting. Much as film adaptations stimulate interest in published work today, theatrical adaptations often stimulated nineteenth-century audiences to “go home and read the book.” The fact that it took a dramatization to bring the novel effectively “to life,” lends an interesting dimension to a book that is very much about reanimating dead matter and textuality (I’m thinking here of the creature’s discovery of books, which is bound up with the spectacular pleasure he receives from watching the woodcutter’s family, as well as of the textual framing of the novel itself).

All things considered, I believe The Return of the Repressed is a good read and provides a useful basic text for an introductory course on the Gothic. The caveat here, of course, is that the sections on the great Gothic horror novels of the nineteenth century need to be complicated and supplemented with additional material.

Joan Hawkins is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington.