Gothic criticism(s)

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1996 by Samara, Donya

JACQUELINE HOWARD, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 307, $52.00.

SUSAN WOLSTENHOLME, Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 201, $49.50.

IAN DUNCAN, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 295, $59.95. Gothic fiction's fantastical structures, including convoluted narratives, supernatural and sublime situations, extreme characters, and surrealistic settings, when not read as pure escapism, are read as forming a knot to be untangled. Such a philosophy of interpretation too easily treats fantastic literature as passive, an artifact that the present moment can learn to read, but which itself has nothing contemporary to say. However, by turning away from claims to mimetic realism, the gothic can also be seen to demand a space within contemporary critical theory. The gothic rejects any direct, unmediated productions of meaning or recourses to the "natural" or other extratextual "realities" through the ambivalence of fantasy. As such, the gothic is consonant with post-structuralist discourses which locate phantasmatic structures at the origins of conceptions of reality. Susan Wolstenholme, Jacqueline Howard, and Ian Duncan all take advantage of the way in which the gothic calls into question representational structures, including subjectivity and history, but also interpretation. All three works address the question of how to read gothic literature, where "how" means both what a particular work might mean and what role such literature might play in critical discourses.

One word Wolstenholme uses to describe the gothic is "incoherence"-by which she refers to the variety of perspectives and reflected gazes that are inscribed through the "'visual' qualities" of the novels. Interested specifically in gendered constructions of authorship, Wolstenholme focuses on how the erotic specularization of bodies within the novel also sets up a formal structure for reading that illuminates a position women can inhabit as active readers and writers. For Wolstenholme, the gothic plays with identification between characters, but also between reader and author and reader and text, as it "mirrors within itself the relationship it invites between the text and its reader" (156). The gothic, then, reads against the grain of the visual economy that it also employs. Howard also points to the gothic as upsetting epistemological boundaries of reality, and she specifically discusses the variety of "fantastic" discourses (including folklore, fairy-tales, and aesthetic theories of the sublime) that the genre incorporates. Because such discourses cannot be easily assimilated into a recognizable "reality," they highlight the intertextual nature of all texts, as well as the heterogeneity of reality itself. For Howard, gothic novels are "metadiscourses working on prior discourses" and meaning production becomes a critical activity entailing giving order to the discursive units, rather than an uncovering of a single truth (43). Ian Duncan isolates the gothic as a mediating point by asserting that the genre claims to be a "'romance,' a fiction apart from modern life" (20). It is through the gothic, which remains on the border of history and reality, that individual and national subjectivity can be stabilized. This view of the gothic also sees the British novel tradition as embracing rather than disavowing romance. For Duncan, the works of Scott and Dickens reflect the novel's turning away from history, rather than its incorporation of it.

Within these formulations of the gothic genre itself, then, is a space for theory. All the books reflect to some extent the intimate connection between literary genre and critical paradigm. The connection is evident in the titles. Wolstenhome's title Gothic (Re) Visions: Writing Women as Readers refers to both her main theoretical formula, "Gothic vision," a term she uses to identify the doubled space of female authorship as both "looking and beinglooked-at" (12), as well as her own position within the scope of feminist criticism on the gothic novel. Wolstenholme opens her book with the question "What's Female About Gothic?," an allusion to the term "female Gothic" which Ellen Moers coined in the late 1970s. By rephrasing the term as a question, Wolstenholme signals her own intention to reconsider old territory, hence her project is also one of (re)vision. Howard's book, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach, includes textual analyses of specific gothic novels, including Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger Abbey, The Monk, and Frankenstein, while the introduction and first two chapters explore theoretical frameworks that have been used to read the gothic genre in the past. It is important to understand that the theoretical chapters do not simply allow for "better" readings of the novels, but rather that theory and text are in a constant dialogue. According to Howard, "the political force of particular discourses is contingent upon their interaction with others in the process of reading" (4). Therefore, Howard's "Bakhtinian approach" provides more than new readings of old novels. It also provides a method for reading twentieth century feminist and Marxist political claims as to what constitutes subversion in discourse. Duncan's Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens refigures both the history of the British novel and the social context of the modern subject. The central transformation which serves as the crux of these two arguments is Scott's use of the female subjectivity Radcliffe creates in her novels to construct a private male subject. According to Duncan, Radcliffe's novels strictly divide public and private spheres, such that the private is characterized as feminine, domestic and psychological. Scott's novels take advantage of a space at the edge of history, in which the individual can interact with economic, political and historical contingency, but never be subsumed by it. Modern romance derived from the gothic reduces history to an effect of "sexual and familial identity" (26). The transformation, then, is the domestication of history through literary forms, which forecloses ethical possibilities in constructing a liberated, coherent subject.