Framing the Gothic: From pillar to post-structuralism

College Literature, Fall 2001 by Hennelly, Mark M Jr

The low throb of a bass guitar pounded from giant speakers from somewhere inside: the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil. Mick Jagger's ragged voice growled out the song's familiar refrain as Derek turned off the street onto the long driveway that looped around in front of the house. Beyond the row of parked cars, a half dozen motorcycles were lined up on the grass. A couple of women in long dresses sat on the damp front lawn, sharing a pipe.

The house itself was an architectural monstrosity, more Gothic manse than the Victorian manor it pretended to be. Whoever designed the thing was either deranged or had an odd sense of humor. Its face was all peaked windows and filigree, but the round towers that rose above its overlapping gabled roofs looked like someone's dream of a medieval castle, badly drawn. (Lake 1994, 81)

For the past twenty-five years, I have been teaching graduate and undergraduate seminars on Gothic fiction.These courses are "dedicated" to both General Education students looking for a "fun class," if not a cheap chill, and hard-core English majors seeking various levels of enlightenment. I always find that the introduction either makes or breaks the class, either stresses or blesses the teacher. Not coincidentally, I also discover that the introduction is the most difficult portion of the course to design, especially determining the right blend of depth and breadth, of complex theoretical and pop cultural material which aligns itself so easily with the Gothic and with which students so closely identify. The following account provides the background and pedagogical strategies for introducing Gothic fiction which have proven most successful in my classes.

Opening the door to this introduction to my introduction to Gothicism, I feel already snared in some Gothic figure-within-a-figure like the narrative mousetrap "Mad Trist" in "The Fall of the House of Usher." As fictional introductions to the "Gothic manse" go, however, Paul Lake's narrative above appears fairly lightweight, especially compared to the heavily determined, more classic descriptions of structures like Otranto, Udolpho, or Usher. Still, introducing Gothic artistry by way of such Gothic architecture can prove an immensely successful classroom strategy. In fact, it fulfills my own course goals by clarifying Gothic narrative and dramatic structures, image patterns, and thematic motifs. As Anthony Vidler puts it in his study The Architectural Uncanny, "the house has provided a site for endless representations of haunting, doubling, dismembering, and other terrors in literature and art" (1992, ix).

Such an introduction further prompts students to engage more responsively with the genre's twin mystiques of mystery and fear-often commingled as either the mystery of fear or the fear of mystery-whether the mystery generates overlapping scientific (Frankenstein), spectral (Dracula), psychological (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), or skeptical (The Turn of the Screw) readings and whether the fear appears as "terror" or "horror" as famously defined by Ann Radcliffe: "Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them" (McKillop 1932, 357). Critics have never been able to decide exactly what Radcliffe's baffling distinctions mean or whether Gothic writers clearly follow them. One reading which students particularly enjoy pursuing suggests that terror denotes the fear of literal and physical danger, like the fears of vivisection and free fall provoked by the interior decor of"The Pit and the Pendulum," while horror connotes the more sublime and metaphorical threats of metaphysical dissolution in something like Dorian Gray's deforming portrait. Since the "vertical" fear of falling anxiously anticipates the loss of physical boundaries and the "horizontal" terror of the pendulum implies the horrifying threat of self-division, however, students quickly discover that such double-crossing distinctions only lead to new teasing dilemmas. They also, though, suggestively lead to Gothic support of Gavin De Backer's recent socio-psychological distinctions in The Gift of Fear. "Since fear is so central to our experience, understanding when it is a gift-and when it is a curse-is well worth the effort" (1997, 11).

Students indicate that architecture further allows them to eyedentify more easily with Gothic fiction; and my class emphasizes different versions of the "Gothic gaze," which appears as the obsessive motif of "ocular demonstration" (Maturin 1961, 24) in Melmoth the Wanderer. De Quincey's Confessions similarly advises readers to "elevate your eye" during its insightful and visionary tour of "vast Gothic Halls" guided by the eighteenth-century surreal architect and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi: "With the same power of endless growth and self-production did my architecture proceed in dreams" (1971, 106). Such examples have traditionally led readers to view the architecture of castles, cathedrals, and haunted houses as the guiding trope in Gothic fiction. In fact, entire critical books like Kate Ferguson Ellis's The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (1989) have been organized around this architectural trope. In the exemplary words of G. R. Thompson, "the central image for" Gothic paradoxes involving the sacred and the profane "is the cathedral itself, for it has both an outward, upward movement toward the heavens, and an inward, downward motion, convoluting in upon itself in labyrinthine passages and dark recesses, descending to catacombs deep in the earth" (1974, 4). Henri Lefebvre pushes the point of medieval Gothic architecture even further, arguing that "The verticality and political arrogance of towers, their feudalism, already intimated the coming alliance between Ego and Phallus. Unconsciously, of course and all the more effectively for that. The Phallus is seen. The female genital organ, representing the world, remains hidden" (1991, 261-62).