Framing the Gothic: From pillar to post-structuralism

College Literature, Fall 2001 by Hennelly, Mark M Jr

From feminist and Lacanian perspectives, two of Freud's more relevant insights involve scopophilia and transitional objects. For instance, when Ambrosio uses his magic mirror to spy voyeuristically on Antonia (later further unveiled as his sister) bathing in The Monk, his blind "Gothic gaze" reveals that both his scopophilia and epistemophilia are "stained." Not only is the Monk's libido stronger than his credo, but his empowered subject position as "male" ironically conceals his disempowered subjection to castration anxiety as a kind of passive (aggressive) "female," which prevents him from recognizing his mirror double. In fact, when Lacan discusses "the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the double," he relevantly notes how "the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form . . . symbolizes the id in quite startling ways" (1977c, 3,5). In discussing the way the "ab-ject" or "phobic object" paradoxically both empowers and disempowers "borderline" (read Gothic) personalities, Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror similarly clarifies both Ambrosio's lack or "incestuous desire" (though/and he will soon murder his mother) and the recurring role of "object[s] of desire" and power in Gothic literature: "Constructed on the one hand by the incestuous desire of (for) his mother and on the other by an overly brutal separation from her, the borderline patient, even though he may be a fortified castle, is nevertheless an empty castle" (1982, 48-49).

To return now to Lake's opening description, the reference that makes it so immediately identifiable for contemporary students is to "the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil." Not only do the chiastic lyrics of the familiar refrain "every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints" uncannily echo the subversive Gothic architecture, but the Stones' gnostic sympathy also memorably concludes popular horror films like Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Fallen (1997), themselves both resonant with architectural motifs. And thus like the architecture, the lyrics provoke a meditation, or what I like to call a metatation, on Gothic intertextuality-the same kind of metatation that Wes Craven's Scream (1996), Scream 2 (1997), and Scream 3 (2000) self-reflexively parody ("Sequels suck!") in their playful double exposure of Gothic horror-film conventions and their performative exploration of audience participation. And both exorcisms exercise Gothic violations of architectural space, whether at home (Scream), the local cinedome complex (Scream 2), or the movie set that joins them (Scream 3).

I should mention here that Lake's subtitled "Vampire Mystery" also grabs "Gothic students" because, in fact, it focuses on such a student in Professor "Watson's graduate seminar in Gothic literature" at Stanford, one who reads "Books full of dungeons and secret passageways and dark family secrets" (Lake 1994, 2). Unfortunately, a classmate has just murdered the good Professor because Watson discovered that Julian, the owner of the "Gothic manse," is a vampire-and what is more, a vampire who turns out to be a certain "immortal" poet many of us teach. Moreover, the text metatextually abounds in academic, genre, and post-structural references to Gothic syllabi, epistolarity, and performance theory, but it always already returns to the amazing grace of architectural space. As Derek, the graduate student "hero," tells his parasitic host Julian, "This house of yours is a regular labyrinth. Just when I think I know where I'm going, I find myself again in some strange room" (1994, 145). Such uncanny "passages" are linked with both Ariadne's thread (1994, 148; perhaps also providing a referential "clue" to J. Hillis Miller's post-structural Ariadnde's Thread 1992) and the student's own cerebral passages: "Derek's dream of several days ago tipped him to the final clue in the bizarre web that had been forming in his brain" (1994, 199).