Framing the Gothic: From pillar to post-structuralism

College Literature, Fall 2001 by Hennelly, Mark M Jr

Next we closely examine a classic example of the reader's (and main character's) introduction to a Gothic structure like the first miserific vision of the manifold Mysteries of Udolpho: "Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni's; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object" (Radcliffe 1980, 226-27). In this brief description of Udolpho's "gothic greatness" and its demonstration of the castle's and Montoni's Gothic monstrosity, we particularly discuss the thematic implications of gazed (in terms of the Lacanian Imaginary), melancholy awe (in Varnado's sense of the numinous), mouldering walls (as deconstructively reflecting absence), and sublime object (in connection with Mishra's liminal and subliminal notions of the uncanny Gothic sublime and object-relations psychology). The details which directly precede and follow this description, however, are also extremely significant in their referential emphasis on a radically changing visual "perspective: dynamic, "unceasing fury," paradoxical "smiling amid surrounding horror," a series of metarepresentational "terrific images," repeated vertical extremes of "rising" and "descending," chiaroscuro "contrasting shade" and ominous "obscurity," liminal "castle gates" and "portal bell," personified "towers ... which seemed to sigh," and again the mysterious "battlements of a castle" which "was vast, ancient and dreary" and "whose shattered outline, appearing on a gleam that gathered in the west, told of the ravages of war."

The class is now prepared to explore various architectural tropes and to see how they lend themselves to post-structural readings. We first discover that Gothic architecture paradoxically deconstructs its own structures by "framing" them through a fascination with what Maturin repeatedly terms "discordant unison" (1961, 9). Personifications of such generic asymmetry become spatially unstable and provocatively disincarnate in the catacombs beneath Lewis's Convent of St. Clare in The Monk: "By the side of the three putrid half-corrupted bodies lay the sleeping beauty" (1959, 363). As at Udolpho, Gothic frames usually involve liminal entrances and exits through Janus-faced thresholds that, like the visual mine field of the cathedral, ritualistically "entrance" the voyeuristic gaze of both characters and readers alike. For instance, that homebody Madeline Usher returns from the dead, "reeling to and fro upon the threshold" before the horrified gaze of the Narrator and Roderick. She then falls "inward upon the person of her brother" (Poe 1976, 98) in a final incestuous embrace. The Italian's portrayal of the two-faced Inquisition similarly stresses Janusian couplings: "the prisoner watches on one side of the door, and the centinel on the other" (Radcliffe 1968, 387). Liminal, postcolonial, and uncanny readings once more merge in overlappings between "unfamiliar" demonic threats and "familiar" domestic tranquility during the Gothic exploration of household hosts, hostages, and parasites. In Dracula's restatement of this mytheme, no demon may "enter anywhere at the first, unless there be someone of the household who bid him to come" (Stoker 1897, 264). Ruskin aesthetically defines such a self-questioning dream quest, the "strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit" with its symptomatic homesickness, as the "restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied" (1958, 382-83). Again, Mishra links the uncanny with the sublime in this same "labyrinthine site of the mise-en-abime"-one of the "great theme[s) of the Gothic" (1994, 78).