HISTORICISM

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Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 23:11:01 +0200
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net,msu.edu (August 2001)

James Watt. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict,
1764-1832. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.  x + 205 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index.$55.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-521-64099-7.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Christopher Kent <chris.kent@usask.ca>,
Department of History, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon

Historicizing the Gothic

 Historicism is currently a widely prevailing tendency among literary scholars, for whom the term connotes something quite different than it does for professional historians. For "us," (the author is an historian) it is a theory--arguably the one major theory the discipline has generated--that attempts to articulate the aspiration to recover the past "on its own terms" and "for its own sake," to use the classic formulations. Among literature scholars historicism tends to imply what for historians is its opposite--whiggism or presentism--the tendency to read out of literary texts a history that is frankly oriented towards the present concerns of the reader. Such readings often seek minimal assistance from the professional historian. After all, if it's in the text, well, there it is: it's history: the author did live there. Not, however, that the author is much of an authority if he or she is merely an author-position or function--a textual artifact. The ultimate authority then resides with the reader, in the present. Proponents of this kind of historicism, sometimes labeled the new historicism, have claimed justification from the writings of a bona fide professional historian, Hayden White (whose bona fides some historians would however question). White has famously smudged the disciplinary boundaries separating literature and history, and though his ideas are far more subtle and fluid than this, the street version of his position claims that historians' work is largely determined by literary forms and forces, and historians are basically poets. Like all disciplinary ideologies, literary historicism makes the work of its adherents more interesting and more powerful, at least, in their own minds. Postmodernism and its offspring postcolonialismhave supported the new historicism by renouncing the grand narrative of progress while claiming a privileged vantage point in the present from which to judge the past, to expose and even denounce the failings of its denizens--particularly those elites deemed to have been in charge and hence responsible--and to commiserate with the victims, oppressed by reason of class, race and/or gender. This is understandably satisfying for a discipline which shares the anxieties common to all the humanities about relevance and appeal to students. Like many disciplines, including history itself, literature tends to be at its most unself-conscious and theoretically naive when it is taking for granted its own history, and the central organizing categories of that history. For literature, these are genre and canon. In _Contesting the Gothic_, James Watt does a fine job of describing and discussing the historicity of the genre of the Gothic novel and its canonical works in their formative period . Watt's book offers an example of what historians mean by historicism. The Gothic novel is an excellent candidate for such analysis. Its career as a genre has been picaresque, its critical fortunes only recently catching up with its commercial success. For a long time academic criticism disdained the genre as beneath its dignity, in large part because its career does not fit in with the stately bourgeois progress of the novel as institutionalized in the discipline's official literary history. To that progress, rather, the Gothic seemingly offers a parodic and subversive counterpoint. This irregular status would become a badge of merit to scholars wishing to challenge the establishment--and who doesn't? The Gothic novel enjoys irresistable brand recognition. "Who hasn't heard of Dickens?" it might be asked. The answer is probably "More than haven't heard of Frankenstein and Dracula." Such popularity clamors for inclusion in the curriculum, and a surge of critical scholarship to justify such inclusion. The traditional justification for inclusion, that a work is a "masterpiece" with timeless aesthetic merits, is not easy to make on behalf of the Gothic novel. A cultural studies justification works much better. The Gothic novel has been seen as a symptom of bourgeois anxiety in the face of revolutionary nightmares. Its hysterical edge and often flagrant gender stereotypes make it attractive to feminist criticism. Little ingenuity is needed to subject it to postcolonial treatment by investigating or speculating about guilty sources of wealth and power among the Gothic casts of characters. Freudian psychoanalytic approaches find here a veritable playground. Add to all this its trademark use of the supernatural, which sets it in opposition to the Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, and we have an irresistable candidate for postmodernist attention. The Gothic novel seems to hold out the tantalizing promise of access to the secret inner history of its times. But the best known examples of the Gothic which lend themselves to such treatment postdate the origins of the genre by half a century and more. Watt's study confines itself to the Gothic's early years, and offers a somewhat surprising account of what was in many respects a less than rebellious youth. By common consent the founding Gothic novel is Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, (a near contemporary of that official landmark novel, _Tom Jones_). Watt devotes his first chapter to Walpole and his celebrated if now largely unread novel, subtitled in its second edition "A Gothic Tale." Here as elsewhere Watt is interested in the intentions of the author and the contemporary reception, both critical and popular, of the work. _Otranto_ emerges as an aristocratic, or at least snobbish, _jeu d'esprit_, a class-specific in-joke largely at the expense of antiquarianism with whose grubby scholarship Walpole wanted it known that he did not soil his fair hands. One of Watt's central points is the early conservatism of this genre which has generally been awarded "transgressive status" by modern critical scholarship. This conservatism is most strikingly evident in the cluster of novels considered in Watt's second chapter titled "The Loyalist Gothic Romance." Contemporary with these novels, particularly distinctive of the 1790s and early 1800s, was the imperial crisis and loss of confidence associated with Britain's defeat by her former American colonies, and the challenge both ideological and military of the French Revolution. This political and intellectual context lends considerable historical interest to a group of novels even more unread today (and pronounced dull, though highly moral, even by contemporary critics). Characteristically situated in the medieval perio--still generally referred to pejoratively as the Gothic, hence of course the generic label--these historical novels nostalgically celebrated the military virtues and social harmony of an idealized British society. The medieval setting, the foreign villains, and the use of the supernatural to punish usurpers and restore legitimacy, are all distinctively Gothic features, though as Watt notes, the benign role assigned to the supernatural is particularly characteristic of the Loyalist Gothic. The subversive aspect of the early Gothic surfaces in Watt's third chapter, which notes the impact of German literary influence from the 1780s, when it was at first welcomed for its boldness and sublimity,for instance in the work of Schiller. By the later 1790s however it was found guilty by association with the excesses of the French Revolution and was hysterically denounced for subversion. Here emerge some of the more familiar versions of the Gothic, the terror fiction mocked by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey as the "horrid novels" devoured by Catherine Morland. "German" became a hot label among publishers, of which the Minerva Press was the most commercially astute with its strong franchise in the female-oriented circulating library market. Watt observes that what was subversive about these novels was not their manifest ideology, which was mostly conservative, but their sheer quantity, their "self-proclaimed commodity status" and their flagrant appeal to--even creation of--a new reading market of women, including some from the lower classes. More subversive still, though in a very different way, was the work of Matthew Lewis who spent time in Weimar, and would introduce distinctly Faustian notes into his notorious work, _The Monk_ (1796). In this novel a young monk, Ambrosio, virginal but "in the full vigour of manhood," is seduced by a wily female who tricks him by wearing male clothing (the monk being so innocent that he is unaware of the difference between men and women). Watt notes the surprising degree of sympathy with which the novel was received by reviewers, many of whom agreed with the Marquis de Sade in praising Lewis for his boldness. Watt suggests that the novel was constructed by its supporters as a "distinctly daring, masculine work," in defiance of the feminized romance genre, and that it was influential in establishing a competition in literary risk-taking among male writers (of whom of course Byron would become the best known). It is not surprising that John Thorpe, the "wannabe" rake in _Northanger Abbey_, is a fan of the book. Lewis revelled in the "bad boy" reputation the book gave him. Even here, Watt suggests, a large element of the scandal surrounding _The Monk_ centered not on its content but its authorship (Lewis was a Member of Parliament) as well as its readership, since its celebrity brought it to the attention of non-elite readers who might be corrupted by that which an elite readership could handle--genius and originality. And of course it fell into the hands of women; though what they may have made of its homosexual connotations Watt does not speculate. Watt's fourth chapter is devoted to the less exciting subject of Ann Radcliffe. He observes that "Recent criticism has tended to focus on the subtext of Radcliffe's work, and its feminist potential, rather than on the congeniality of Radcliffean romance for conservative critics in the 1790s and 1800s" (p. 103). Watt offers an illuminating and persuasively contextualized analysis of how Radcliffe could be read as a "safe" author in a tumultuous age. Here again, the work in its own time, rather than ours, is his chief concern. In contrast to modern readings of her as an alert, middle-class, radical dissenter, contemporaries commended her political innocence and praised her works as political escapism, a refuge from the alarm bells of contemporary politics. In this respect her work seems to belong with the Loyalist Gothic, though she was considerably more skillful than others of that school--and a lot more fun to read. She was complimented on the moral tone of her work, and her judicious employment of the ghostly was acceptable because she naturalized the supernatural, emphasizing its effects on the imagination, rather than its actual existence. She was thus careful "to temper the marvellous with the probable," as a contemporary put it, in the properly "English" manner of common sense. Nor was it the least of Mrs. Radcliffe's merits that she was herself so very private: "Nothing would tempt her ... to sink for a moment, the gentlewoman in the novelist," observed her biographer (p. 124). How much better than that self-dramatizing publicity hound, "Monk" Lewis! Ann Radcliffe was suddenly, totally, and permanently eclipsed by an author who also showed a gentlemanly concern with the management of his authorial identity--"the Author of Waverley." Sir Walter Scott's relationship with the Gothic is the subject of Watt's final chapter which emphasizes the extent of his critical awareness of, and practical indebtedness to, its various elements even while he was attempting to create for himself a new literary space--the historical novel of which genre he might fairly be called the creator. This involved a certain polite disparagement of the Gothic romance as feminine, confined and unreal, unlike his own work which was that of no mere writer but of a lawyer and man of the world. Scott managed to have it both ways: Watt shows his continued and often ironic exploitation of the Gothic in his novels. He also suggests that Scott's rhetoric of reality, by its invocation of history, invested his work with history's masculine generic prestige. Here I might just note that Watt, who is commendably alert to what is going on in the historiography of his period--he makes good use of Linda Colley's work, for instance--might benefit from recent works by Bonnie Smith, Daniel Woolf and this author, among others, that challenge the traditional notion that history has always, or until recently, been gendered masculine.[1] In fact it was arguably Scott's peculiar achievement to annex to the novel an area of history--referred to by Scott as "customs and manners," and now called social history--which tended to be seen as a feminine sphere.

 Watt's closing remarks in this compact and tightly written, yet lucid, work offer some interesting reflections on the subsequent fortunes of Scott's novels and of the Gothic romance which they at once assimilated and seemingly vanquished. It was a brief triumph, he suggests, soon to be followed by a reversal of fortunes. He discusses the decline both in Scott's reputation and of the historical novel from about the mid-nineteenth century, linking this to the rise of professional history which undercut their claims to historical authority. He quotes Leslie Stephen: "Sir F. Palgrave says somewhere that 'historical novels are mortal enemies to history,' and we shall venture to add that they are mortal enemies to fiction" (p. 156). While the opinion of Thackeray's son-in-law and Virginia Woolf's father is always worth hearing, Watt may somewhat exaggerate the decline of the historical novel, which was perhaps more a decline in its reputation within a rising profession of literary criticism concerned with policing disciplinary boundaries, than a decline in its popularity among readers. Nor, one suspects, was the eclipse of the Gothic so complete in the realm of popular taste, though it may have gone further down-market than the historical novel for its constituency. The countervailing resurgence of the Gothic, its legitimization as separate literary genre, and its embrace by academic criticism, are persuasively linked by Watt with its anti-historicism. The refuge from history that Mrs. Radcliffe was commended for offering her readers during the French Revolution would be even more inviting amidst the greater terrors of the twentieth century. The Gothic has also offered the academic discipline of literature a welcome refuge from history, or rather a place in which it can construct its own version of history. This has involved, according to Watt, the construction of a genre and a canon with some notable exclusions or blind spots. The Gothic genre, so constructed, has been too selective and simplistic in establishing its genealogy for present purposes, ignoring the complexities of context, of authorial intention and contemporary reception, and the existence of such ideologically embarrassing forebears as the Loyalist Gothic. Such matters may be deemed irrelevant by new historicists--as they seem to be in a review of this book by a specialist in the Gothic who crushingly calls Watt "naive"--but to this old historicist they are important, and Watt's discussion of them is well worth reading.[2]

Notes

[1].  Bonnie Smith, _The Gender of History_ (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1998;  Daniel Woolf, "A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and
Historical Knowledge in England, 1500-1800" _American Historical Review_
(June 1997);  and Christopher Kent, "Learning History With, and From, Jane
Austen" in _Jane Austen's Beginnings_, Joel Gray, ed.  (Rochester
University Press, 1988).
 

[2]. _Clio_ (Fall 2000), p. 127.

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