by Steven Moore
[At this place had the greatest depredations of the curate begun. There were so very few connected passages of the subsequent chapters remaining that even the partiality of an editor could not offer them to the public. I discovered, from some scattered sentences, that they were of much the same tenor with the preceding: recitals of little adventures in which the disposition of a man, sensible to judge and still more warm to feel, had room to unfold themselves. Some instruction, and some example, I make no doubt they contained; but it is likely that many of those, whom chance has led to a perusal of what I have already presented, may have read it with little pleasure, and will feel no disappointment from the want of those parts which I have been unable to procure: to such as may have expected the intricacies of a novel, a few incidents in a life undistinguished, except by some features of the heart, cannot have afforded much entertainment.]
Mackenzie has gutted the 18th-century novel of all its stuffing and connective tissue to present only concentrated scenes of sentimentalism, which is why the novel was so popular (pure shots of an uncut drug for sentimentalism addicts) and which is why the novel is only a quarter of the length of the 400-page David Simple. “Since feeling is first/who pays any attention/to the syntax of things,” E. E. Cummings asks, “syntax” in this case being the linear form and background material of a conventional novel. “I would have it as different from the entanglement of a novel as can be,” Mackenzie wrote in a letter while at work on The Man of Feeling, and as a result it is fragmentary, impressionistic, expressionistic, more like a postmodern novel than a premodern one. Though sketchily presented, Harley is reminiscent of the weepy heroes of medieval Japanese novels as well as the eccentric wanderers and aesthetes of 19th-century poetry and fiction. The exaggerated sentimentality of The Man of Feeling is dated, but its daring experiments with form and character make it timeless.
Publishers noted the success of The Man of Feeling and were quick to cash in on the trend: in 1774, an abridged edition of Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison was issued under the title The Man of Real Sensibility, with an epigraph from A Sentimental Journey. Soon the shelves of circulating libraries were groaning with precious additions to the genre, though most are derivative and cliché-ridden. “Between 1770 and 1780 appeared The Assignation, a Sentimental Novel; The Tears of Sensibility; The Sentimental Spy; The Embarrassed Lovers; The Delicate Objection, or Sentimental Scruples; and Travels for the Heart,” Shepperson records. “Between 1780 and 1790 appeared Distressed Virtue; The Effusions of Love; Female Sensibility; The Sentimental Deceiver; Sentimental Memoirs; The Favourites of Felicity; The Errors of Innocence; The Victim of Fancy;318 Excessive Sensibility; The Curse of Sentiment;319 The Illusions of Sentiment” (84). This fad, like all literary fads, soon fell out of favor; Shepperson tells of how a Scotch lady wept over The Man of Feeling at age 14 shortly after it came out, but 50 years later “read it aloud to a group of friends, and how instead of weeping they laughed, and how she herself was unable to restrain her mirth” (83). The only sentimental novels still worth reading—A Sentimental Journey, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Man of Feeling—are those that problematize the popular genre, and whose canny authors may have been laughing up their sleeves at their sensitive readers.
THE GOTHIC NOVEL
On the day before Christmas 1764, a small novel appeared that had a big impact on fiction. The Castle of Otranto claimed on its title page to be a translation by William Marshal of an Italian story written by Onuphrio Muralto in the Middle Ages and published in Naples in 1529. When the novel was reprinted five months later—the subtitle significantly changed from “A Story” to “A Gothic Story”—it was revealed to be the invention of Horace Walpole (1717–97), the rich, aesthetic son of the hated former prime minister. In his preface to that second edition, Walpole stated that the novel was “an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern” and thus to breed “a new species of romance”320—a phrase that self-consciously echoes the “new species of writing” created by Richardson and Fielding a generation earlier. By “ancient” Walpole meant the late medieval period, which appealed to those disenchanted with rational, Enlightenment thinking, and who used the term “Gothic” to describe its appeal. As David Punter puts it in The Literature of Terror, “Gothic stood for the old-fashioned as opposed to the modern; the barbaric as opposed to the civilised; crudity as opposed to elegance; old English barons as opposed to the cosmopolitan gentry; . . . Gothic was the archaic, the pagan, that which was prior to, or was opposed to, or resisted the establishment of civilised values and a well-regulated society” (5). Walpole preferred the Gothic approach to literature over the modern because “In the former, all was imagination and improbability,” while in the latter “the great resources of fancy have been damned up by strict adherence to common life” (7).
“Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through boundless realms of invention,” he goes on to say, “and thence of creating more interesting situations,” Walpole begins his novel with a gigantic helmet falling out of nowhere and crushing to death the 15-year-old son of Prince Manfred of Otranto, who had hoped to marry him to an 18-year-old virgin named Isabella in order to tighten his loose claim to the principality his grandfather acquired through poisoning the rightful ruler and forging a will. Over the next three days, Manfred tries to put a new plan in place—divorcing his sterile wife and marrying Isabella himself—while appeasing a visiting combative knight by offering his dutiful daughter Matilda to him. Meanwhile, Manfred is being harassed by a priest from the nearby monastery and by a young stranger named Theodore who has fallen for Matilda, and who happens to be the son of the priest and the legitimate heir to the principality of Otranto. If that were not enough, the increasingly frenzied Manfred is spooked by apparitions, including a giant, a painting that comes to life, and a talking skeleton. Convinced that Theodore is wooing Isabella in a dark church, Manfred goes there and accidentally stabs his daughter Matilda to death; overwhelmed with guilt, he confesses the illegitimacy of his claim to the throne and, after relinquishing it to Theodore, retires to the monastery. Theodore reluctantly marries Isabella, who had become Matilda’s friend, because “he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul” (102).
Walpole set the stage for later Gothic novels by introducing all the standard props and tropes: an old castle, a nearby monastery (both connected by a spooky subterranean passage), supernatural occurrences, medieval pageantry, superstitious Catholicism, portentous weather, terrifying sounds, dark secrets, repressed sexuality, an “ancient prophecy,” and so on. He established the standard personae dramatis: a tyrannical father, a submissive wife, frightened virgins, priests and nuns, the handsome outsider (usually a nobleman dressed as a peasant), knights and their retainers, and (for comic relief) garrulous servants. And he gave the Gothic its specialized vocabulary, words and phrases like horror, horrid, tremendous, “exquisite villainy,” torture, ominous, “pleasing melancholy,” terror, phrenzy, monster, “haunted by evil spirits,” “the powers of darkness,” “dreadful spectre,” etc.— all clichés now, but startling in 1764, evoking recent “graveyard poetry” and the Jacobean drama of a century and a half earlier. (In fact, The Castle of Otranto has much more in common with Elizabethan plays—specially Shakespeare’s, which are quoted often—than with medieval romances.) Walpole doesn’t explain away the supernatural occurrences, leaving it to the reader to decide whether they are metaphoric manifestations of psychological states or demonstrations of “the powers of fancy at liberty.” In any case, Walpole created the template used by countless later novelists, dramatists, and filmmakers; as Mack writes in his introduction to the Everyman edition (which is recommended because it includes Walpole’s bizarre Hieroglyphic Tales [1785]), “The fundamental thematic concerns of the story—the manner in which the past impinges upon the present, the brutal and violent connection between sexuality and po
wer, and the overwhelming conviction that the truth will finally be brought to light— are, again, those which to a large degree are at the centre of the gothic to this very day” (xvii–xviii).321
Given the popularity of The Castle of Otranto, it is surprising that no one thought of imitating it until a generation later. In 1777, Clara Reeve (1729–1807) published a novel entitled The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story, but better known by its 1778 reprint title, The Old English Baron. Reeve admits upfront that her slim novel “is the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto, written upon the same plan, with a design to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient romance and modern novel. . .” (2). But hers is weak tea compared to Walpole’s strong mead, a blandly written story of how a young man raised as a peasant discovers he’s a nobleman and claims his rightful place. Reeve felt the supernatural events in Otranto “excite laughter” rather than terror, so she dials them down to a premonitory dream, a ghost or two, and the haunted wing of a castle; the result is merely a novel set in the 1420s, less a Gothic than a historical novel, a genre that was in development at this time.322 Walpole’s Otranto may be rather stilted, but it has an intensity that is lacking in Reeve’s boring novel, and not surprisingly Walpole dismissed it, telling a friend that The Old English Baron was “so probable that any trial for murder at the Old Bailey would make a more interesting story” (Punter, 48).
Much more impressive and ambitious is The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times (1783–85) by dramatist Sophia Lee (1750–1824). A well-researched dramatization of political machinations during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, The Recess is a considerably more detailed historical novel than Reeve’s, while retaining the tension and malevolent atmosphere of Walpole’s novella. The dreaded tyrant here is Elizabeth I, whose persecution of Mary, Queen of Scots, extends to her two (fictitious) daughters, Matilda and Ellinore, who spend most of the novel confined in various dungeons, prisons, and Gothic monasteries (one of which contains the hidden room that gives the novel its title). There are instruments of torture, bandits, abductions, threats of rape, bad weather, and in Ellinore’s case, “total insanity”: dressed in black, she appears before a frenzied Queen Elizabeth, who thought she was dead and hence regards her as a “ghastly spectre” (266). Even pregnancy is swathed in Gothic gloom: when Matilda realizes she’s pregnant, she tells the fetus “throbs of terror were thy first symptoms of existence,” and when she is born, the girl seems “to bewail her unknown calamity” (91, 132), as though sensing that she too is doomed to be a persecuted maiden in a Gothic novel. (When she grows up, her intended dies, she is imprisoned with her mother, and dies of poison, as though fulfilling a family curse.) The Gothic mood is maintained by the rich, metaphoric language, which is much more like Walpole’s than Reeve’s: “The radiant sun of love seemed to dip into a sea of blood, and sink there forever” (117). Matilda describes Greenwich Palace on the Thames (Queen Elizabeth’s birthplace) thus: “The tide in silence laved the walls of a deserted palace, which verging to decay like its past possessors, seemed but a gaudy mausoleum” (152). Describing a new bout of madness, Ellinore writes, “It brought on another Greenland winter’s night, which lasted many lingering months” (186).
To the Gothic and historical modes, Lee adds elements of the sentimental novel—she wants to make our eyes weep rather than our flesh creep—illustrating the Gothic’s tendency to feed on other genres like a parasite—or as Maggie Kilgour more aptly puts it, “The form is thus itself a Frankenstein’s monster, assembled out of the bits and pieces of the past” (4). The structure of The Recess is interesting, possibly unique in 18th-century epistolary fiction. The narrative is a 320-page memoir written by Matilda at the end of her calamitous life for a French ambassador’s daughter, who helped the dejected Englishwoman when she moved to France to retire. But enclosed within it is a 115-page narrative written by Ellinore, who gives her side of the story. (They had a difference of opinion over Elizabeth’s courtiers: Matilda fell for and married the Earl of Leicester, while Ellinore preferred the Earl of Essex.) More adventurous than timid Matilda—who feels “I was born for obedience” and considers herself “a voluntary victim” (63, 90—much like her namesake in Otranto), Ellinore gradually cracks up, replicated visually as her narrative breaks up into fragments and short letters. When Matilda finishes reading this manuscript, she voices the response Lee hoped to elicit from her readers: “[I] remained the statue of despair, every sense seeming riveted on the manuscript I held” (269). The two accounts contradict rather than complement each other, and there’s no authorial intervention to indicate whose account is more accurate. Nor is there any restoration of order, as in Walpole’s and Reeve’s novels—King James is no better than Queen Elizabeth in the narrator’s opinion—which makes Lee’s Gothic even grimmer than theirs.
Though the Scottish physician John Moore (1729–1802) did not set out to write a Gothic novel, his once-popular Zeluco (1789) is often grouped with them (a gloom of Gothics?) because it contains a flagrant example of the genre’s stock villain: the egotistic Italian tyrant. Indulged by his mother, Zeluco displays “strong indications of a vicious disposition” (as the first chapter’s subtitle announces) as early as age 10, when he crushes his pet sparrow to death because “it did not perform certain tricks which he had taught it to his satisfaction.” Zeluco grows up to be a vain, selfish egomaniac: he impregnates/abandons a woman while burning through his inheritance; goes off to Cuba and becomes a vicious slaveholder; makes a fortune there, returns to Naples, and marries a decent young woman named Laura for her body, tires of it, and begins an affair with a Sicilian schemer named Nerina, who convinces him that Zeluco’s child by Laura is illegitimate. In a fit of rage, he snatches the child from Laura’s arms and strangles it, “occasioned” (the author needlessly reminds us) “by the propensity he betrayed in his infancy” when he, “in a fit of groundless passion, squeezed his sparrow to death” (chap. 89). To the reader’s satisfaction, Zeluco is fatally stabbed in the stomach by a rival after Zeluco catches him in bed with Nerina, and Laura makes a more satisfactory second marriage, moving away from sensuous, Catholic Italy to rational, Protestant Germany. There are no supernatural scenes in Zeluco—as the worldly author assures us, Zuluco’s heartless egotism is all too common—but the vain, vengeful title character and the Italian setting influenced later Gothic novelists, as well as Lord Byron, who inexplicably described his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as “a poetical Zeluco.” (Harold is much nobler than the asshole Zeluco.) Dr. Moore’s sardonic novel is closer in form and substance to the early novels of Smollett—a friend and distant cousin—especially Ferdinand Count Fathom, another portrait of a miscreant with some Gothic elements.
Born the year The Castle of Otranto was published, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) is the one who transformed the Gothic novel from a minor literary genre into a popular commercial one. She did so by grafting on to Frankenstein’s monster two more modes: the romance and the travelogue. All of her novels are conventional romances dressed up for Halloween, and follow the standard romance formula: a goody-goody heroine (usually an orphan, but with money and looks) is prevented from marrying the man she admires (usually of noble birth, but with some temporary ignoble stain) by a tyrant of some sort. After the usual obstacles, the tyrant is overcome and the hero and heroine reclaim their inheritances and marry. As one of her modern editors observes, her works “are basically novels of sensibility with heroes and heroines straight out of the tradition of Richardson, Prévost, and especially Rousseau.”323 What Radcliffe did is to blow up these conventional story-lines to nightmarish proportions by use of Gothic machinery and apparent supernaturalism—always explained away as manmade contrivances or misinterpreted actions—and cushion them in pages of lush nature description. It’s a formula that made her rich and inspired a legion of imitators. Influenced not by Walpole but by his imitators (especially Reeve and Lee), Radcliffe set her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), in Scotl
and near the end of the 16th century. Seventeen-year-old Mary is the heroine of this tale of two feuding clans, and displays the Radcliffean heroine’s tendency to faint a lot and retain her virginity through several abductions by immoral men. Gothic castles with dungeons, damp crypts, and subterranean passages provide the atmosphere, but Radcliffe explains away any suspiciously paranormal occurrences, a bait-and-switch tactic that she uses in all her novels. This was followed by The Sicilian Romance (1791), which is a little better and a little longer, as is The Romance of the Forest (1792), set in a ruined abbey in France.
On the strength of these, Radcliffe was offered the unprecedented sum of £500 (at a time when many novelists were lucky to get £10) for her fourth and longest novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). It begins with a l-e-i-s-u-r-e-l-y account of a sightseeing trip through southern France undertaken in 1584 by Emily St. Aubin and her ailing father, who soon dies and leaves her in the hands of an odious aunt (who needs a huge falling helmet to crush her to death). The aunt makes a bad marriage with a visiting Italian count named Montoni, who takes them back to Venice and then to his castle at Udolpho in northern Italy, forcing Emily to abandon her beloved, a local aristocrat named Valancourt. Rumors of the mysterious death of the castle’s previous owner, along with spooky shenanigans, drive Emily to distraction, causing the narrator to tut-tut: “It was lamentable that her excellent understanding should have yielded, even for a moment, to the reveries of superstition, or rather to those starts of imagination which deceive the senses into what can be called nothing less than momentary madness” (1.10). After Emily’s aunt dies, Montoni turns his horrid attention to her—nothing sexual; he just wants the property she has now inherited—and eventually Emily is able to escape from Udolpho with the help of her servants. She returns to France only to confront further mysteries and paranormal activity in a haunted château, and where she learns that, while she was away, Valancourt went on a wild spree in Paris (cf. Saint Preux in Julie). Her sense of decorum and propriety forces her to break off their engagement, to the exasperation of her old nurse: “Dear dear! to see how some people fling away their happiness, and then cry and lament about it, just as if it was not their own doing, and as if there was more pleasure in wailing and weeping then in being at peace” (4.14)—which may register Radcliffe’s impatience with the sentimental genre that she otherwise adapts. Predictably, all mysteries are cleared up, Valancourt’s reputation is restored, and they marry and move back into her beloved father’s home.