Gothic Libraries and National Subjects.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-01

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This domain of phantasms is no longer the night, the sleep of reason, or the uncertain void that stands before desire, but, on the contrary, wakefulness, untiring attention, zealous erudition.... Henceforth, the visionary experience arises from the black and white surface of printed signs, from the closed and dusty volume that opens with a flight of forgotten words.... The imaginary now resides between the book and the lamp.

--Michel Foucault, "Fantasia of the Library"

IN A GOTHIC NOVEL, TO ENTER THE CHAMBERS A HOUSEHOLD SETS ASIDE FOR its reading and writing is to be recruited into a genealogical plot. The secret cabinets of Gothic libraries house memorials and legacies. To visit them is to stumble on wills made by dead fathers; long lost certificates of marriage; musty manuscripts; even, as in The Mysteries of Udolpho, the miniature-portrait of an unknown lady, concealed within a bag of coins--raw materials, all, for narratives of reproduction and succession. Walter Scott, not just an aficionado of old spectre-stocked mansions, but also romanticism's most indefatigable bibliographer, can be counted on to comply with a basic rule of this literature: while surrounded by books, ink, and paper the protagonists of Gothic fiction embark on their projects of memory and mourning. These projects establish the terms on which the generations will be linked and on which the living will relate to the family dead.

And when Gothic protagonists use the Gothic library as they are meant to, when they read, they are haunted. One site in which Ann Radcliffe's Emily St. Aubert remembers the dead and, seeing spectres, receives assurance that the dead remember her, is the library of La Vallee. Re-entering it after an absence from home, Emily finds her way to the armchair in which her father had been accustomed to read and sees a book lying open as he had left it. "She immediately recollected that St. Aubert, on the evening before his [final] departure from the chateau, had read to her some passages from this, her favourite author. The circumstance now affected her extremely; she looked at the page, wept, and looked again. To her the book appeared sacred and invaluable, and she would not have ... closed the page ... for the treasures of the Indies."(1) The passage presages a pattern in the scenes that follow, in this novel and those of Radcliffe's many romantic-era imitators: a pattern in which the supernatural will, to paraphrase Foucault, reside between the book and the lamp. Later, for instance, Emily's manservant Ludovico will use a book picked up "in an obscure corner of the Marquis' library" to kill time as he stands watch in a room rumoured to be haunted (551). It is, or so it appears, his very act of reading that raises the chateau's ghosts: the narrator implies that once Ludovico ceases to regard the characters on the printed page, he instead sees the space before him filled by the spectral shape of the dead. The audience invited to put themselves in Ludovico's place are reminded of how as readers they also are enlisted in a process characterized by periodic disappearances and apparitions, a process in which, time and again, the book as object, the thing of paper that one grasps in one's hands, will, as one is engrossed by one's reading, cease to be a material reality, while the ideas this book "contains" will begin "to exist" and to be embodied in their turn.

Alerted to the uncanny aspects that attend on this everyday phenomenology, readers of Gothic fictions learn to associate the textual and the spectral. What Radcliffe's reference in the earlier passage of Udolpho to "the treasures of the Indies" suggests as well is another point crucial to my argument: that the page the character regards in these episodes of phantasmagoria can be a legacy. Within these narratives, so often geared to resecuring the line of succession and the transmission of property, even the time of reading is given the reader by the dead. Literature is a family trust.

This leads me to the second way I have to identify the Gothic libraries at issue in my essay--and leads me, too, to the terms in which this rereading of the Gothic might also reopen the question of Scott's role in instituting the discipline of literary studies and with it the category of "English Literature," which he helps equip with a canon, history, and tradition. (This is a question often engaged of late, but in work that tends to underestimate Scott's debt to the female practitioners of the Gothic and to overlook the emotional baggage--the melancholy, trepidation, and even aggressivity--that freights the project of canon formation almost as much as it freights the ghostseeing that this "English Literature" depicts and abets.)(2) As writing erected "within the archive,"(3) Gothic fictions themselves do the cultural work of a library, the institution dubbed the national library in particular. Gothic fictions make us contemplate not only family origins but also literary sources--and, crucially, make us contemplate them in tandem. It is, of course, a critical commonplace that, in its obsessing over the secrets of the child bed, the Gothic gives voice to the culture's anxieties about procreation, about the slippage between kinship arrangements and individuals' sexual desires. My aim here, while preserving the feminism that informs that scholarship, is to relocate the base from which we investigate that anxiety over reproduction. What if the home base for our discussions of Gothic convention were not the bedroom but rather the library? To answer this question, I'll be aligning the Gothic with other (often North Briton-monopolized) institutions of national cultural formation (the ballad collection, the anthology, "lives" of the poets and the novelists)--those projects of literary revivalism that so often proved irresistible for Scott, who frequently seems to have dreamt of single-handedly reissuing "English" in its entirety.(4)

The Gothic novelists conceive of themselves as the target market for enterprises of this kind, and they advertise their bibliophilia. Scarcely canonical themselves, they are among the period's chief exemplars of canon-love. Their texts are remarkable accordingly for the density of their intertextual allusions. The Castle of Wolfenbach, in Eliza Parsons' 1793 Minerva Press novel of that name, is typical of its domiciliar kind in being endowed to excess, as a neighbor complains, with "`bloody floors, prison rooms, and [in]scriptions, they say, on the windows to make a body's hair stand on end.'"(5) We know that, with its endowment of "[in]scriptions," the typical Gothic text resembles that house. It is crowded with quotations and epigraphs from Shakespeare and Milton and the graveyard poets. This writing self-consciously offers itself to British readers as the site where they may claim their ancestral birthright.

The books-within-books I called attention to earlier are the conventional media of that self-consciousness, of the interrogation of literary reading that is a central drama for the Gothic.(6) And we know--because it is as if these novelists all did business with the same props department, because horror movies have likewise made the Gothic library a standard element in their mise-en-scene--how any one of these books should look. Its dilapidated state, quaint woodcuts, and mildew will announce the fact that it has survived generations of readers, a longevity that casts into relief the truncated life expectancy accorded mere humans. My hope in this essay is that by tracing to its eighteenth-century origin this conventional source of Gothic suspense--the moment when the protagonist pries up the cover of the old book and begins to read--I will be able to demonstrate how this figure of reading (which is also a figure of what it means to probate one's cultural "inheritance") functioned in the program the first Gothic novels pursued both self-consciously and equivocally via their modelling of canon-love: that of addressing their audience as a nation.

This reconstruction will involve me in a dispute with recent accounts of the geopolitics of the Gothic and attempts to specify the real object of the terror this tradition mobilizes. Cannon Schmitt and Judith Halberstam agree on how best to name that terror. They call it xenophobia. Schmitt, for instance, proposes that even or especially when set in foreign parts--the Black Forest or Catholic Italy--the Gothic functions as a "mechanism of Englishness, a technology of national subJect-formation that works to confirm identification between English readers and `English' characters and characteristics."(7) In this account of the novels' Continental settings, nationality requires a foil to set it off. The...

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