The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. Dorothy Scarborough
contribution that the Gothic school made to English literature is Jane Austen’s inimitable satire of it, Northanger Abbey. Though written as her first novel and sold in 1797, it did not appear till after her death, in 1818. Its purpose is to ridicule the Romanticists and the book in itself would justify the terroristic school, but she was ahead of her times, so the editor feared to publish it. In the meantime she wrote her other satires on society and won immortality for her work which might never have been begun save for her satiety of medieval romances. The title of the story itself is imitative, and the well-known materials are all present, yet how differently employed! The setting is a Gothic abbey tempered to modern comfort; the interfering father is not vicious, merely ill-natured; the pursuing, repulsive lover is not a villain, only a silly bore. The heroine has no beauty, nor does she topple into sonnets nor snatch a pencil to sketch the scene, for we are told that she has no accomplishments. Yet she goes through palpitating adventures mostly modelled on Mrs. Radcliffe’s incidents. She is hampered in not being supplied with a lover who is the unrecognized heir to vast estates, since all the young men in the county are properly provided with parents.
The delicious persiflage in which Jane Austen hits off the fiction of the day may be illustrated by a bit of conversation between two young girls.
“My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all the morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?”
“Yes; I have been reading it ever since I woke, and I have got to the black veil.”
“Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh, I would not tell you what is behind that black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?”
“Oh, yes, quite! What can it be? But do not tell me—I would not be told on any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton. Oh, I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life reading it, I assure you. If it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for the world.”
“Dear creature! How much obliged I am to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”
“Have you, indeed? How glad I am! What are they all?”
“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book: Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. These will last us some time.”
“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?”
“Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews—a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world—has read every one of them!”
Mr. George Saintsbury[37] expresses himself as sceptical of this list as a catalogue of actual romances, stating that he has never read one of them and should like some other authority than Miss Andrews for their existence. He is mistaken in his doubt, however, since during the progress of this investigation four out of the eight have been identified as to authorship, and doubtless the others are lurking in some antique library. Clermont is by Maria Regina Roche; Mysterious Warnings by Mrs. Parsons, in London, 1796; Midnight Bell by Francis Latham; and Horrid Mysteries by Marquis Grosse, London, 1796.
Jane Austen’s stupid bore, John Thorpe, and Mr. Tilney, the impeccable, pedantic hero, add their comment to Gothic fiction, one saying with a yawn that there hasn’t been a decent novel since Tom Jones, except The Monk, and the other that he read Udolpho in two days with his hair standing on end all the time.
But the real cleverness of the work consists in the burlesque of Gothic experiences that Catherine, because of the excited condition of her mind induced by excess of romantic fiction, goes through with on her visit to Northanger Abbey. She explores secret wings in a search for horrors, only to find sunny rooms, with no imprisoned wife, not a single maniac, and never skeleton of tortured nun. Mr. Tilney’s ironic jests satirize all the elements of Gothic romance. Opening a black chest at midnight, she finds a yellowed manuscript, but just as she is about to read it her candle flickers out. In the morning sunshine she finds that it is an old laundry list. The only result of her suspicious explorings is that she is caught in such prowlings by the young man whose esteem she wishes to win. He sarcastically assures her that his father is not a wife-murderer, that his mother is not immured in a dungeon, but died of a bilious attack. These delicately tipped shafts of ridicule riddle the armor of medievalism and give it at the same time a permanency of interest because of Jane Austen’s treatment of it. The Gothic novel will be remembered, if for nothing else, for her parody of it.
But Miss Austen is not the only satirist of the genre. In The Heroine, Eaton Stannard Barrett gives an amusing burlesque of it. It is interesting to note in this connection that while Northanger Abbey was written and sold in 1797 it was not published till 1818, and Barrett’s book, while written later, was published in 1813.
In the introduction, an epistle, supposed to be endited by one Cherubina, says:
Moon, May 1, 1813.
Know that the moment that a mortal manuscript is written in a legible hand and the word End or Finis attached thereto, whatever characters happen to be sketched therein acquire the quality of creating a soul or spirit which takes flight and ascends immediately through the regions of the air till it arrives at the moon, where it is embodied and becomes a living creature, the precise counterpart of the literary prototype.
Know farther that all the towns, villages, rivers, hills, and valleys of the moon also owe their origin to the descriptions which writers give of the landscapes of the earth.
By means of a book, The Heroine, I became a living inhabitant of the moon. I met with the Radclyffian and Rochian heroines, and others, but they tossed their heads and told me pertly that I was a slur on the sisterhood, and some went so far as to say that I had a design on their lives.
Cherry, an unsophisticated country girl, becomes Cherubina after reading romantic tales. She decides that she is an heiress kept in unwarranted seclusion, and tells her father that he cannot possibly be her father since he is “a fat, funny farmer.” She rummages in his desk for private papers, discovering a torn scrap that she interprets to her desires. She flies, leaving a note to tell the fleshy agriculturist that she is gone “to wander over the convex earth in search of her parents,” with what comic experiences one may imagine. There is much discussion of the Gothic heroine, particularly those from Mrs. Radcliffe’s and Regina Maria Roche’s pages. The girl sprinkles her letters with verse. She passes through storms, explores deserted houses, and comes to what she thinks is her ancestral castle in London, but is told that it is Covent Garden Theatre. She decides that she is Nell Gwynne’s niece and goes to that amiable person to demand all her property. She pokes around in the cellar to find her captive mother, and discovers an enormously fat woman playing with frogs, who drunkenly insists that she is her mother. Leaving that place in disgust she takes possession of somebody else’s castle and orders it furnished in Gothic style, according to romance. She has the fat farmer shut up in the madhouse.
The book is very amusing, and a more pronounced parody on Gothicism than Northanger Abbey because the whole story turns round that theme—but, of course, it is not of so great literary value. It seems strange, however, that it is so little known. It burlesques every feature of terror fiction, the high-flown language, the excited oaths, the feudal furniture, the medieval architecture, the Gothic weather, the supernatural tempers, the spectral apparitions—one of which is so muscular that he struggles with the heroine as she locks him in a closet, after throwing rapee into his face, which makes him sputter in a mortal fashion. Cherubina finds a blade bone of mutton in some Gothic garbage and takes it for a bone of an ancestor. Radcliffian adjectives reel across the pages and the whole plays up in a delightful parody the ludicrous weaknesses and excesses of the terror fiction.
Likewise the Anti-Jacobin parodies the Gothic ghost and there is considerable satire directed at the whole Gothic genre in Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Nightmare Abbey.
In general, Gothicism