Gothic Subjects. Sian Silyn Roberts
family and guarantees its perpetuity through a modern companionate marriage.
Up to this point in the novel, it is fair to say that Julia reproduces the cultural logic of the British gothic. As critics of the English novel have argued, the British tradition labors in defense of a realist world of stable meaning against forces that assail the self-enclosure and self-government of its constituents. These novels introduce atavistic energies and marvelous occurrences into a closed domain—typically a castle, dungeon, or monastery—that animate the object world and challenge the protagonist’s ability to think and feel for herself.20 On discovering what she believes to be a mutilated and decaying corpse in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for example, Emily St. Aubert is seized by “fits of abstraction” and “shuddering emotion” that spread between bodies to her terrified servants.21 The same kind of intrusive objects animate the psychic landscape in The Castle of Otranto (1764). An oversized helmet, a bleeding statue, and a sighing portrait challenge the ontological order of a world that rests on the strict separation of subjects from objects. When, under such circumstances, “resolution … give[s] way to terror,” Walpole challenges the autonomy of his characters by subjecting them to emotion that enters the individual directly from the outside.22 Working within this tradition, Wood likewise challenges her protagonist’s status as an autonomous subject when she introduces the gothic trope of the return of the dead. On a visit to the family’s crypt, Julia is startled by her mother’s miraculously lifelike corpse before, “to her horror, it sunk into ashes, and mouldered into dust.”23 This temporarily reanimated object provides a convenient way to talk about the mobile relationship between subject and object positions when the individual’s liberty is constrained in the space of the gothic castle. In much the same way that Wood reassigns subjectivity to an object that was itself once a subject, Julia becomes an object in the Count’s self-interested narrative when her property and agency are withheld.
In what Sir Walter Scott identified as the signature move of the “Radcliffe school” of writing, such anti-individualistic phenomena are ultimately explained away as the fevered hallucinations of an overwrought imagination or the magical events of a remote past at odds with modernity.24 Emily discovers that the corpse is actually a memento mori carved from wax, while Walpole consciously locates his tale of superstitious frenzy “in the darkest ages of Christianity.”25 Julia finds out that her mother’s corpse was merely extremely well preserved by “rich spices and aromatics,” and the “ghost” she sees on the castle grounds is Colwort come to rescue her.26 By warding off these supernatural phenomena as singular, excessive, or phobic, novels such as The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Julia and the Illuminated Baron ultimately reassert what Horkheimer and Adorno call “a disenchanted nature,” namely, a modern world evacuated of all superstition and subordinated to the sovereignty of the human mind.27
Recent scholarship has suggested that the gothic mode takes up these cultural materials to reconcile early modern kinship structures (which oversee the transfer of property and bloodline along male lines) to modern, consensual social relations.28 The kind of aristocratic despots populating the British gothic represent older forms of traditional hierarchy primarily concerned with the perpetuation of a family or estate. Such tyrannical power is at odds with the distinctly modern forms of individuated desire represented by the persecuted women under their control. In contrast to the phobic feelings that originate in spectral objects and spread between the castle’s inhabitants, this kind of desire originates wholly within the subject and is directed toward socially acceptable forms of masculinity. The Italian’s (1797) Vivaldi, Udolpho’s Valancourt, and Julia’s Colwort represent a new kind of paternal authority—distinct from the patriarchal imperatives of blood-based power relations—that qualifies them as heads of English households. When these novels unite such individuated subjects in a contractual marriage, the home emerges as a site of modern authority represented by a set of domestic practices that reproduce and guarantee self-government and civic virtue within the family and across generations.
Yet Julia’s resemblance to a British gothic romance obscures the fact that the social problem of the novel is actually more American than British. As I see it, Wood’s novel does not simply set out to modernize aristocratic kinship structures at the level of the household. Wood also wants to take this model of social relations on the road, so to speak. By relocating Colwort and Julia to England at the novel’s end, she imagines a more expansive social unit that can claim the distinctive moral qualities associated with established gentry but whose constituents are far removed from a fixed estate or point of origin. To understand why Julia performs such a move—and why Wood appropriates the representational strategies of the British gothic to make it—Leonard Tennenhouse’s work on “the cultural logic of diaspora” offers a helpful interpretative tool.29
As Tennenhouse explains it, a displaced colonial population—such as the English in pre-Revolutionary America—maintains its ties to its nation of origin by reproducing within the colonies a set of cultural practices associated with the homeland. American literature, Tennenhouse argues, insists “on reproducing those aspects of Englishness that do not require one to be in England so much as among English people.” Characterized by “detours, disruptions, circularity, and exchanges,” this model of cultural transmission reformulates British ideas and forms to reproduce a kind of Englishness that can travel beyond set geopolitical limits.30 It is for this reason, I am convinced, that Wood restores the original Alvada family by means of a purified bloodline only to transplant it to England at the novel’s end. Let me explain further.
Julia may begin the novel separated from her original bloodline but she nonetheless preserves her eligibility as a member of that group through her exemplary personal qualities. Her virtue, autonomy, and capacity for selfgovernment qualify her as a match for Colwort, who likewise possesses “the best of minds, and a counterpart of her own.”31 Their unique brand of interiority and moral worthiness authorizes them as modern couple in the tradition of British sentimentalism. Their union rescues the original bloodline from the impurities of the Count’s deviant social practices and resanctifies it as a new form of exemplary cultural Englishness at the level of the household, which comes to include a large extended family of unrelated dependents, servants, and friends. Put differently, the novel ends by naturalizing a much more inclusive version of the family than that defined purely by blood relation and estate. In a move that fosters what Tennenhouse identifies as the peculiarly American diasporic fantasy of a return to a cultural home, the family that “returns” to England is characterized primarily by the personal qualities of its constituents. This is an altogether different formation from the predatory, overly endogamous social organism championed by the Count or the closely related kinship group of the Alvadas. When the old Marquis rejoices that, in his daughter Julia he has found “the exact resemblance of her mother,” the novel ends on a note strikingly similar to that of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791).32 There, we recall, Mr. Temple returns to England with the daughter of the deceased Charlotte, and with time Mrs. Temple “began to fancy she again possessed her Charlotte.”33 In both novels, the structure of the original family is restored, but its domestic habits and the quality of its affective ties ultimately matter more than the blood and origin of the people in it.34
Thus the British gothic tradition works hand-in-glove with the sentimental novel to legitimate individuated sources of authority, which are guaranteed by and reproduced in the home. This account gives us new grounds on which to evaluate the extraordinary appeal of early British gothic novels in post-Revolutionary North America. The Radcliffe school of British gothic ultimately resolves ontological uncertainties by means of a common, rational interpretation of the world of objects. In this sense, it works in the service of a realist literary form that deals with life as it exists prior to language. That a wide range of Americans would find this narrative logic appealing for its ability to cut through problems posed by mediation and misrepresentation seems entirely plausible, especially considering that the historical events of the period conspired to foster such apprehensions. This is the same logic underwriting the popular Common Sense school of thought, which provides an immediate conviction of the reality of the external world. It makes sense that a form of writing committed to authorizing