The gothic novel began with Horace Walpole with The Castle of Otranto (1764) and carried on well into the early Nineteenth Centaury with Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) marking its high point. The gothic genre is described as a precursor to the tradition of romanticism. Their outlook is similar on the rejection of the rational, the objective and the embracing of emotion. Romanticisms’ emotion was mainly love, and loss; the Gothic’s emotion was fear. To begin with the gothic game was easy to play, all you needed was a set of extraordinary sequences involving ghosts, ghouls, walking armor with plenty of death or near-death experiences. As the genre developed the rules for it became more polished and thought out. Writers were using gothic conventions for their own ideas, exploring the psychology of fear. You couldn’t simply throw in monsters and skeletons at every turn as each demon had to be backed by a whole philosophy and/or politics. James Hogg’s The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is one of these thinking man’s horror.
The narrative can be called a counterfeit as it copies an older style of writing. This aspect then makes it more of a historical novel. The story was supposedly written by 1712 and it was published in 1824, making it a hundred and twelve years old. This is similar to the Waverly novels that Hogg’s contemporary Walter Scott wrote. Scott, however, dedicatedly wrote gallant romances and though they often involved highly improbable circumstances and highly unlikely coincidences they were not overly concerned with the supernatural. This imitation of style in Justified Sinner is grounded on the style for much more than merely the simulation of other gothic novels. Other novels simply want to imitate the style but Hogg wants to persuade readers that it is an actual authentic historical document. Supplying an editors’ narrative and a letter to a magazine he creates a conspiracy of truth around the book. His aims for the story are not only to provide a good read but also to provoke a strong reaction and questions of belief and believability in literature and in life. It is these questions of objective truth, in history and reality, which makes it a forerunner to post-modern gothic books, such as The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and The Infernal Desires of Dr. Hoffman by Angela Carter. Another element that makes this proto-post-modern is the manipulation of conventions and knowingly using them to great effect, such as the doppelgänger motif.
Gil-Martin, the influential villain, is not just a doppelgänger to the hero but to everyone else. He takes the form of whomever he is talking to, or near by. Suggesting that evil imitates good so it can subvert and corrupt that good, as in the way he corrupts Robert Wringham. Wringham’s intentions are indisputably good but from this he is persuaded into acts of transgression. He is coerced into a series of crimes, starting with killing Mr. Blanchard, before become the victim of a framing that accuses, and conspires against, him to be the killer of his mother. There are reminisces of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein particularly when Wringham describes his fear of his own appearance at the end of the book, ‘I dared not to look at my face in a glass, for I shuddered at my own image and likeness’[1]. It reminds me of Shelly’s book and it reminds me more of it when Wringham meets up with his tormentor. He wishes to flee Gil-Martin but finds that he cannot, very like the death lock Victor Frankenstein finds him when he meets his monster on the mountains. The psychology of persecution against a philosophical backdrop, along with an undertow of responsible guilt, is similar as well. Like Frankenstein it ‘hover[s] undecidedly between the psychological and the political’[2]. Frankenstein’s monster however is not exactly supernatural but Gil-Martin most certainly is.
To my mind though, if we are to take Wringham’s narrative as reliable, it has to be impossible to read Gil-Martin as a psychological projection. Either or not he sees a spiritual being on the mountain is disputable but what cannot be denied is that other various characters have testified in seeing this devil. Mr. Blanchard talks to Wringham’s ‘illustrious friend’ who then advises that he should cut all ties with such a person. If Gil-Martin is a psychological projection then that conversation would have been impossible and if Wringham imagined it then he may have well imagined the whole world containing many more impossible things. There is more evidence in his reasoning then his madness, which is only a culmination of extreme actions. He is methodically misled, not a hallucinatory hysteric. How does a sinner justify himself when he commits suicide? This book is not skeptical of the supernatural it advances the genre by giving a portrait of a more sophisticated evil then the earlier monsters, ghouls and ghosts. What it does seem skeptical of is watertight reasoning from an unsound premise leading to its extremely logical end, or, as David Punter calls it, a ‘limitless implication of the self in a series of actions which persuade us of their inexorability’[3]. It does not merely give the reader a sensational scare but uses gothic conventions to illustrate what can happen within the influence of evil and the abandonment of discernment. The twist in the tale being that the editor, in writing the narrative off as a madness by a maniac, learns nothing from the parable and is consequently prey to spiritual manipulators such as Gil-Martin. Here interpretation of stories, as in doctrine, is vital in deciding between good and evil, truth and fantasy. Or maybe the real twist is that the editor really is Gil-Martin himself wanting to put the ‘self’[4] in the justified.
In the narrative of this essay normally I would have started with an analysis of the older text so that I could show the chronological processes of literary evolution. However in this case I had to cover first some of the gothic conventions that is sincerely part of Hogg’s writing so that it is easier to understand Jane Austen’s equally sincere criticism of the genre.
The line between joking, laughing, terror and horror can be quite thin in the gothic genre. Overwritten settings and over-the-top melodrama can move us quickly from the terrifying to the camp. Can an audience seriously take the Hammer Horror film series of Dracula and Frankenstein when each successive sequel becomes, paradoxically, more unimaginative and ludicrous? Even if it was frightening then it has aged just enough for it to be laughable purely based on social fashion. It is the unsubtly of the genre that makes it difficult to take it entirely serious. The plot synopsis alone of The Castle of Otranto can make readers burst into laughter (if you are not amused by the crushing of a character by a giant helmet, on the second page no less, then all comedy must be very tedious). The original gothic novels were ‘writings of excess’[5] which was excess that Austen found so ridiculous to take seriously. Northanger Abbey is a book of gothic parody, saytrising the sentimentalism that makes up a large part of the genre (the only other well known example of gothic genre being outright laughed at is Thomas Love Peacocks’ Nightmare Abbey). All through her novels Austen consistently makes fun of sentimentalism prevalent in Victorian Society but this is the book that makes the most use of literary reference to the gothic genre. Gothic parody is also an aspect of post-modernism since Northanger Abbey employs irony and self-awareness of its medium, it is, after all, ‘a novel about novels and novel readers’[6]. The majority of Austen’s ridicule is demonstrated in Catherine Morland, a heroine who takes gothic stories all too seriously and changes the way she sees the world around her. Exposure to such unregulated emotion has made the character prone to superstition and conclusions without the suitable critical thought required. She is one who misreads the interpretation of the novels she reads and consequently in the life she leads. The joke is, despite the setting and other suspicions, it is not a gothic novel but a realist one. At least it is not a gothic novel in the original sense, nor have the later sophisticated sense, but more of the gothic romances that the Brontë’s produced with the supernatural elements pared down and the psychological aspects enhanced. Unlike these other novels sharp humor is at the book’s forefront and not resigned to a few moments of slapstick.
Jane Austen died a year before Frankenstein was written, which was a greatly missed opportunity for now there is no record of her thoughts about such a book. It would have been extremely useful in an essay like this. Instead allow me a hypothesis of what she might have thought. I believe Austen would have approved of Shelley’s use of gothic conventions because she employs her imagination to translate a real life problem of the consequences of science, and to an extent reason, into a robust philosophical speculation. It is not of the excessive written, and overly emotional, novel of before, it has become an altogether more intellectually stimulating affair. For this reason I suspect that Hogg gets easily away from Austen’s biting wit. Despite Northanger Abbey making use of many gothic conventions it is only to satirize the genres’ absurdity. It is not a conventional gothic novel because it does not take itself seriously. Despite being a late entry into gothic fiction Confessions of a Justified Sinner advances the genre by using the conventions to make enquiries into belief and the nature of truth. Not truly like its early predecessors but an example of the more sophisticated novels, like Frankenstein, that took its philosophies more seriously.
BIBLOGRAPHY
Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, ed. by Anne Ehrenpreis (Middlesex:Penguin Books Ltd, 1987)
Botting, Fred, Gothic (London:Routledge., 1996)
Hogg, James, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969)
Punter, David et al, The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. by Maire Mulbey-Roberts (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998)
[2] Punter, David, ‘Terror’, in The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. by Maire Mulbey-Roberts (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998) pp. 235-240
[3] Punter, p237
[4] ‘I altered the title to A Self-Justified Sinner, but my booksellers did not approve of it;’ Hogg, p253
[6] Anne Ehrenpreis, introduction to Northanger Abbey, ed. by Anne Ehrenpreis (Middlesex:Penguin Books Ltd, 1987) p10
No comments:
Post a Comment