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Emmeline

Charlotte Smith. 1788. “Romanticism and Gothic” list.

For today’s reader, much more likely to be well read in Jane Austen than to have heard of her predecessor Charlotte Smith, a certain scene of conflict between two women in Smith’s Emmeline may seem familiar. The heroine Emmeline is sent up to the room of Lady Montreville, the mother of Delamere, a man who has fallen violently in love with Emmeline, and who also happens to be her first cousin. Despite their near relation, the orphan Emmeline’s supposed status as a “natural” daughter bars her both from the fortune and the high status that would be hers had her parents married. The haughty, commanding Lady Montreville, used to getting her way in everything, has much greater matrimonial plans for her son than for him to lower himself to a union with this upstart. She tells her as much. She orders Emmeline to accept a different offer of marriage, from a man she dislikes. Emmeline is not Lizzy Bennett. She believes herself indebted to the Montrevilles, and besides, she belongs to an earlier generation of heroine. She seems sweeter, more delicate, more traditionally feminine. Where Lizzy mocks the accusation that she has used her “arts” to ensnare her lover (“If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it”), Emmeline respectfully denies it. But 25 years before Pride and Prejudice, the seeds of the spirited heroine are definitely there. Emmeline, like Lizzy, states in no uncertain terms that this insolent treatment of her is not having the desired effect. Emmeline, like Lizzy, gets up and leaves before Lady Montreville is willing to end the conversation.

As this comparison shows, Emmeline is situated at an interesting point in the development of the female-centered novel, a sort of way station between Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. A version of the famous “Catherine de Bourgh” scene actually arrived nearly 50 years earlier in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, but under Smith it moves closer to the scene we know.

Although unable to foresee Jane Austen, of course, Emmeline is self-conscious about its place on the literary map. Like many novels during the form’s initial flowering, it tries to disassociate itself from other novels by criticizing them (for the first 100 years, novels were still considered pretty trashy). At one point, Emmeline looks through a stack of novels “but found nothing in any, that tempted her to go regularly through the whole.” At another, she cannot distract herself from her sorrows by taking any interest in “the fictitious and improbable calamities of the heroine of a novel.” (Heroines’ unsuccessful attempts to distract themselves by reading is itself a widespread motif through the period.) But here we have to suspect conscious humor; Emmeline is of course, as Smith knows, indisputably fictitious, and her calamities are not especially probable. Perhaps the most striking instance of the novel’s conscious intertextuality when Delamere receives news that his mother has taken violently ill as a result of his behavior. At the time, he is in a room with Emmeline and their friends Mrs. Stafford and Colonel Fitz-Edward, and the latter is reading Fanny Burney’s Cecilia aloud to the two young women. As anyone who has read Cecilia knows, it too features a mother who loses her physical health through distress over her son’s desire to marry against her wishes.

Straddling the cross-pollinating genres of gothic, sentimental, and novel of manners, Emmeline borrows heavily from other work (as it is, in turn, borrowed from). Works in this vein can seem like a grab bag of stock elements recombined into endless novels with a woman’s name as the title. Seeing certain tropes over and over—the conceit that people can become sick and even die because of their feelings, for example—we may be tempted to view these authors as showing a lack of inventiveness. Emmeline reading Cecilia while living a twist on the plot of Cecilia should show us that its derivativeness is, at the least, deliberate.

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The Old English Baron

Clara Reeve. 1778. “Romanticism and Gothic” list.

Frontispiece illustration to the first edition.

In the preface of her 1777 The Champion of Virtue, the first version of what was to become The Old English Baron, Clara Reeve announces that her goal was to write in the vein of Horace Walpole’s earlier Castle of Otranto—but with important adjustments. Considered the first Gothic novel and an attempt “to blend together...the ancient romance, and modern novel,” according to Reeve (and Walpole himself), The Castle of Otranto nonetheless traffics in marvels that Reeve and others find so ridiculous as to be disruptive of its “enchantment.” 

Reeve suggests that instead, such a novel should “excite or detain the attention” while being “kept within the utmost verge of probability.” Her attempt to demonstrate this principle was met with mixed success; Horace Walpole, perhaps vexed at her criticism, declared Reeve’s novel “stripped of the marvelous...except in one awkward attempt at a ghost or two...it is the most insipid dull thing you ever saw.” From a modern perspective that takes the early Gothic less seriously and enjoys Otranto’s over-the-top charms, it is hard not to agree with him. Reeve’s preface condemns some of Otranto’s most famous and delightful innovations: the giant helmet falling out of the sky, the sword so large that it takes a hundred men to lift it, the picture walking out of its frame, etc. By contrast, Reeve restrains her own supernatural effects to two prophetic dreams, doors that fly open by themselves to welcome the castle’s rightful owner, and indeed, one ghost (who groans a lot and makes just one visual appearance, only to point). Although less whimsical than the events of Otranto, it is hard to see how these “verge on probability.” The book’s repeated emphasis on the hand of Providence may provide a clue; all supernatural elements serve to bring justice and divine retribution. Against a backdrop of shifting Enlightenment views on miracles, The Old English Baron suggests that God sometimes works outside natural cause and effect, but here the fantastical is purposeful and controlled. 

The critic Anna Barbauld noted, justly, that “we foresee the conclusion before we have reached twenty pages.” The plot adds little excitement to a formula already developed in Otranto and other works. There’s a hero (Edmund) of seemingly low birth who reveals the murder of his parents by a usurper of their estate, uncovering these past crimes through divine intervention via gothic trappings (haunted chambers, rooms hidden behind tapestry, coffin concealed under loose floorboard). Uncertain how to make the situation right, Edmund follows the advice of his friend Father Oswald to seek out the protection of a “great man.” As luck would have it, an old friend (Sir Philip Harclay) of Edmund’s father (the late Lord Lovel) visited the castle years ago and declared himself impressed by Edmund and willing to take him under his protection at any time. Harclay’s plan is to challenge the wicked, traitorous current Lord Lovel to a trial by combat, which Harclay wins. Lovel confesses; Edmund claims his patrimony; Edmund marries Lady Emma, daughter of the castle’s displaced current inhabitant (Baron Fitz-Owen), who raised him as a servant. Everything goes exactly according to plan. The lovers Edmund and Emma are in brief suspense about whether her family will agree to their union, but the reader is not. It’s almost a surprise that there are no surprises.

In lieu of twists, this simple plot is spun into many pages by a profusion of banal details. Every aspect of the resolution is described blow by blow, including Sir Philip Harclay and Baron Fitz-Owen’s legal agreements over how to restore Edmund’s estate with minimal detriment to Fitz-Owen’s family. This stylistic choice betrays Reeve’s equal, if unspoken, debt to the tradition of sentimental literature; an embrace of everyday domestic details in service of a larger moral project characterizes the work of Samuel Richardson, not Horace Walpole. Like many works of its kind, it ends on a final sentence that sets forth its moral⁠—and like many works of its kind, the moral is that the wicked do not go unpunished.

 Edmund is a typical eighteenth-century “man of feeling,” his portrayal complete with the culture of sensibility’s anxiety about reconciling this model with traditional masculinity (“Edmund’s heart was deeply affected...but it was a manly sorrow”). And yet, like a heroine, Edmund faints! The Old English Baron stands as an early example of the infusion of the sentimental into the emerging Gothic tradition that would mark the genre for decades to come. The marriage of these modes of writing reflects both genres’ investment in depicting, and raising, extreme emotions. 

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Waverley

Walter Scott. 1814. “Novel” list.

Walter Scott’s first novel and arguably the first historical novel ever, Waverley, or, ’Tis 60 Years Since, opens with a discussion of why the narrator chose the title Waverley, or, ’Tis 60 Years Since. Such an opening is only the beginning of the Waverley narrator’s running play with a meta-narrative of his own artistic choices. He discusses everything from chapter length (“Shall this be a long or a short chapter?–This is a question in which you, gentle reader, have no vote, however much you may be interested in the consequences”) to the introduction of new characters (”But Rose Bradwardine deserves better of her unworthy historian, than to be introduced at the end of a chapter”).

The narrator states that he chose the titular character’s (and based on it, the novel’s) title because it is “an uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little of good or evil…”. The reason given for the subtitle, ’Tis 60 Years Since, is that it makes clear what genres the book is not (Gothic romance, sentimental tale, novel of manners), as well as the fact that it’s “more a description of men than manners,” a clue we can apparently gather from sixty years ago being, in terms of manners, an unglamorous period to describe. 

But the title has still more significance than the narrator explicates. The name “Waverley” is not in reality uncontaminated, having graced the characters of a few of his novelist contemporaries, but it does particularly suit Scott’s protagonist, one of whose defining qualities is indecisiveness. He “wavers” in matters large and small, from whether he will betray the current government to fight for the Stuarts in the Jacobite Uprising of 1745, to what books he wants to read. Waverley’s irresolution aptly represents the genre Scott seeks to establish, a genre that sits at the crossroads of the forking possibilities of the historical moment at which a particular novel set. We as readers are expected to know the outcome, and becoming familiar with Scott’s sympathetic Highland and Lowland characters, with the knowledge that their cause and their culture will be lost, adds to the pathos of the reading experience. “’Tis 60 Years Since” puts one of the novel’s feet in the year of its setting and the other in the year of its publication, simultaneously. “’Tis 60 Years Since” reminds us of what time it is “now” as much as it is an indicator of when the book takes place. It’s a very different subtitle than, say, “’Twas 1745,” for example. In that way, the subtitle mirrors the title, wavering between 1745 and 1805. Looking back from the vantage point of the latter, one outcome of the war has been foreclosed⁠. But for Waverley, and amidst the events of Waverley, indeterminacy rules.

Another of Waverley’s key personal characteristics that helps define the novel is his curiosity. In the course of his stay in Scotland, unfortunate circumstances make it look as though Waverley, an officer in the British army, has betrayed his commission to cross over to the rebels. This is not true⁠—it is only the government’s treatment of him as a supposed traitor that later allows him to be swept up in the other side. The first circumstance that gives his actions such a misleading cast, and the one that makes the rest possible, is the direct result of his curiosity. Motivated by curiosity alone, while visiting his father’s Scottish friend Colonel Bradwardine he joins an envoy to the Highlanders in order to observe their way of life. This throws him unawares into the midst of the Jacobite plot. (Waverley, by the way, is always unaware of the historical import of what happens around him, allowing the reader to exchange her post facto perspective on events for that of someone wrapped up in them as they unfold.) Compounding the suspiciousness of a visit to the rebel Highlanders, the robber Donald Bean Lean takes advantage of Waverley’s stay in his cave to steal his seal and commit treacheries with Waverley’s identity. 

This is only one of several instances in which characters’ curiosity drives the plot. If Waverley were not so curious, his life in this period would be too uneventful to write about. Similarly, in the novel as a genre, a reader’s curiosity is necessary for the act of reading to move forward. In the historical novel, which presents many situations the outcome of which is already known by the reader, Scott relies on our curiosity about what will happen to the fictional characters. History can tell us nothing about what side of the war Edward Waverley fights on, the consequences of his choosing the losing side, or whether he picks as his Scottish bride Flora MacIvor (who represents the grand sweep of history) or Rose Bradwardine (who represents everyday domesticity). Like Waverley’s name, Flora’s and Rose’s signify their symbolic roles: one is a particular flower, while the great one is floral in general. 

In the end, Waverley’s inability to make firm decisions saves him from the fate of Flora’s very determined brother Fergus (execution). Swept up in the rebellion almost unconsciously, he is later pardoned by the triumphant Hanoverian government. That trait that most disqualifies him to be a hero of history allows for his happy ending in the realm of the quotidian, just as the ability of Scott’s historical novel to fluctuate between past and present enables its success. 

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A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Lawrence Sterne. 1768. “Romanticism and Gothic” list.

“Maria, ‘A Sentimental Journey’ by Lawrence Sterne” by Joseph Wright.

The painting above depicts an iconic scene from Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey in⁠ which a beautiful young woman named Maria is found by the protagonist, Yorick, sitting in sorrowful contemplation under a poplar tree, her head leaning on her hand, a dog at her feet, a brook running beside them. A Sentimental Journey does not offer an account of Maria’s tragic past, which can be found in Sterne’s previous novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Suffice to say that Yorick having heard, in that text, Tristram relay his encounter with Maria, he seeks her out and finds her as described. 

Stripped, for the most part, of the story behind Maria’s suffering, this passage can place even more focus on what, in sentimental literature, often takes precedence over story: characters’ emotional reactions. Maria cries; Yorick wipes away her tears with his handkerchief; he cries his own tears into the handkerchief, already wet with Maria’s tears; he wipes her tears with it again, and they pass it back and forth to cry into two more times. It is a particularly over-the-top example, even for the genre, of sentimental literature’s frequent representation of emotions as passed between people through external means. The handkerchief embodies the transfer of Maria’s feelings to Yorick. It is the physical vehicle of contact for one another’s tears. 

Time has not been kind to 18th-century sentimental literature, and Sterne’s deployment of (now scorned) tropes such as these can seem, to modern readers, incongruous with Tristram Shandy’s legacy as a brilliantly experimental and hilariously bawdy early novel. However, the conventions Sterne helped establish in A Sentimental Journey, though much imitated, have rarely been mixed with the humor and thoughtfulness found in this work. 

In spite of the improbable hanky-soaking, the book sincerely (and often accurately) explores human psychology and takes a serious look at our ethical obligations. Yorick is the self-described “Sentimental Traveler.” Unlike most travel narratives, which focus on seeing sights, traveling for A Sentimental Journey is about seeing different human situations and the feelings they arouse. Yorick approaches other cultures less critically and more openly than his fellow 18th-century narrators. The book is as plotless as most travel narratives, but the incidents depicted take place with regular people amidst the humdrum of everyday life: at inns, in shops. Sterne is interested in how the imagination runs away with us, how we wishfully construct identities for those we barely know, how emotional impulse is the basic motivating force of our moral actions. He also shows how our unanalyzed impulses can sometimes lead to hurtful interactions with others that we later regret. He characterizes the unspoken language of body and gesture as what we should “translate” in our travels. 

And tear-mixing aside, the book is also, like Tristram Shandy, humorously indecent. As Nietzsche said of Sterne, “the reader who demands to know...whether he is making a serious or a laughing face, must be given up for lost: for he knows how to encompass both in a single facial expression.” Critic Tim Parnell argues convincingly that it is part of Sterne’s project to show that the body and its urges are not always selfish and degraded, and that sexual desire and empathy are not mutually exclusive. Yorick is both attracted to Maria and genuinely moved by her plight. Sterne did not lay aside his playful and exuberant experimentation for this novel. A Sentimental Journey ends on an incomplete sentence, and a risqué one at that. In a room with a gentlewoman and her chambermaid, Yorick has been sticking out his hands in the dark to gesticulate:

[W]hen I stretched out my hand I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s

That’s it. Sterne’s intention to write additional volumes was halted by his early death, but it was published in installments, the second of which he chose to end like

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Ivanhoe

Sir Walter Scott. 1819. “Romanticism and Gothic” list.

“Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe” by Eugene Delacroix.

“The knights are dust, And their good swords are rust, And their souls are with the saints, we trust.”

In the style of Sir Walter Scott, whose books and chapters open with epigraphs, I begin with a quote that Scott adapts from Coleridge’s “The Knight’s Tomb” (although in Ivanhoe we find this in the main body of the text). 

The quote is just one of countless places where the narrator calls attention to the fact that the book is set in an earlier age (the reign of Richard I, in the 12th century) than its time of publication (1819). Whereas a contemporary historical novel typically presents a self-contained story, without extradiegetic references to its nature as a period piece, Ivanhoe scuttles between its setting and (Scott’s) present-day: for example, to contrast what a certain building looked like in the period with how it does now; or contrast the customs of the time with current customs, sometimes to help readers understand an event (“And as there were no forks in those days, his clutches were instantly in the bowels of the pasty”), sometimes just because; or offer reasons why we should believe in the plausibility of his fictions, naming his historical sources. As the first historical novelist, Scott seems to feel called upon to explain and justify his new genre even within the text itself. In their context, the Coleridge lines are trotted out to justify why the narrative declines to include lengthy descriptions of the devices and colors of the knights at a particular tournament⁠—contrary, the narrator explains, to “my Saxon authority (in the Wardour Manuscript).” 

Of course, no work of fiction needs to justify why it includes certain details and leaves out others—it is the author’s job to decide what material is relevant, and there are far too many choices involved to justify each one. But the narrator brings up his reasoning behind not describing knights’ heraldry—namely, because they’re all dead now—to play up the theme of nostalgia, a staple of the Romanticist movement. Not only are we, in the nineteenth century, looking back at knights (how nostalgic), but remember, readers, they no longer exist (aw!). 

But the Romanticist project here is ambivalent, with the narrator both criticizing (explicitly) and glorifying (usually more implicitly) the Age of Chivalry. The narrator frequently opines on “the disgraceful license by which that age was stained,” and how “fiction itself can hardly reach the dark reality of the horrors of the period,” and so on. “In our own days...morals are better understood” (he’s no relativist). But on the other hand, as Richard the Lionheart comments upon hearing the Saxon noble Athelstane detail how he escaped from a crypt, “beshrew me but such a tale is as well worth listening to as a romance.” That’s because it’s a tale within a romance, and romances, the implied author seems to agree, are well worth listening to. “The horrors” are seductive. The horrors are romantic. (Cf. the Gothic.)

The title may be Ivanhoe, after its chivalric Saxon hero Wilfred of Ivanhoe, but the real hero(ine), arguably, is the beautiful and long-suffering Jewess Rebecca. Here we can see the real divergence of this 19th-century Romantic work from its medieval-romance inspiration. In what can be read as an implicit criticism of medieval romance and the age that gave rise to it, the show, I think, is stolen from the titular knight-errant by a Jewish woman. 

The only character with no flaws or foibles, Rebecca is even more perfect than the heroine we would expect to star in this romance—Ivanhoe’s lady-love, the Saxon princess Rowena. As the similarity of their names suggests, Rebecca and Rowena are doubles. They appear in back-to-back chapters, simultaneously unfolding chapters that feature them, imprisoned in separate rooms of the same castle, spurning the sexual advances of their respective captors. Heroines locked up in castle chambers, besieged by would-be rapists and the threat of forced marriages; heroines demonstrating their noble character by rejecting wicked seducers—all tropes. Less predictable is the use of these tropes as a means of contrasting the situations of women from different classes, and with a Jewish woman emerging as the superior character, no less. 

Both women do triumph in their goal of averting the fates their captors intend. But Rowena, normally haughty, crumples in a flood of tears when she realizes De Bracy’s power to force her hand in marriage. (Luckily for her, De Bracy is soft at heart—this would not have worked on Rebecca’s admirer, the still more wicked Brian de Bois-Guilbert.) Rebecca, though bearing herself with “courtesy” and a “proud humility” (in contrast to Rowena’s haughtiness), shows herself to have more spirit and strength of character. As a member of a despised race, Rebecca is approached with an offer far less honorable than marriage. (Also, Bois-Guilbert’s vows as a Knight Templar forbid his marriage to anyone.) Instead, the Knight wants to make her his mistress. In such a station she will be showered with riches and glory, he promises. She answers with true fighting words: “I spit at thee, and I defy thee.” In a classic (literally, going back to classical mythology) heroine move, Rebecca threatens to commit suicide, jumping to the ledge of the high turret and warning him not to come a step closer. This both dissuades Bois-Guilbert from his original intent and heightens his passion for her: “Rebecca! she who could prefer death to dishonor must have a proud and a powerful soul. Mine thou must be!...It must be with thine own consent, on thine own terms.”

Thus Rebecca finds herself at the center of a Gothic-heroine-threatened-with-rape-in-castle-chamber scene turned into a Samuel Richardson-style seduction narrative—that gives way, at this part, to a Gothic castle siege passage. Whereas Rowena’s persecutor uses the interruption presented by the siege as an excuse to desist in his ill-fated suit, the Richardsonian plot starring Rebecca continues as a dominating strand of the novel, another respect in which her character appropriates the literary territory of the highborn Englishwoman. Before Brian de Bois-Guilbert closes his first scene with Rebecca to go defend the castle, he established himself as that tantalizing character-type, the potentially reformable rake. “I am not naturally that which you have seen me—hard, selfish, relentless. It was woman that taught me cruelty, and on woman therefore I have exercised it...” He came home from knight-errantry, he explains, to find that the lady-love whose fame he spread far and wide had married another man. Here the reader can glimpse the possibility for Rebecca to be a Mary (another Jewess) to the former lady’s Eve, the means to redemption for a man who was led by a woman into corruption. Whether the Knight Templar will turn out like Richardson’s reformable Mr. B or the irredeemable Lovelace remains to be seen.

In another aspect of Rebecca’s and Rowena’s doubleness, Rebecca’s (rejected) lover is antagonist to Rowena’s (accepted) lover, the hero Ivanhoe. Brian de Bois-Guilbert is the ultimate 12th-century bad boy: he has “slain three hundred Saracens with his own hands,” and he slays with the ladies, too. He is described, in the Ann Radcliffe tradition, with all the dark fascination of a Gothic villain: 

“His expression was calculated to impress a degree of awe, if not fear, upon strangers. High features, naturally strong and powerfully expressive...keen, piercing, dark eyes, told in every glance a history of difficulties subdued and dangers dared...a deep scar on his brow gave additional sternness to his countenance and sinister expression to one of his eyes...” 

and so on. One of the most interesting things about the novel for me is the way that Bois-Guilbert—over and above whatever is appealing about bad boys—is a strangely sympathetic character, more so than Ivanhoe, and to what degree that was built into the narrative intentionally. When the narrator weighs in with moral judgments (as he often does), it can offer insight into what his take might be on those scenes unaccompanied by commentary. So for example, when the narrator calls “the character of a knight of romance” (here, describing King Richard) “brilliant, but useless,” it implies an author for whom Rebecca is a mouthpiece when she comes down on the anti-chivalry side of a debate with Ivanhoe. So the narrator—and most modern people—likely agree with Rebecca’s opinion of the laws of chivalry as “an offering of sacrifice to a demon of vain glory,” to which a highly miffed Ivanhoe responds that she can’t understand because she is not a noble Christian maiden (unlike Rowena, is the unspoken subtext). 

Applying this to the case of Bois-Guilbert, the villain, we might conclude, to our confusion, that his views of race are closer to the narrator’s (more progressive). I have already discussed the novel’s treatment of Rebecca, one of two major Jewish characters; the other, her father Isaac, conforms to some offensive Jewish stereotypes (stingy, money-hoarding, obsequious etc.) but is ultimately portrayed as good-hearted. Moreover, anytime the narrator draws on negative stereotypes he accompanies it with vindications of the Jewish people based on their historic oppression. As in other areas, the storytelling is here flavored with a decidedly 19th-century sensibility (even perhaps progressive for 1819, when Jews still could not hold public office in England). The narrator repeatedly describes the anti-Semitism of his characters as “prejudiced” and “bigoted.” All the characters seem to feel Rebecca’s beauty and greatness, but Bois-Guilbert is the only one who sees her as an equal, without qualifying her noble traits in terms of her Jewishness. Her race seems to be a non-issue for him. Contrasted with Ivanhoe, whose admiring male gaze turns into a demeanor of cold courtesy when he learns Rebecca’s descent, the medieval villain looks more and more like a hero for the 21st century. Could he be Scott’s real hero? 

Moving forward, the evidence piles in favor of Rebecca as the real star (despite her complete lack of mention on the back cover of my 1994 Penguin Classics edition). The penultimate chapter, the novel’s denouement, decides Rebecca’s fate in the Richardsonian narrative. The two chapters prior, separating the conclusion from when we last left Rebecca, in danger of being burned at the stake as a Jewish sorceress, are sort of like...okay, Ivanhoe, Rowena, Richard the Lionheart, blah blah blah. Every chapter in Ivanhoe is fun, and there’s a surprise in these chapters, but it’s ultimately an example of Scott’s mastery of the suspense trick of drawing out a cliffhanging moment by switching to a different plot, one that is slower and more predictable and less emotionally captivating. It’s all great reading, but whether or how Rebecca will be saved is what we really want to know, what we will read through anything to find out. Rebecca’s importance—and Rowena’s as her foil—is also borne out by Scott’s choice to close the novel on their farewell scene. 

The penultimate chapter contains Rebecca’s trial by combat. Rebecca’s life is at stake, but the real trial is Brian de Bois-Guilbert’s. Since backing off the whole raping Rebecca idea, he has saved her life and then put it at risk again. Bois-Guilbert’s rescue of Rebecca from the burning castle of Torquilstone, by the way, is an example of Scott’s practically cinematic sense of humor and flair for dialogue. Essentially, the Knight Templar appears in the room where Rebecca has been nursing Ivanhoe, when they’re all about to go up in flames; Rebecca is more fiery than the fire (“Rather will I perish in the flames than accept safety from thee!”); Bois-Guilbert picks her up and carries her off anyway (“Thou shalt not choose, Rebecca; once didst thou foil me, but never mortal did so twice”); Ivanhoe, unable to move, yells hilariously impotent threats of rage from his sickbed: “Hound of the Temple—stain to thine order—set free the damsel! Traitor of Bois-Guilbert, it is Ivanhoe commands thee! Villain, I will have thy heart’s blood!” The perfectly timed next sentence: “‘I had not found thee, Wilfred,’ said the Black Knight, who at that instant entered the apartment, ‘but for thy shouts.’”

After this daring rescue, in which the Knight Templar uses his shield to protect Rebecca at the risk of his own life as they gallop on his horse through the flying arrows of the battle, he spirits her to the prefectory of his Temple with the purpose of keeping her captive until she feels forced to “consent” to sex with him. As one might expect in the case of two equally indomitable people with a difference in values, this isn’t going well, until it goes even worse: the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, a stickler for all those pesky rules about not drinking and fucking, makes a surprise visit and finds out about Rebecca. The leader of the prefectory, who knew about Rebecca and was cool with it but has to save face for himself and his most important Knight, convinces the Grand Master that the Jewess has literally bewitched Bois-Guilbert (an easy sell). So in all fairness, she should really be burned to death and he should be given a few Hail Marys. Learning of this horrific prospect, Bois-Guilbert returns to Rebecca with his final offer: he will leave England, abandoning the Knights Templar in all its attendant glory and ambitious prospects, in order to save her, on the condition that she accompany him to start a new life back in the Middle East, where he can conquer everything (his reigning passion) there instead; if not, he’s not giving up his whole life for nothing, and she will see that “my vengeance will equal my love.” For the third time, Rebecca’s answer is that she’d rather die. Bois-Guilbert despairs, wavers, makes a plot to save her without compromising his position—he gets her, when inevitably convicted, to request a trial by combat, imagining that he can be her champion in disguise. Then he is required to fight for the Knights Templar against her champion (if she can even find a champion). Brian de Bois-Guilbert is like the third best knight in the world, so that’s probably a death sentence for Rebecca. He offers to save her again when she’s at the stake, with no champion for her yet appearing and time running out, and is again rebuffed. Ivanhoe rolls up at the last minute to be Rebecca’s champion, still really wounded, and his horse is totally exhausted. Under these conditions, the Knight Templar knocks Ivanhoe off his horse, as everyone expects. But no one, not the live audience, certainly not me, expects Brian de Bois-Guilbert to fall off his horse for no reason, practically untouched, and die. The Grand Master says, “This is indeed the judgment of God.” True to genre, the narrator replaces divine intervention in human affairs with a very Romantic and scarcely more probable explanation: “he had died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.” 

Rebecca’s would-be seducer dies of being unable to decide whether he is a Mr. B or a Lovelace. Some readers may be left in similar indecision about how to judge him. Not so Rebecca, who has actually loved Ivanhoe the whole time, "imput[ing] no fault to [him] for sharing in the universal prejudices of his age and religion.” Rebecca is very unusual among Romantic heroines from the long 18th century in that her love goes unrequited. She may meet the type’s standards of perfection notwithstanding her Jewishness, but ultimately she cannot escape its limitations to claim her full literary-generic inheritance, the hero’s adoration. Happily ever after goes to the less deserving Rowena, and Ivanhoe only has the decency to recall Rebecca’s beauty and magnanimity “more frequently than [Rowena] might altogether have approved.” Rebecca must withdraw and devote her life to God. In this genre, there is no such thing as second love, and that is one of many points on which the narrator remains silent.

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Vathek

William Beckford. 1786. “Romanticism and Gothic” list. 

“I cannot justify my conduct, yet my only crime was curiosity,” says Carwin of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (see previous post). This may strike us as disingenuous; he clearly is trying to justify his conduct by reducing it to a non-crime. And yet, his words are a reminder that in much of Western thought, dating back to the story of the Fall in Genesis—and perhaps nowhere more robustly illustrated than in 18th-century novels—curiosity has been seen as a dangerous temptation to criminal behavior. 

William Beckford’s Vathek takes up the theme: a daily-changing inscription on a magical sabre reads “Woe to the man who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant!” Vathek is a twist on the Faust legend, in which a man sells his soul in exchange for infinite knowledge and pleasure and comes to regret it when he is claimed for hell upon his death. In Beckford’s pseudo-oriental version, the caliph (chief Islamic ruler) Vathek renounces Mohammed and agrees to a series of hideous crimes in exchange for being conducted to the Palace of Subterranean Fire, underworld of the Qur’anic devil Eblis. Vathek’s possession of the Palace’s riches and wonders turns out to be even shorter-lived than Faust’s allotted lifetime. After three days, he and his young wife Nouronihar’s hearts are eternally consumed by flames as they wander the palace’s boundless, haunting spaces forever.

Part of the short text’s power lies in its being many things at once: oriental tale, moral fable, Gothic romance, parody, camp. The blend is fascinating both for the way the combinations complement each other and for their frictions. A scholar of Arabic literature, Beckford masters many of the features he was trying to imitate. The sensuous stylistic effects of opulent settings minutely described could be verbatim out of Galland’s The Arabian Nights. Though a departure from that tradition, the infusion of humor from Vathek’s campier elements works to play up the sense of strangeness so fundamental to medieval folk tales. The tower built by Vathek and his evil mother Carathis muddies the borders between the exotic and the ridiculous, featuring Carathis’ troop of “fifty female negroes mute and blind of the right eye” who guard her collection of “dainties” (rhinoceros horns, skulls, bones, mummies, “woods of a subtile and penetrating odor,” oils from venomous serpents she “pinched to death,” etc.). Reining in her son’s most Arabian-nights-emperor impulses, Carathis highlights the comic excess of this figure: “to put the ignorant to death is somewhat severe...Content yourself with commanding their beards to be burnt.” The demonic “Giaour” who tempts Vathek is a straightforward folktale figure in his solemn grotesqueness, but Vathek’s power to kill with his eyes when angry is described wryly. (Another way he kills people is by inviting pilgrims returning from Mecca with holy gifts to hand them over while he’s on the toilet, sending them into pious shock from which they never recover.) 

As in other Gothic romances of the period, the story’s desired effects can subvert the very morals it explicitly tries to inculcate. Ann Radcliffe chastises her characters for the irrational feelings of terror she simultaneously invokes in her readers, and similarly, Vathek’s success depends on exploiting its original readers’ curiosity about the cultures and traditions of faraway places. The genre’s tie to travel literature is particularly noteworthy when Vathek’s own misadventures begin as a result of his propensity to invite all travelers to visit him at his palace, “prompted by motives of curiosity.” His most over-the-top acts of villainy, from sacrificing fifty young boys to the bloodthirsty Giaour to throwing his own people into the fire they run up to rescue him from, cultivate a sensationalist thrill. (Don’t worry, a beneficent genie ends up whisking all the book’s innocent children to a paradisal nest in the sky where they enjoy the tranquility of perpetual childhood.) Oh, and Carathis pinches dwarves to death. Readers may not be complicit in Vathek’s pride, lust, or avarice, but we do experience the vicarious satisfaction of our own curiosity as we explore the wonders of Eblis (and get to see how this nutty ride ends). In one scene, a stream of blood streaking across the sky should warn Vathek away from his attempt to court the Giaour, but after shaking off his first impression of terror, he finds that it “served only to stimulate his love of the marvelous.” As literature of the marvelous, Vathek spreads its antihero’s immoral and ill-fated love. 

Though didactic moralism became an almost indispensable feature of the 18th-century pseudo-oriental tale, it sits uneasily with the attempt to capture medieval Arabic tales as they first appeared, translated and embellished, in Europe. Vathek, though the greatest among these efforts, is no exception. A key charm of works like The Arabian Nights, even over and above their strangeness, is the pure randomness of their marvels. Events often seem to happen outside the laws of cause-and-effect. While no one can contest Vathek’s weirdness, the controlling Faust narrative with its illustration of the perils of curiosity exerts a logic that diminishes the work’s fantastical effects. 

[an-incurable-affection-blog]

Wieland, or The Transformation. An American Tale.

Charles Brockden Brown. 1798. “Romanticism and Gothic” list.

Pro forma for early novels, Wieland opens with the obligatory justification for its existence on the grounds of its salutary moral lesson. The next thing we learn from the first-person narrator, à la its predecessor Caleb Williams, is that the story will have an unhappy ending. But many pages will have to be turned before we learn the specifics.

Wieland creates suspense, not with immediate action that makes us want to know what happens next, but by stating an outcome up front (total devastation of the narrator’s life) and making us read not for the what but the how. It triggers the same impulse as not being able to look away from a car crash. The narrator’s long interjections bemoaning events further delay the gratification of learning what happens next.

It features countless themes and tropes of (especially the early) gothic, and early novels more broadly, but I’ll start counting them anyway⁠—terror and horror; the hypnotic, irresistible power of the horrifying; curiosity; madness; the somatic roots of emotion; melancholy and imagination; Burkean principles of sublimity; closets; corpses; perfect heroines; interplay of interior emotions and the external environment; naturalistic explanations of seemingly supernatural events; dreams. Characters place themselves at windows to ruminate. They understand the paradoxical pleasures of pain and the solace of weeping. Their emotional traumas lead, inevitably, to physical illness. Women understand “the remediless and unpardonable outrage on the dignity of the sex” involved in being the first to disclose one’s romantic feelings; they preserve their chastity at all costs. (This invariably involves sequestering oneself in one’s room against the external threat of rape.) 

Each of the above, in its own way, testifies to the Gothic preoccupation with human psychology. Wieland is particularly invested in phenomenology, and thus, its literary project is what Dorrit Cohn calls “narrative modes for presenting consciousness.” (As the 1822 preface to Brown’s unfinished sequel Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist, perceptively notes, “[u]nlike most other writers, [Brown’s] modes of thinking, the systems of ratiocination with which he invests his characters…” are “more the objects of our admiration or attention than the incidents or themes of his fictions.”) To this end, Wieland is far from alone among 18th-century novels in its appropriation of the language and concerns of Enlightenment philosophy (association of ideas, errors of the senses, reason vs. emotion, etc.).

The vehicle of the book’s detailed rendering of consciousness is a main character as first-person narrator⁠—not quite typical, as only one-third of the 18 novels on my Gothic list use this. It is, then, our narrator Clara Wieland’s—and not just the implied author’s—tacit foregrounding of her thoughts and feelings over events. In one example among many of Clara’s long internal monologues, it takes two pages between one concrete action (sitting down) and the next (going to her closet). In between, she wonders why her love interest failed to show up at a prearranged social engagement; invents two different possible reasons, one that causes her delight and the other, despair; accounts for why she seized upon those reasons; acknowledges her obsessive thinking as an unfortunate recent development in her character; meditates on the human condition, generally, and then her father’s fate, in particular; resolves to peruse a manuscript written by her father; and plans how to execute the resolution: which should come first, fetching the manuscript or preparing the lamp? (She goes for the book first, in the dark—spoiler alert, bad decision!).

Supplying these details draws out the scenes, serving a purpose of suspense. More importantly, it goes beyond merely narrating consciousness (achievable through third-person narration) in demonstrating how many people habitually narrativize our own lives and selves, often without realizing it. Clara recalls and retells events by retracing her thoughts and feelings about them, just as she filtered them through her thoughts and feelings when they were happening. She can’t escape this reflexive self-narrativization: “at such a crisis my thoughts might be supposed at no liberty to range; yet vague images rushed into my mind…” 

Wieland advances psychological theories both through Clara’s stated beliefs and narrative demonstration. It seems to come down on the side of Hume, that reason serves the passions, as Clara repeatedly suffers unwise impulses and supplies the bad reasoning to talk herself into following them. At one point she expresses the belief that we can never understand the motives of others; yet, she seems almost as ignorant of her own motivations, listing various alternatives as she tries to assign them post hoc. She walks straight into closets containing probable murderers. She cannot even acknowledge that she is drawn to darkness and danger, much less explain why.

A gothic novel is not complete without a villain, but Wieland’s Carwin is more rounded than most. He confesses to bad things, but is not responsible—or at least, not fully nor intentionally responsible—for the dark climax, the hero Wieland’s murder of his own wife and children. Mischievous rather than evil, Carwin uses his talents for ventriloquism and mimicry to perplex people with unembodied, often seemingly supernatural voices. On almost every occasion when someone hears a voice of warning or command, or when the overheard voice of a friend sows misunderstanding and anger, it’s Carwin. But he did not, it seems, order Wieland to kill his family in order to prove his devotion to God (the story of Abraham and Isaac should come to mind). The voice of God was all in Wieland’s head. No one was ever in actual danger until Wieland’s descent into madness. The real villain is the human mind and its vulnerabilities.

Carwin’s role is more complex than villain, as he seems to embody the gothic tale writ large. Albeit minimally involved in its defining tragic event, he is the inadvertent engine of most of the plot. His gift is the easy solution to all mysteries. He confesses to “a rooted passion for scattering around me amazement and fear”; it is “for the sake of creating a mysterious dread,” he says, that “I have made myself a villain.” What could be more fundamental to the Gothic project than the scattering of amazement, fear, and a mysterious dread? Like Clara’s, Carwin’s motives are perplexing. He seems to enjoy arousing gothic emotions just to see how it affects people, and so, it seems, does the novel. We could see it was the ventriloquist, just because he felt like it as a lazy, anticlimactic, and improbable explanation of events, or as an insight into the genre and the human psychology. 

In a shorter piece written three years after the close of these events, Clara reveals that she did not, as she predicted, die with the completion of her written account, but lived to find happiness again. She traveled for a change of scene and became curious about the world again (a central motivating force of the novel). She married the object of her affections, who, in a reversal of the traditional gender dynamic, has moved from admiration to reciprocating her love. Surprise, it’s actually a happy ending after all. Clara transcends generic expectations on two levels, existing outside the Gothic story and changing the ending.

[an-incurable-affection-blog]

The Overstory

Richard Powers. 2018. “Novel” list.

Toward the end of The Overstory, a couple we have followed throughout the novel come back together from the brink of divorce after the man’s stroke leaves him physically paralyzed, unable to speak, in need of near-constant care. The man, Ray, reflects on what has become his wife Dorothy’s daily habit of reading to him from great novels—that day, Anna Karenina. “…For Ray…the greatest mercy fiction gives [is] proof that the worst that the two of them have done to each other is just another tale worth reading together, at the end of the day.” 

Like many works of fiction, and as we glimpse here, The Overstory follows a large cast of characters to bring readers to moving truths about the human condition. But that is not its only or its main ambition. Outside Ray’s window is a yard the couple has planted in extensively but never really seen, until near the end. A book about forests (by another major character, one they never meet) inspires them to stop cultivating it, to let nature take its course. (From the same scene: “Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.” Anna Karenina, if it was about plants.) As reviewers have noted, The Overstory attempts to be about trees as much as it is about people. Of course, such is the inscrutability of trees that a novelist must approach them through human characters. 

For example, the intrusive, almost 19th-century (read: preachy in a delightful way) narrator tells us of Ray and Dorothy’s journey from being “plant-blind” to growing to appreciate the miraculous nonhuman living taking place all around them. The things they’ve planted “are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But the humans hear nothing.” Unlike most people, Dorothy and Ray are successfully drawn back to a sense of nature, into the world of myth. Myths, here, are “memories posted forward from people standing on the shores of the great human departure from everything else that lives, send-off telegrams by skeptics of the planned escape, saying, ‘Remember this, thousands of years from now, when you can see nothing but yourself, everywhere you look.’” 

The thing shared in common by every major character is this experience of waking up from the modern condition of environmentally destructive overconsumption. The awakening is invariably triggered by tragedy of some kind. A college student-turned-activist, Olivia, nearly dies of electrocution and, in a road-to-Damascus moment, returns to life believing that trees are talking to her, calling for her to save them. Bedridden for life, Ray more slowly comes to notice of his yard that “There’s danger everywhere, readiness, intrigue, slow-motion rising action, epic changes of season once too slow to see…”, a yard in “symphonic narrative mayhem.” 

The narrator doesn’t quite render judgment on whether the trees actually talk to Olivia or she is what we might less charitably call “crazy.” Several passages advance the scientifically sound idea that trees communicate, among other magical science facts about trees. Some suggest the idea that trees have something we might call a sense of purpose. There is dialogue attributed to trees: “The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.” But there’s a feeling the author understands that in attributing a sort of language to trees he is like his engineer character trying to tell a potentially dangerous bear who stumbles into their campsite, in Chinese, “Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon.” Again and again, we encounter the Other. There is an unbridgeable gap, an acknowledgement that despite humans and trees descending from a common ancestor and still sharing a quarter of our genes, a billion and a half years of evolution separate us. But The Overstory offers a glimmer of hope for the survival of our species if we can learn to once again share the planet. The message is that we are not alone. As Olivia’s “eco-terrorist” friend realizes in prison, when the tree-voices called Olivia to action with the words “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help,” they meant humans.