Appropriations of the Gothic by Romantic-era Women Writers Aishah Sulaiman Alshatti Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Literature University of Glasgow March 2008 © Aishah Alshatti 2008 2 DISSERTATION ABSTRACT In this study, I set out to examine the multifarious ways in which Romantic-era women writers appropriated the Gothic for genres other than the novel, and to explore the implications of these appropriations. I look at different manifestations of the Gothic written by women in non-novelistic texts –– such as drama, autobiography, poetry, and chapbooks –– and I contend that the relationship of women writers to gothic writing is more complex and ambivalent than has been shown in earlier studies, revealing the special and intricate relationships of Gothic with genre and gender. In the first chapter, I compare two plays that are based on a well-known highland legend, Joanna Baillie’s The Family Legend and Thomas Holcroft’s The Lady of the Rock. I elucidate the role played by genre and gender in formulating two adaptations that bear, each in its own way, on themes of liberation, tyranny and domestic violence. One of the main issues addressed by this chapter is how Baillie appropriates gothic tropes and adapts a legend to suit her gender specific literary and political purposes. In the second chapter, I refer to Diane Hoeveler’s concept of “gothic feminism” and use it to read Mary Robinson’s Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson and “Golfre: A Gothic Swiss Tale”, a long narrative poem. I consider these texts as instances of an ideological appropriation of varieties of the Gothic that victimizes women, and thus reveals their vulnerability in order, paradoxically, to make a case for their rights and to expose hegemonic patriarchal constructs. 3 In the third chapter I look at the poetic works of the little known Anne Bannerman whose utilization of the Gothic has centred on the deformed body, in this way obliquely revealing her own definition of and experience with disability. The fourth chapter examines yet another minor women writer, Sarah Wilkinson, who lived in almost total obscurity, yet wrote numerous gothic chapbooks. I study her appropriation of the didactic modes of Gothic that are found in chap-literature, and in this way I highlight a new strand of the Gothic that weaves gothic trappings with elements of both popular literature and middle-class morality. In the fifth and final chapter I return to Joanna Baillie in order to study Orra which I believe to be one of her most unusual plays in that it uses gothic conventions to offer a critique on these very conventions. I use Elizabeth Fay’s definition of the “radical critique gothic” to illuminate my reading. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..…………………………….....………………....…………….…...5 Introduction……………………………………….…………….……...…………….….7 Chapter One: Gothic Drama Joanna Baillie’s The Family Legend and Thomas Holcroft’s The Lady of the Rock: Rewriting a Highland Legend…………...….............….37 Chapter Two: Gothic Autobiography Mary Robinson’s Memoirs and the Social Condition of Women...................…75 Chapter Three: Gothic Ballad Anne Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry and the Deformed Body….......................................................................................110 Chapter Four: Gothic Chapbooks Sarah Wilkinson and the Didactic Chapbook………………………....……....146 Chapter Five: Gothic on the “Gothic” Joanna Baillie’s Orra……………………………………….….….….....…….184 Conclusion…………………...……………………………….………..….……...…...222 Works Cited………………………………………………….…………...…….......…231 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My academic venture, resulting in this dissertation, would have been impossible without the support and encouragement that I received from faculty members, academic institutions, and family members to whom I wish to extend my heartfelt gratitude. I wish to express my deepest thanks to my supervisor, Ms. Dorothy McMillan, for introducing me to the works of Joanna Baillie, and thus nurturing my appreciation for this remarkable writer. I also wish to thank her for the lucid explanations, insightful comments, and stimulating discussions that aided me during the course of researching and writing this dissertation. I also wish to thank Professor Nigel Leask for his encouraging feedback, making the postgraduate annual review session an illuminating and much anticipated experience. Many thanks are also due to other departmental members whose discussions on the literature and culture of the Romantic period in my first year as an M.Phil. student have directed my attention to the works of Romantic-era women writers, triggered my interest in the Gothic, and refined my understanding of the field: Professor Richard Cronin, Dr. Alex Benchimol, Professor Janet Todd, and Dr. Nicola Trott. I wish to extend my gratitude to Kuwait University for the generous scholarship that made my postgraduate studies financially possible, and to the University of Glasgow for the research award that enabled me to do the necessary research on Sarah Wilkinson’s chapbooks in order to write the fourth chapter of this dissertation. My deepest thanks go to my parents, Sulaiman Al-Shatti and Sarah Al-Fadhil, whose love of literature instilled in me the love of reading, and whose support encouraged me to pursue this love beyond my Bachelor degree. Finally, my admiration 6 and many thanks go to my husband, Nasser Boresli, for his unfailing support even when it meant having his wife living abroad and away from him to pursue her studies. 7 INTRODUCTION When we establish a considered classification […] what is the ground on which we are able to establish the validity of this classification with complete certainty? (Foucault, The Order of Things xxi) Before going about putting a certain example to the test, I shall attempt to formulate, in a manner as elliptical, economical, and formal as possible, what I shall call the law of the law of genre. It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging –– a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. With the inevitable dividing of the trait that marks membership, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless. (Derrida 59) The Gothic, like any genre, depends on a system of classification, and because genres, as Derrida argues, are never pure, and systems of classification, according to Foucault, cannot be verified, one is pressed to investigate and contest the validity of the definitions and conceptions typically attributed to the term “Gothic”, a kind of writing that is evidently heterogeneous and impure. For instance, contemporaries of the Gothic never called it “Gothic”, which brings into question many of the problems that arise in the subsequent application of the literary classification. Readers in the Romantic period 8 also made clear demarcations among groups of texts that we now regard as part of the Gothic tradition: Ann Radcliffe’s work was praised and respected whereas Matthew Lewis’s was criticized and condemned. The contemporary demarcation between the works of Radcliffe and Lewis is evidence of an early form of classification that aimed to distinguish between safe and dangerous texts, a necessary move during a time of political contention and war. Another contemporary reaction worthy of note is the connection that was increasingly being made between the gothic novel and women. Women were usually regarded as the main writers and readers of the gothic novel, a connection that was not always viewed in positive terms, and was perceived indeed as a possibly pernicious combination. In fact, many of the contemporary attacks on the gothic novel were made in sexist terms that criticise both female readers and writers. Women writers who indulged in the supernatural excesses of the gothic novel were accused of committing a kind of “LITERARY PROSTITUTION” (Curties 308). They were also accused of being subject in actuality to their own fictional mad trances: She looks like madness or her child… She goes with look enthusiastic To yonder edifice fantastic, Where fancy speaking from its trances Gives inspiration of romances. (“The Age; A Poem” 4-8) And were encouraged instead to return to their domestic duties, epitomized by needlework: Ye female scribes! Who write without a blot, “Mysterious Warnings” of –– the Lord knows what; O quit this trade, exert your proper skill, 9 Resume the needle, and lay down the quill. (Aberdeen Magazine qtd. in Norton 280) Warnings were also given about the intoxicating effect reading such material might have on female readers, thus diverting them from their domestic obligations: It is urged by the “ante-novelists” [sic] that romances and novels serve only to estrange the minds of youth (specially of females) from their own affairs, and transmit them to those which they read: so that while totally absorbed in lamenting and condoling with the melancholy situation of a Julia, an Emily, or a Matilda, or lost in the admiration of the glorious deeds of some all-perfect novel hero, they neglect both their own interests, and the several duties which they owe to parent, friend, or brother. (Rimelli 309-10) Perhaps because of this contemporary lopsided and narrow view of the Gothic output and its consumption, many critics, like contemporary detractors of gothic novels, limit their discussion of the Gothic to the novel, giving the impression that women writers of the Gothic channelled their literary efforts only into this genre and that the Gothic is not present in other genres. For instance, a quick search in the MLA database on the research conducted on the works of Mary Shelley will yield 752 hits for Frankenstein and less than four hits for her later gothic short stories, such as “The Transformation”. A similar case is to be found with male writers of the Gothic. For example, eighty studies have been made of the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, and only thirteen on the first gothic play, The Mysterious Mother, although both were by the same writer –– Horace Walpole. Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk tallies at 150 studies whereas his 10 equally popular1 and controversial gothic drama, The Castle Spectre, at eight studies only. This narrow view of the history of the Gothic that separates the gothic novel from its non-novelistic counterparts and gothic novels from other gothic works by the same writer may partly be attributed to the ambivalence of the term “Gothic” itself, and partly to the Romantic ideology that dominated the Romantic canon for a considerable part of the twentieth century.2 “Gothic/gothic”: the term The term “gothic” has undergone many metamorphoses. Connotations have been ascribed to and dropped from it in the course of its development. What the “Gothic” denotes during its mass popularity at the end of the eighteenth century is completely different from what it traditionally meant earlier, and from what it came to mean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the Gothic continues to flourish. Punter gives an etymology of the term and notes that it was during the late eighteenth century that the “Gothic” acquired a positive meaning due to “a shift in cultural values” (The Literature of Terror 5). Punter writes: For while the word “Gothic” retained this stock of meanings, the value placed upon them began to alter radically. It is not possible to put a precise date on this change, but it was one of huge dimensions which affected whole areas of eighteenth-century culture architectural, artistic –– 1 On the popularity of The Castle Spectre, Nigel Leask says: “Before the first three months of its run were over, it was said to have brought £18,000 into the Drury Lane treasury. It was presented over a dozen times over the next two seasons and became a reliable stock piece for years. Lewis's publisher Bell, who brought out the first printed edition in 1798, had published ten more by 1803” (“Lewis, Matthew Gregory”). 2 Throughout this dissertation I use the capital “Gothic” to signal the noun and lower case “gothic” the adjective.