Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic
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Will ye shrink? Shall foreign critics teach you how to think? Had Shakespeare's magic dignified the stage, If timid laws had school'd th'insipid age? Had Hamlet's spectre trod the midnight round? Or Banquo's issue been in vision crown'd?
Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic
Free as your country, Britons, be your scene! Be Nature now, and now Invention queen! Sons had been born to him and his wife, a foreign princess, but none of them had lived beyond infancy. The Queen was now beyond the age of childbearing, and the King began to wonder why God had not per- mitted any of these male heirs to survive.
He was certain that leaving his kingdom to his daughter would lead to disaster; how could a Queen be strong enough to lead and to defend the realm?
His own father had ascended the throne-some would say seized it-in a battle where the ruling monarch had been killed. This combat had ended a century of wars fought over the question of legitimate succession. And besides, a charming young lady one of the Queen's own attendants had caught the King's eye.
And so the King began to examine his conscience. He concluded that God must be punishing him for the sin. The King appealed for a divorce to the Pope. But this father of the church, speaking as God's vicar on earth, refused to grant his request. The King alternately pleaded and raged, but he refused to relent. The Queen's nephew had considerable influence with this Pope.
At last, the King rebelled.
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He removed his kingdom's church from the institution ofRome. He made himself the head of the church, granted himself a divorce, declared his only daughter illegitimate, and married the charming lady-in-waiting. But she too gave birth to a daughter. Soon the King began to sus- pect that his wife was guilty of adultery and possibly of witchcraft.
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When one's husband is the king, adultery is high treason, and death the just punishment for such crime. So the second Queen was beheaded and her daughter declared illegitimate. Then the King mar- ried again, and this wife bore him a sickly son, dying herself shortly after the birth. Now the king negotiated again for a foreign bride, but was so disgusted by the princess's less than prepossessing looks that shortly after she arrived, he granted himself another divorce.
Now he married another charming young lady, a cousin of his second wife, whose family were so eager for the power and prestige of this marriage that they ignored the implications of the King's marital history.
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And history repeated itself. Again the Queen was accused of adul- tery, convicted of treason, and beheaded. But he married once again- a widow disinclined to the treason of fleshly adultery. She, however, began to exhibit alarming tendencies toward a treason of the spirit: sympathy with the radical "heresies" that had flourished since the king had divorced himself from Rome. But this queen outlived the aging monarch worn out by decades of high living. She survived him, only to marry again and to die herselfin childbirth.
On his deathbed, the King made a will, announcing the order ofsuccession. With the flick ofa pen he "legitimated" his daughters, restoring them to the order of succes- sion. The King was succeeded by the sickly son of his third marriage, an unfortunate child who literally embodied the sins of his father, being afflicted with a hereditary disease, possibly syphilis.
This young King soon died, leaving the kingdom to his half-sisters. So each of the King's daughters became queen. The younger of these reigned for forty years; she died as an old and unmarried ,voman.
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Henry's son Edward, like Manfred's Conrad, is crushed by the weight of a past not his own. The giant helmet that crashes into the courtyard in the opening chapter of Otranto provides the heir with a quicker death than Edward's hereditary ailments, but each might serve as a symbol of "the sins of the fathers" and the continuing power of guilty past deeds to haunt the present. Like Manfred, Henry's desperate desire to conform to the rule ofpatriarchy-to be succeeded by a son- leads him to violence.
Manfred murders his daughter Matilda with his own hand. Henry had the judicial murders ofAnne Boleyn and Kather- ine Howard staged according to the "rules" of such affairs. The histo- ries of both Henry and Manfred are also curiously haunted by patri- archy's unspeakable crime: incest.
Manfred immediately tries to marry his son's fiancee, literally "pursuing" her through the corridors of Otranto. Henry insists upon interpreting his marriage to Katherine of Aragon as "incestuous," and the two wives he has beheaded are first cousins. This exercise suggests that if the patriarchal family provides the organizing "myth" of the literature we now call Gothic, it is equally fundamental to the shape of English political history from the Wars of the Roses to the death of Charles the First.
Patriarchy's rules of the family, of marriage, of the proper relation of male to female, of legiti- mate succession, and so on, are also the ruling principles of the human activities we think of as "historical": politics and economics. The Law of the Father was literally "realized" in the complex texture and tex- tuality of the overlapping realms of church and state. All politics was sexual. Transgressive females, the Anne Boleyns of this world, were justly punished by death.
Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic
Henry was simply a public ver- sion of Bluebeard, working within the system. Transgressive ideas were similarly dealt with. Both Catholics and Protestants executed "heretics," and what constituted "heresy" was determined by whoever had the power to name their heresies. Henry, like Walpole's Manfred, ultimately failed to keep his house in order.
Like Manfred's line, that of the usurping Tudors lasted only three generations.
But in the Gothic pages of English history, the supplanting Stuarts fared ill. Never again in England, at least, would "reality" be so intricately ordered by these ancient, overlapping, and mutually supportive structures.
As David H. New York: New American Library, There are often strik-ingly similar patterns of behavior in the families of couples, sometimes severalgenerations back, or even unknown to the individuals perhaps each one has agrandparent who eloped at the age of seventeen, for instance. They often seem to deal with topics concerning invasion of personal space. Perhaps Walpole himselfintuitively sensed the characteristic order of Gothic when he spoke in his second preface of the "new" romance in contrast to the "old. Henry VIII's frantic struggle to produce a strong male heir weakened these principles even as it enacted them.
Before this last act in the tragedy, however, Henry's worst fears were realized: a woman inherited the throne of England, and made herself a long- running and popular spectacle of female power. Since "history" is a form of narrative, certain episodes of it may seem to invite the categories we use to talk about literature, including "Gothic" and "tragedy.
Public rituals like coronations and progresses showed the monarch acting out the role ofher position, and these rituals were also frequently accompanied with theatrical alle- gories of the ruler's power. Backscheider traces the relationship between the public domain and mass culture, primarily the theater, through the eighteenth century, and concludes with a discussion of the Gothic drama that flourished around the time of the French Revolution. All of these might find particularly apt expression on the Gothic stage.
Late eighteenth-century Gothic writers constantly invoke Shakespeare in both their theory and practice. In the preface to the second edition of Otranto, Walpole pro- claims Shakespeare as his model for his representation of "lower" social orders and levels of discourse though it is hard to judge the tone of this mock-heroic excursion into "literary theory".
But as Walpole's prologue cited above shows, Shake- speare was also used to justify nationalistic rejection of rules espoused by authoritarian French critics. Shakespeare was on the side of "nature," and "nature," in Walpole's eyes at least, also dictated an unflinching treatment of certain themes: The tragic Greeks with nobler licence wrote Nor veil'd the eye, but pluck'd away the mote. Whatever passion prompted, was their game; Not delicate, while chastisement their aim. Electra now a parent's blood demands; Now parricide distains the Theban's hands, And love incestuous knots his nuptial band.
Such is our scene; from real life it rose; Tremendous picture of domestic woes.