Neil Bowen on (Edited )
Notes from Kelly Hurley's essay - British Gothic Fiction, 1885-1930
‘All of these texts descirbe human bodies that have lost their claim to a discrete and integral idenitity...They are in contrast liminal bodies; bodies that occupy the threshold between the two terms of an opposition, like human/beast, male/female, or civilised/ primitive... By breaking down such oppostions the liminal entity confounds one’s ability to make sense of the world...the abhuman being may be some unimaginable ‘thing’ incorporating, mimicking, or taking on a human form, thereby constituting another kind of threat to the integrity of human identity.’
These representations of the ‘repulsively fascinating spectacle’ of the ‘abhuman’ abound in Late Victorian Gothic fiction and reveal the deep anxieties of the fin de siecle, displaced into the Gothic. Dracula is described in terms ‘explicitly borrowed from criminal anthropology, degeneration theory, and alienism, late-Victorian sociomedical disciplines that worked to classify and comprehend the abnormal humans subject’.
The Gothic is a ‘transhistorical genre’ with a ‘fascination with extreme behaviours and derangements of human subjectivity. The genre is about excess...’ Overheated prose and hysteria.
Causes of Late Victorian anxiety include: the city & modern urban culture; the status of Britain as a colonial power and interaction with colonial subjects; Darwinian Science, which linked animals to man and made us a species formed by chance that could either evolve or degenerate, thus demolishing the idea of a fixed human identity. The fearful idea of randomness rather than providence and design.
‘Uncanny human metamorphoses were also the concern of the late-Victorian humans sciences...’ Criminal anthropology ‘argued that deviant individuals, known as ‘born criminals’ were atavists: throwbacks to the species who shared certain savage bhavioiurs and physognomical traits...with other species’. Degeneration theory argued that physical and nervous disorders, generated by city life, were highly contagious and could be spread through social contact and inherited by offspring. Technology, alcohol, drugs, industrial toxins, slums caused this degeneration.
‘The sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing and the social theorist Max Nordau believed that moral trupitude (sexual perversion, decadent art, and literature) was an especially repulsive and dangersous cause of degeneration.’ (Is the art cause or effect?) Homosexuals were also seen as a ‘perverse aberration’ and as degnerates. Liminal in the sense that they were imagined to have female souls within male bodies. Another threatening liminal figure was the New Woman as she rejected the ‘angel of the house’ conventional gender role.
‘the deviant subject must be identified, diagnosed, and controlled in order to assure national health.’
Psycholanalytic interpretations of the Gothic are also concerned with the ways in which social anxieties are supernaturalised and rendered in displaced form. More specifically, a psychoanalytic reading of the Gothic might identify the genre’s monster as the ‘return of the repressed’: the embodiment of unbearable or unacceptable fears, wishes and desires that are driven from consciousness adn then transmuted into representations of monstrosity...The reader remains safely distanced from the threatening contents of the unconscious because they have been defamiliarised by being rendered phantasmic.’
We suppress feelings that run counter to social norms and project these feelings on to others who we vilify. Gothic monsters are displaced, distorted versions of these repressed feelings, but also of the ‘bad’ others with whom these tendencies have already been identified. Either the text can offer catharsis by punishing the monster and thus safely repressing the inappropriate feeings, or create sympathy for the monster and thus critique cultual norms.
The inability to understand the monstrous and the prolonged state of uncertainty points to the limits of understanding in the culture; its epistemological stress points. ‘The characters’ panicked inability to interpret the strange event - lets us know we have breached the knowledge systems of the text’s culture.’