Making Strange: Teaching 19th-Century Gothic and Fantastic Literature

Abstract

Although I teach religion and literature within a department of Theology and Religious Studies, where biblical literacy might be assumed among students of religion, this is often not at all the case. Moreover, a secularist way of conceiving the world is common to most of our students, whether coming from a faith tradition or not. As Charles Taylor has written in A Secular Age (2007), in the contemporary world ‘faith, even for the staunchest believer is one human possibility among others’.¹ The secular, in the sense of a self-sufficient realm of experience without a supernatural cause, has become the norm and the horizon of the experience of us all. Taylor’s project, in his magisterial study, is to question the naturalism of secularity and to reveal its historical construction, questioning the ‘subtraction theory’ whereby one removes superstitious practices and institutions to reveal a ‘pure’ human nature. Jonathan Sheehan has pointed out that there are questions about when this turn from traditional to secular worldview took place, but we can identify the ‘before’ and ‘after’ as essential to the secularisation idea.² ‘Reform’ is the agent according to those driving a secular agendum that enables the transformation from the traditional past, and this has become ‘a generalised logic embedded in the very structures of modern human existence’.³ One key aim of my pedagogy is always to alert students to the constructed nature of the secular idea, and Taylor’s writings and terminology is very helpful in shaping that work.

One literary mode, central to my teaching and research, which is seen to perform this liberatory work of producing the secular, is the Gothic novel. In its earliest iterations in the 18th-century fictions of writers like Ann Radcliffe, the Gothic novel submitted its redoubtable heroines to incarceration and indoctrination by ‘tradition’—feudal aristocracy and tyrannical ecclesiastical authority—only to chart their escape to freedom, enacting the downfall of the systems of the past. The heroine’s fears of ghostly intrusion are also removed, when the supernatural machinery that had formerly terrorised her is unmasked as human machination and the modern secular subject is born, freed from superstition.

In my study, God and the Gothic (2018), I argued that Radcliffe’s allowing the supernatural so much sway over the major part of her immensely long novels vitiates against so easy a reading of the explained supernatural.⁴ Indeed, its awkwardness, coming as it does after hundreds of pages in which it has had a symbolic importance for the heroine’s view of reality, can be seen to press at the limits of what Charles Taylor terms, the ‘immanent frame’ as incommensurate with the depth of human experience. The ‘immanent frame’ is the result of an a priori denial of admittance of anything beyond the material, so that a novel which problematises the relation between natural and supernatural allows transcendence at least a foot in the door. Radcliffe does not form part of the upper-level module, ‘God and the Gothic’, that I have taught in the United Kingdom, with contemporary British students not having the readerly enthusiasm of those I taught formerly in the United States, but this module has the explicit aim, expressed openly to the students, of questioning the ‘naturalness’ of a secularist and materialist account of reality and even its model of liberation. Our students have a basic understanding, at the least, of the history of philosophy, so I build on this by framing the literary texts we shall study with their background in Immanuel Kant and German Romanticism. We look briefly at Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by the Dreams of Metaphysics (1766), where he deals with the prophecies of Emmanuel Swedenborg and begins to adumbrate his celebrated distinction between phenomena (objects perceivable by the senses) and noumena (concepts of the understanding beyond intuition). This distinction, I argue, opens a gulf in our perception of the world inimical to religious experience. For, in Kant’s system, the things our senses perceive are dead things, inert under our control, while we lack any access to the noumena, causing the transcendent to become insubstantial. We develop our reflections on Kant’s distinction and its problems further by turning to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s thoroughgoing idealism and its self-positing ‘I’, which can be seen as doing away with the noumenal altogether. This may sound quite abstract, but we go on to ground all these ideas through a reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s celebrated story, The Sandman (1817).

The Sandman is primarily a philosophical story about the limits of perception, represented by the many ocular devices in the story and the legend of the Sandman as a stealer of children’s eyes while they sleep. Hoffmann was a student of Kant, made use of Fichte’s ideas and was close to the Schlegel brothers. He incorporates elements from all these philosophers. Students with the philosophical background presented in the module are quick to make this interpretation for themselves. They are asked to justify the viewpoint of the various characters in the story and try to identify their philosophical perspective. Clara here, as her name suggests, is easily identified as representative of the Enlightenment, but although her bad treatment by Nathanael attracts student sympathy, she too glibly dismisses Nathanael’s fears of Coppelius as superstition, and students are able to recognise the limitations of the modern self. Nathanael demonstrates the self-positing ‘I’ of transcendental idealism, in which mind makes the world, but this makes him give an illusory life to an automaton and reject the real, challenging Clara in favour of a doll who agrees with his every word. Olympia, the automaton, can be seen to represent the dead world of phenomena in a Kantian perspective, and so on. The aim is not to over-allegorise the text so much as to demonstrate how each perspective fails to do justice to the whole effect of the narrative. Is the grey bush that Clara spots from the top of the tower the head of Coppelius? Is his return a coincidence and does it cause Nathanael’s suicide? How are we to interpret the epilogue of Clara’s serene happiness?

This exploration of the story aims to show how the modern Enlightened ‘secular’ reading is just one interpretation. It demonstrates how difficult a single interpretation of the story is to achieve, hence the way in which Sigmund Freud’s psychological explanation in his essay ‘On the Uncanny’ (1917), which deals with only part of Hoffmann’s narrative, falls short. The materialist, secular ‘natural’ is thus destabilised and this makes the students ready to encounter this aporia in other texts.

One literary critic whom I find helpful to introduce at this point is Tzvetan Todorov and his theory of the fantastic.⁵ I present the students, again not immediately with the theory, with a ghost story from my own experience. This is given all the tropes of Todorov’s model in that it begins with a readerly contract, being presented as from my own student days, and thus from their own world, introduces an event which questions the limits of the material—a ghost—and then provides pieces of evidence that make it difficult to decide whether it was marvellous or has a psychological explanation. Todorov, of course, argues that stories resolve themselves by the end, but this is just not the case with the tales of Edgar Allan Poe or Sheridan Le Fanu, which we will go on to study and which my own story echoes. Students are invited to write their own fantastic tales according to Todorovian conventions, after having studied a range of fictional examples. A good novelistic instance is the ghostly (and all too fleshly) hand of Cathy at the window experienced by Mr Lockwood early in Wuthering Heights (1847). If he had just dreamed the encounter, why did the ghost outside describe herself as Catherine Linton or speak about 20 years? These are details which make it difficult to accept his subconscious had imported them, any more than a child would invent being scared by the phantom Heathcliff and a woman, saying ‘un Aw darnut pass’em’ as reported by Nelly in the novel’s final chapter.⁶ Her complacent words which end the novel, in which she ‘wonder[s] how anyone could imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’, are somewhat undercut both by the witness of the little boy and the decidedly ‘unquiet’ character of the main protagonists.⁷

Such an approach to reading Gothic and ghost stories of the Victorian period allows us to question the Enlightenment narrative of liberation from the supernatural. We look, for example, at the way Charles Dickens as editor sought to prevent Elizabeth Gaskell from making her supernatural world realist in The Old Nurse’s Story (1852) by urging her to confine the witness to the revenant seeking justice to a child rather than the more reliable nurse.⁸ Margaret Oliphant’s superb novellas are rarely studied and yet are compelling, especially her study of the desire for female imaginative expansion in The Library Window (1896). Perhaps one reason for the neglect of Oliphant’s stories, in a period quick to rescue female authors from occlusion, lies in the fact that they have a supernatural element which is not explained away. In A Beleaguered City (1879), for example, the dead drive the action, expelling their descendants from their town as having become unfit to live there because of their selfishness and greed. The story is narrated by one of the present inhabitants of the town of Semur, the secularist mayor, who stands for Gallic laicité, but he observes that the dead have left a written challenge on the cathedral gate, rearranged the furniture in his own house and even left a reconciliatory and wholly ‘natural’ olive branch behind as they withdraw. There is no wriggle room here for a Todorovian fantastic.

Such texts as these allow the narrative of Victorian Gothic, which is routinely interpreted as one of a turning away from the supernatural towards the psychological, and of increasing secularism of outlook, to be rather reread as presenting a transcendent reality in which the natural depends upon the supernatural element for its metaphysical stability, as here in Semur the living depend upon the dead.

Another Gothic writer who does not follow this Enlightenment trajectory is the Anglo-Irish Sheridan Le Fanu. His ‘natural’ world is haunted by a supernatural realm which is rather more vivid and substantial. Hitherto, the shadowiness of his settings has been given an historicist interpretation as indicative of the loss of political influence and identity of the Protestant Ascendancy class, but it has deeper metaphysical roots. Le Fanu has recourse to the metaphysics of Emmanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell (1758), in which this world is a shadow of the parallel heavenly Jerusalem. This enables him to present phantasmagorical hauntings such as the demonic monkey in the omnibus in Green Tea (1872) or the supernatural parrot in A Haunted Baronet (1871). His tour de force Gothic horror story, Uncle Silas (1864) unveils apocalyptically a universe wholly caused by the transcendent: ‘this world is a parable—a habitation of symbols—the phantoms of spiritual things shown in material shape’.⁹

It is possible, then, to devise a syllabus which takes students further and further away from a progressive secularism and ever deeper into a society in which it is only the confinement of the religious to the affective (the level of Kant’s practical reason) and the real to the material level that renders the supernatural ghostly and invasive. Gothic fiction of the period protests against this confinement and the kind of anthropology that is presumed by it. Forces of secularism abound in the 19th century, but this sort of writing does not accept its categories, nor the increasingly atomised subjectivity that ensues. Taylor uses the language of the dodgem car to describe the ‘buffered self’ of secular modernity and we read his vivid and approachable description in the classroom, of ‘the agent who no longer fears demons, spirits, magic forces’ (p. 135), who is disembedded from the social and enjoys a kind of mental invulnerability in his or her private castle.¹⁰ Reading about the buffered self after the isolation of Covid lockdown, I note it appears less enticing to students than it once did. And the reading of Uncle Silas offers not only demonic forces, out to murder and entrap, but angels working through human beings, who offer a renewed enchanted relationality. The Gothic dramatises both the threat of possession and invasion of the defences of the buffered self, but it is also an escape from that same atomism and isolation.

From the later 19th-century our course embraces classic tales such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). This too we approach through the lens of the buffered self and through the anthropology of the Pauline epistles. Here we learn to see how Jekyll’s problem is the lack of rational control over his desires, to which he can give no higher value. Taylor calls this being ‘super-buffered’.¹¹ No longer is the Platonic ascent of Eros described in Plato’s Symposium a possibility; all that matters is suppression and control. St Paul, quoted by Jekyll, similarly had ‘a war among my members’, which was resolved by accepting his inability to resolve it through control and by recourse to Christ.¹² Jeykll seeks to separate himself from his darker self rather than integrate it. He refuses the resolution by confession to the accepting and charitable Utterson. After this rejection of what might have been a productive duality, the students are given an essay assessment to analyse key theological themes in an earlier Stevenson tale, Markheim (1884–5), also about the double, in which a murderer appears to be haunted by a demonic spirit who takes on his own form. The story is resolved when, instead of accepting the temptation to commit another murder to make himself safe, which is suggested by the visitant, Markheim gives himself up to justice and the features of the visitant ‘brightened and softened with a tender triumph’.¹³ Porosity to spiritual forces here, which first appears so threatening and even unethical, is shown to be a heuristic tool and the demon an angel all along. This tale is capable of a psychological resolution, although it remains open, with details of foreknowledge in the visitant making it difficult to close down the possibility of an actual angelic visitation. Either way, the humanity that is revealed is one beyond the super-buffering of Taylor’s taxonomy.

The module concludes either with Arthur Machen’s The Three Imposters (1895) or with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). If the latter, the emphasis is on the problematics of the phenomenal in a world shorn of metaphysical depth, with the vampire representing a free-floating materiality, which does not signify. If Machen is chosen, we look at his theurgic aesthetics, by which the abject and horrific is raised to signification, as he describes in his manifesto, Hieroglyphics (1902). In both writers the object takes on a monstrous form, as in the climax of The Three Impostors, in which the tortured body of the young man in spectacles is displayed, the presence of his eyeglasses adding the touch of the grotesque.¹⁴ This aesthetic category, so central to German Romantic theory, Poe and the Gothic generally, is presented here as creating an aporia, which shows the mind brought up against its limits in an image that is visually clear yet conceptually impossible to comprehend. Here we bump up against the limits of Taylor’s ‘the immanent frame’: a constellation of self-sufficient orders, ‘cosmic, social and moral’, which naturalise all experience.¹⁵ The grotesque makes us aware, through an unnatural or monstrous object, of the construction of those categories, and of their limits. The ‘subtraction theory’ that would leave us with an orderly secular just does not obtain. I hope to leave my students feeling uneasy and with a sense that there are mysteries of life beyond our comprehension.

A second module I have often taught that similarly seeks to question the immanent frame is on Religion and Fantasy, encompassing the 19th and 20th centuries. Its central premise is that non-realist fiction can make our usual view of reality ‘strange’ and destabilise our secular modes of organising experience, which deny the possibility of the transcendent. Taught as a follow-up to God and the Gothic, it rehearses the Enlightenment and Idealist philosophical background of that course, but then develops it toward the German Früromantik of the Schlegel brothers and Novalis. We look at Novalis’ concept of magic idealism as a way of raising the world beyond the self to full presence and participation, building upon and to some extent critiquing Fichte’s self-positing subjectivity. Magic Idealism is an attempt to bread down the barrier between subject and object through an act of creative imagination. The celebrated incident of the dream of the blue flower in Novalis’ posthumously published bildungsroman, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), offers students an embodied example of the concept in the form of a blue flower viewed by the protagonist, which begins to move and reveals a human face within its petals, thus transforming from an object in the perceiver’s scopic control to a subject with an inexhaustible significance. Novalis then becomes a way in to the study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s theory of the imagination in Biographia Literaria (1817), as well as a lens by which to understand The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), and the protagonist’s reconnection with the world through the sea-snakes. For Coleridge, too, the imagination has a creative force, echoing divine creativity while also enabling a restoration of true presence and agency to the natural world.

The literary theory work done by Todorov in the first module is here performed by Viktor Shklovsky’s essay of 1917, ‘Art as Technique’.¹⁶ Shklovsky’s claim that ‘words are dead’ in the modern world of abstraction and ‘language like a graveyard’ parallels Novalis’ resurrection of the ‘petrified magic city’ of nature, which has similarly become inert in a post-Kantian perspective. What effects the raising in Shklovsky’s essay is defamiliarisation, whereby an object is seen from an unusual perspective, grotesquely dismembered, or isolated so that it may be attended to properly. Perception is thus slowed or distorted, so that the words may be restored full of meaning and enchantment. ‘Art as Technique’ gives examples from Tolstoy but in this module the fictional masters of this effect are Charles Dickens and G.K. Chesterton. Dickens, on one of his tramps through night-time London ‘in a trance of abstraction’, sees some words in the transom above a door: ‘MOOR EEFFOC’.¹⁷ Going round the other side of this utterly enticing and mysterious sign, it proves to be ‘Coffee Room’. A time-telescope opens into vistas of the past and clothes the commonplace refreshment hall in a magical glow. The ordinary has been defamiliarised. This effect is then traced through what Chesterton called Dickens’ ‘eerie realism’ in his supernatural Christmas tales as well as generally in his fiction and into the fantasy literature of the Victorian period.¹⁸ Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1862–3), for example, is an extended exercise in such ‘making strange’ of Victorian society, seen first from the perspective of a child chimney sweep and then from the watery world of efts or water-babies into which he is reborn.

Disenchantment is, of course, central to the secular narrative, an effect, says Max Weber, of entrapment in an iron cage of the banal.¹⁹ The language of the ‘iron cage’ describes the routinisation of modern work practices, in which individuals are entrapped in processes of rationalisation and control. His essay provides students with a different perspective on secularism, which is often critical in that Weber notes a loss of the communal now that transcendent values cannot be found in the social or the polity but only in private intimacy. Science is pitted against religion but of its own nature is unable to fill the vacuum that it leaves, as is shown in Kingsley’s well-meaning professorial ‘fisher’ of a water-baby, who is completely unable to comprehend what he has found.²⁰ Three works of fantasy that address this disenchantment are John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River (1841), George MacDonald’s The Light Princess (1864) and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862). These stories of redemption and reconnection describe a desacralised world, with Ruskin’s tale of the destruction of a river having an overtly ecological dimension. Recent work by Emma Mason has detected a similar concern in Rossetti’s poem, while MacDonald’s princess is separated from humankind and the natural and material by her inability to stay grounded.²¹ Disenchantment of the natural world is accompanied by commodification and a loss of kinship with nature. MacDonald includes two professors, Hum Drum and Copy-Kek, who represent the routinisation or the converse escapist spiritualisation of the disenchanted universe but also reveal its deathly solutions, which in the case of the princess is to bury her underground.²² Only an embrace of the limitation of the material which is sacrificial in its demands enables reconnection with nature, other people and the immanent sacrality of the world.

There is a tendency by some working in the field of literature and theology to use the concept of re-enchantment as if it were a straightforward matter of the reassertion of the wonder of nature. This module seeks to demonstrate how difficult it is to recover such a perspective, given humankind’s alienation from natural processes, which is another effect of secularisation, and Owen Barfield’s notion of ‘final participation’ is introduced as one way of articulating this.²³ Barfield has already been introduced to students as a Coleridge interpreter and his work aligns Novalis and the Romantics with the Victorian fantasy tradition and its defamiliarising procedures.²⁴ For Barfield argues that we have no way back to an original participation in nature but must understand our own role in the creation of meaning.

My two modules, then, seek to question the inevitability and hegemony of the secular and to reveal in a range of 19th-century writers of non-realist fiction questionings of the immanent frame to experience. My hope is to make my students aware of the power of the imagination to make the world, and they are encouraged to respond to these texts by crafting short stories, artwork, and music which perform defamiliarisation, the grotesque and the fantastic to understand how aesthetic modes may do theological and philosophical work. Novalis is the inspiration here, who wrote that ‘life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us’.²⁵ Our lives as teachers and students in the contemporary British university are tightly controlled by highly bureaucratic procedures and the routinisation of study. Writers like Novalis call us back to our true calling to seek for wisdom, which he describes as ‘romanticising’ and which the reader of Taylor might call rather an opening of the immanent frame:

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.²⁶

Footnotes