In 1881, Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Elizabeth Luna Chapin Holland, including news of her brother Austin's having hired a day-laborer to help with work around the family property. Since the death of their father, Edward, in 1874, Austin had been responsible for running both the Homestead in Main Street that Emily lived in with her sister Lavinia and their mother, and the Evergreens next door, occupied by himself, his wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and their children:

”I dwell in Possibility - /A fairer House than Prose - ,” Emily Dickinson begins a poem that describes how, simply by “spreading wide” her “narrow hands,” she gathers “Paradise” (Fr 466, J 657). However, this “house”of possibility is not a dwelling providing shelter in the usual sense but is instead composed of trees and sky. The house of possibility is “More numerous of windows” and “Superior of doors” than “Prose,” which is not only enclosed by humanly constructed dimensions but is also, the poet suggests, more constraining than protecting, more imprisoning than liberating.

Prose: the genre, what is not poetry; prosy: what is matter-of-fact and dry; prosaic: what is lacking in imagination or spirit, what is dull. In “I held a Jewel in my fingers – ” the poet explains that, confident her jewel would “keep,” she allows herself to fall asleep in the warm day with its “prosy” winds, until, as she laments,

Although the myth of Dickinson's alienation from her society is slowly dissolving, it has not been sufficiently recognized just how open she was to forces within her surrounding culture. In some ways, of course, Dickinson was the quintessentially private poet. It is also important to note, however, that she had a keen eye on American popular culture and drew poetic sustenance from it.

Indeed, there is evidence that she had a deep, frustrated desire for popularity. As a family acquaintance, Mrs. Ford, wrote to Mabel Todd, “I think in spite of her seclusion, she was longing for poetic sympathy and renown, and that some of her later habit of life originated in this suppressed and ungratified desire for distinction.” Dickinson herself did at times express this desire for fame, as when she remarked to her sister-in-law Sue, “Could I make you and Austin – proud – sometime – a great way off – ‘twould give me taller feet – ’” (LED, p. 378). She once recalled that she and her cousin Louise Norcross had “in the dining-room decided to be distinguished. It’s a great thing to be great, ‘Loo,’” she remarked. Although she could adopt a pose of literary shyness before the Atlantic Monthly editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, writing to him that publication was as “foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin,” the fact remains that she sent this leading man of letters six poems in response to his call for pieces from “new or obscure contributors” (LED, pp. 378, 539). Her thirst for fame and popularity sometimes surfaces in her poems, as when she writes that her “Holiday” will be “That They remember me,” and her “Paradise” will be “the fame – / That They – pronounce my name –” (J 431).

Born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson led a privileged life with a financially comfortable and well-respected family in a deeply Calvinist New England community. Her father was elected a representative to Congress and served as Treasurer of Amherst College for thirty-seven years, a post later occupied by Dickinson's brother, Austin. The Dickinson family hosted many important visitors, including the famed essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emily Dickinson had numerous correspondents and attended both Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. For most of her life, however, the poet spent much of her time secluded within her family's home, writing poetry and helping to run the household. She sent numerous letters and poems to her intimate friend and sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and she, with her sister, Lavinia, nursed her ailing mother throughout her lengthy illness and until her death, just four years before the poet's own. Dickinson's poetry expresses her struggles with her faith, with her father, with mortality, and with the challenges of being a woman and a poet.

Emily Dickinson has emerged as a powerful and persistent figure in American culture. As a woman poet, Dickinson has been portrayed as singular and enigmatic and even eccentric. Often, Dickinson is painted as a young woman in white, closeted in the upper rooms of her home, isolated not only from her neighbors and friends, but also from the historical and cultural events taking place outside her door. Her poems speak most noticeably of “the Heaven of God,”“the starkest Madness,” or the “Infinite” rather than of worldly events. She has been perceived as agoraphobic, deeply afraid of her surroundings, and as an eccentric spinster. At the same time, Dickinson is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of American poetry, an innovative pre-modernist poet as well as a rebellious and courageous woman.

Doom with a view

A hand appears, clutching an automatic pistol. Walls of gray and slimy concrete provide the gloomy surroundings. The flickering half-light of low ceilings, dark corridors, and sliding steel doors offer little orientation as the handgun begins to negotiate the uninviting dungeon. Outside, a bleak, rocky landscape is visible. So, too, the harsh walls of the desolate bunker fortress, labyrinth, and prison. Suddenly, a shadowy movement is glimpsed through the pale glow of dials and lamps. A shot. The assailant, a barely human figure in fatigues and body armor, lumbers from a dark alcove, preparing to fire again. The pistol reacts, kicking slightly in the hand. It kicks again. The attacker recoils and falls, a bloody mess on the floor. More shapes lurch from the darkness. The pistol responds, its semicrazed fire continuing until all the mutant soldiers are splattered corpses. Welcome to Doom.

There is something strangely familiar about this popular computer game. Its labyrinths, ghostly figures, and monstrous mutants evoke primitive fears and instinctual responses; its violent shocks and graphic images set the pulse racing; its repetitive structure sacrifices imaginative narrative involvement for more immediate sensational pleasures. Computer games owe a debt to horror cinema: Silent Hill evokes tension through dark, obscure settings, its player/wanderer suddenly shocked by “blood-curdling monsters”; Resident Evil takes scenes directly from George Romero’s 1978 cult horror movie, Dawn of the Dead.

It is the business of literary criticism to test the myths of literary history. The contemporary reception of what we now call the Gothic has furnished us with two enduring stories about its rise: that the Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and that the 1790s witnessed an explosion in what was most commonly referred to then as the “terrorist system of novel writing.” The chapters prior to mine in this volume address the first proposition. My purpose here is to explore the second, of which there are two main aspects. Was there in fact an effulgence of terror fiction in the 1790s? And if so, what did it mean?

Was the novel-writing market flooded by the Gothic in the 1790s, as the reviewers claimed? With only one small qualification, the answer is a resounding “yes.” The qualification rests on the meaning of “Gothic.” As E. J. Clery in the previous chapter reminds us, the term Gothic novel was retrospectively applied to such works, for the most part. Although this ought to caution us against overlooking the heterogeneous nature of 1790s romance, the fact remains that terror fiction of the period is easily identifiable, despite its variety. The recently published English Novel 1770–1829: a Bibliographical Guide (Garside et al.) permits a simple yet decisive exercise. It contains the full titles of virtually all of the novels published during the period, which generally include key items of marketing information, thus giving us useful generic pointers. It also includes extracts from the Monthly and Critical Review, which dominated reviewing at this time, so that we can observe the period’s own acts of critical categorization.

The Gothic - as Walter Scott observed in his commentary on Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto - is above all the “art of exciting surprise and horror.” The genre’s appeal to readers, in Scott’s view, comes from its trying to reach “that secret and reserved feeling of love for the marvelous and supernatural which occupies a hidden corner in almost everyone’s bosom.” As it happens, this “literature of nightmare” (MacAndrew, Gothic Tradition in Fiction, p. 3) was, from its earliest history in England and Europe, fundamentally linked to colonial settings, characters, and realities as frequent embodiments of the forbidding and frightening. This mixed genre was still less than forty years old when Charlotte Smith – the eighteenth-century poet and novelist admired by so many in her time, including Jane Austen – set her novella “The Story of Henrietta” (1800) in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, where the terrors of the heroine’s situation are exacerbated by her atavistic fears of Jamaica’s African-derived magicoreligious practice of Obeah and the possibility of sexual attack by black males. By the 1790s Gothic writers were quick to realize that Britain’s growing empire could prove a vast source of frightening “others” who would, as replacements for the villainous Italian antiheroes in Walpole or Radcliffe, bring freshness and variety to the genre. With the inclusion of the colonial, a new sort of darkness – of race, landscape, erotic desire and despair – enters the Gothic genre, and I here want to show and explain the consequences of that “invasion” throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Literary genres do not emerge overnight, nor do they arise in cultural isolation. This is especially true of the Gothic, which not only underwent an initial period of gestation, development and decline (broadly speaking, from the publication of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to some moment after Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer of 1820) but also, from the very outset, borrowed liberally from a vast range of sources, foreign and domestic, literary, aesthetic, and scientific.

In light of the burgeoning academic interest in the Gothic in Britain and the Americas over the last decades of the twentieth century, it is easy to forget that the English Gothic genre was by no means the only example of a popular aesthetic of horror in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. Indeed, in France a tradition of sentimental adventure stories, stories which generally contained more than the occasional macabre frisson, had existed since the 1730s (and been equally popular elsewhere, particularly in Britain); while in Germany, at almost exactly the same moment as the vogue for the Gothic reached its apogee in Britain, the reading public devoured a succession of novels and tales featuring knights, robbers, and ghosts (thus giving rise to a tripartite genre generally thought of as the Ritter-, Räuber-, and Schauerroman). At some moment in the late eighteenth century, moreover, under the impact of translated English and German works, the French sentimental adventure story transmuted itself into yet another distinct genre, termed the roman noir, which appropriated genre markers from translated foreign literature while generally obeying local norms with regard to narrative structure and ideological content.

I want to focus in this chapter on qualities particular to Scottish and Irish Gothic fiction, wider histories of which are already available. More specifically, I propose to inquire into some of the general relations between history and the Gothic for Scotland and Ireland and to exemplify these issues through an extended consideration of two texts, one Irish and one Scottish, that might both, in very different ways, make some claim to have an “originary” status in the history of Gothic fiction. One of these is, perhaps, inescapable in any contemplation either of the Gothic in general or of the “Irish Gothic”: Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). My epitome of Scottish Gothic is less obvious, but carries, as I hope to show, a freight of themes that touch at many points on the Gothic: Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816).

I have in mind also the curious way in which current critical discourse seems to be forming itself round a certain terminology that owes much to the Gothic tradition. I have looked elsewhere at the contemporary preoccupation, in literary as well as in psychoanalytic theory, with crypts, phantoms, and processes of spectralization. Here I want to use different terms, principally the monument and the ruin. Both of these notions, I believe, point us toward the “uncanny,” in that they speak always of history, but of a history that is constantly under the threat of erasure. They speak of history not as a living presence nor yet as an irrecoverable absence, but as inevitably involved in specific modes of ghostly persistence which may occur when, particularly in Scotland and Ireland, national aspirations are thwarted by conquest or by settlement, as they have been so often. I want to show how the Gothic is especially powerful in rendering the complex hauntings in such conflicted histories.

It may come as a surprise, in view of the generic force of the term Gothic, that there is no established genre called Gothic cinema or Gothic film. There are Gothic images and Gothic plots and Gothic characters and even Gothic styles within film, all useful to describe bits and pieces of films that usually fall into the broader category of horror, but there is no delimited or demonstrable genre specific to film called the Gothic. This is at least in part due to the fact that film, as a medium born with the twentieth century, is both a late-comer to and an avid, unashamed plagiarizer of earlier, literary forms of the Gothic. As such, the Gothic does not “belong” to film, and the film medium must content itself with providing a home for that catch-all category of terror and spookiness, the horror genre.

Nonetheless, if it is surprising that there is no such thing as Gothic cinema, that is because we perfectly well know the Gothic when we see it. There is, in fact, something peculiarly visual about the Gothic. As William Patrick Day has pointed out, the Gothic tantalizes us with fear, both as its subject and its effect; it does so, however, not primarily through characters or plots or even language, but through spectacle (Day, Circles of Fear and Desire, p. 63). The fearful effect of the Gothic, at least in its literary forms, depends on our ability to cast certain conventionalized images from the text onto the “screen” of our mind’s eye. The Gothic is thus particularly suited to the cinema, trading as the latter does in images that affect the individual psyche, albeit in culturally legible terms. Indeed, this is both the strength and weakness of the Gothic on screen: its ability to capture the spectacular element of the Gothic effect and encode it in culturally recognizable – ultimately perhaps in all too recognizable – forms.

Gothic fiction is hardly “Gothic” at all. It is an entirely post-medieval and even post-Renaissance phenomenon. Even though several long-standing literary forms combined in its initial renderings - from ancient prose and verse romances to Shakespearean tragedy and comedy - the first published work to call itself “A Gothic Story” was a counterfeit medieval tale published long after the Middle Ages: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, printed under a pseudonym in England in 1764 and reissued in 1765 in a second edition with a new preface which openly advocated a “blend [of] the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern,” the former “all imagination and improbability” and the latter governed by the “rules of probability” connected with “common life” (p. 9). The vogue that Walpole began was imitated only sporadically over the next few decades, both in prose fiction and theatrical drama. But it exploded in the 1790s (the decade Walpole died) throughout the British Isles, on the continent of Europe, and briefly in the new United States, particularly for a female readership, so much so that it remained a popular, if controversial, literary mode throughout what we still call the Romantic period in European literature (the 1790s through the early 1830s), now especially well known as the era of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).

I will begin with four Gothic scenarios from the British fin de siècle. Marooned on an obscure island, the protagonist of H. G.Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) must contend with “creatures” who are “human in shape, and yet human beings with the strangest air about them of some familiar animal”(p.40). Prendick, unable to classify these anomalous entities, feels a “queer spasm of disgust,” a “shuddering recoil,” in their presence (pp. 25, 31). In The Great God Pan, the body of the dying Helen Vaughan loses its human specificity in a series of rapid transformations as it “descend[s] to the beasts whence it ascended,” dissolves into “a substance as jelly,” and then takes on “a horrible and unspeakable shape, neither man nor beast.” The doctor who attends Helen is convulsed with “horror and revolting nausea” at the sight of her terrible metamorphoses (Machen, House of Souls, pp. 236-37). The narrator of William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907) leans over the water and looks into the eyes of a “thing” with a “white, demoniac face, human save that the mouth and nose had greatly the appearance of a beak.”

My title suggests a rather straightforward enterprise: I want to account for the enormous popularity of the Gothic - both novels and films - since the Second World War. However, the title proposes more questions than it answers. First, what exactly counts as “the contemporary Gothic”? Since its inception in 1764, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic has always played with chronology, looking back to moments in an imaginary history, pining for a social stability that never existed, mourning a chivalry that belonged more to the fairy tale than to reality. And contemporary Gothic does not break with this tradition: Stephen King’s IT (1987) and Anne Rice’s vampire narratives (begun in the 1970s) weave in and out of the distant past in order to comment on the state of contemporary American culture, while other narratives foreground their reliance on prior, historically distant narratives. Peter Straub’s Julia (1975), Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988), and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (film version: The Village of the Damned [1960]) all feed off The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James, itself arguably a revision of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762), a treatise on the education of two children at a country house. And as many contributors to this volume demonstrate, the central concerns of the classical Gothic are not that different from those of the contemporary Gothic: the dynamics of family, the limits of rationality and passion, the definition of statehood and citizenship, the cultural effects of technology. How, then, might we define a contemporary Gothic? For to think about the contemporary Gothic is to look into a triptych of mirrors in which images of the origin continually recede in a disappearing arc. We search for a genesis but find only ghostly manifestations.

From the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century and the beginnings of a distinctive American literature, the Gothic has stubbornly flourished in the United States. Its cultural role, though, has been entirely paradoxical: an optimistic country founded upon the Enlightenment principles of liberty and “the pursuit of happiness,” a country that supposedly repudiated the burden of history and its irrational claims, has produced a strain of literature that is haunted by an insistent, undead past and fascinated by the strange beauty of sorrow. How can the strikingly ironic, even perverse, career of the Gothic in America be accounted for? Why has it been so at home on such inhospitable ground?

The most common responses to these questions have recourse to conventional metaphors: the Gothic, it is frequently reasoned, embodies and gives voice to the dark nightmare that is the underside of “the American dream.” This formulation is true up to a point, for it reveals the limitations of American faith in social and material progress. Yet a simple opposition between the convenient figures of dream and nightmare is overly reductive. These clichés, and the impulses in American life that they represent, are not in mere opposition; they actually interfuse and interact with each other. This realization will take us far in understanding the odd centrality of Gothic cultural production in the United States, where the past constantly inhabits the present, where progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its costs, and where an insatiable appetite for spectacles of grotesque violence is part of the texture of everyday reality.

According to Northrop Frye, “There has never … been any period of Gothic English literature, but the list of Gothic revivalists stretches completely across its entire history, from the Beowulf poet to writers of our own day.” There was, however, a specific period of Gothic English drama. While scholars have identified Gothic elements throughout the dramatic tradition from Euripides and Seneca to Tennessee Williams and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it is important to locate the Gothic drama proper in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (that is, during the period we call “Romantic”),when it rose and fell as a major force on the London stage. During an era when English audiences anxiously lived through a series of political, economic, social, cultural, and literary innovations the Gothic drama provided a major new form of entertainment and of reflection upon a world in major upheaval.

Still, Frye’s point that the Gothic has always seemed belated, always a revival rather than an origin, does apply to the Gothic on stage. Gothic drama arose in England roughly between 1789 and 1832 under a multiple debt of imitation. As Gothic drama, it appeared after and often as an imitation of Gothic novels. As Gothic drama, it struck many as an attempt to revive the conventions and motifs of great Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, or alternatively as a dangerous effort to import the suspect German drama of the Sturm und Drang, a deliberate theatrical style of anticlassical “Storm and Stress” that began with a German play of that name by F. M. Klinger in the 1770s (Mulvey-Roberts, Handbook to Gothic Literature, p. 286). While wildly popular then (as is now its descendent, the horror movie), the Gothic drama has always been found by critics to be second-hand literature: second-rate as literature and secondary to an understanding of the Gothic firmly grounded in the novel. What we need is an account of Gothic drama on its own terms.

This was the way matters stood in 1969 when Robert Hume published “Gothic Versus Romantic: a Revaluation of the Gothic Novel” in the flagship journal of America’s Modern Language Association, PMLA. To reread Hume’s essay today is to be surprised by the modesty of its claims – since it points to conventions, aesthetics, and reading experiences shared by Gothic and Romantic texts and their readers – and by the energy with which these claims were attacked by another scholar, Robert Platzer, in a “Rejoinder” published as a companion piece to it. Their exchange resembles another, better-known dispute between Arthur Lovejoy and René Wellek over the nature of Romanticism. There Lovejoy had attacked Wellek’s holistic definition of Romanticism by pointing to its exceptions. Here Platzer took a similar approach: attacking the fundamental vagueness of the categories of “Gothic” and “Romantic”; allowing for common thematic preoccupations but no closer relation; and arguing for the two terms as part of an overarching “continuum” of print culture. Sharing subject matter and themes, he claimed, did not amount to sharing consciousness, and only the most selective account of both movements could point to real common ground or direct and unmediated influence (Platzer, “Gothic Versus Romantic: Rejoinder,” pp. 270–71).