Neo-Victorian Gothic: Honor, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Split into three parts, 'Imperial Impostures and Improprieties', 'The Horrid and the Sexy', and 'Hybrid Forms', the eleven essays collected here uncover fresh conversations and interdisciplinary research into this relatively new field of study. [...]an assertion that 'The "other" in this construction, it should be noted, indicates not a singular alter-ego, but a fragmented plurality of versions of otherness' [emphasis in original] (p. 9) is immediately followed by the notion that In neo-Victorianism, Gothic is not so much 'a language, often an ahistoricising language, which provides writers with the critical means of transferring an idea of the otherness of the past into the present' (Sage and Smith 1996b: 1), as it allows them to transfer an idea of the (self-) otherness of the present into the past. The 1888 Whitechapel serial killer created a gothic space in public opinion, and gave 'degeneration' a cross-class (perhaps cross-gender) polymorphic substance. Drawing on Beryl Bainbridge's Watson's Apology (1984) and Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996) (which fictionalise two real-life murder cases), Brindle interrogates the 'provenance and transmission of documented events' (p. 283).

Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (eds), Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012)

Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben have edited a formidable collection of essays, which establishes neo-Victorian gothic as a serious field of study in itself rather than a subgenre of gothic. Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the ReImagined Nineteenth Century neatly side-steps merging the gargantuan gothic and the new kid on the block, neo-Victorianism - despite the editors' protestations that the two were 'doomed to converge, if not to merge, their union almost predestined by their common revivalist premises' (p. 2). Instead, the essays collected here position neo-Victorianism as a twenty-first-century David slaying the Goliath that has become 'Gothic Culture' and retrieving the genre's original radical energies, as it emerged in the eighteenth century.

Whereas gothic used to be the domain of the marginalised, now, in the twenty-first century, it is the Absolute, 'omnipresent, diffused through literature, film and other visual media' (p. 1). But has it over-reached itself, becoming the thing it despised - 'homogenised' and 'mainstream'? Its 'hegemonic power' seems to have robbed it of its original alterity, with Dracula's teeth reduced, in Fred Botting's phrase, to 'candygothic'. As Kohle and Gutleben put it,

It is precisely by exploring the Gothic in relation to the nineteenth-century past and the period's specific cultural field that neo-Victorianism endeavours to circumvent the hypermodern, globalised and uniform presentation of the Gothic, in the process re-kindling an intensely disturbing desire that unsettles norms and redefines boundaries once more. (p. 2)

This is the third volume in Gutleben and Kohle's neo-Victorian series (Vol. 1, Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering [2010] ; and Vol. 2, Neo-Victorian Families: Gender and Sexual and Cultural Politics [2011] ). Split into three parts, 'Imperial Impostures and Improprieties', 'The Horrid and the Sexy', and 'Hybrid Forms', the eleven essays collected here uncover fresh conversations and interdisciplinary research into this relatively new field of study. Each essay, with its pertinent footnotes, provides a solid bibliography for students (both new-comers and the more informed). For instance, Cora Kaplan, Julian Wolfreys, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Kate Mitchell, Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, and Roger Luckhurst are all discussed. Most satisfyingly, the contributors suggest a who's-who of the latest neo-Victorian fiction, giving tempting critical insights and extracts from the works.

A gargantuan forty-eight pages, the introductory essay provides a comprehensive, and, in parts, dense definition and defence of neo-Victorianism. If anything, the editors play up the impurity of neo-Victorianism and its 'retrogressive innovation' (p. 4). It is 'by nature quintessential^ Gothic' because it 'tries to understand the nineteenth-century [sic] as the contemporary seifs uncanny Doppelgänger' [emphasis in original] (p. 4). A textual labyrinth, the introduction is repetitive in its focus on the "'(self-) alienated subject of postmodemity - a subject radically 'othered' and 'other' even to itself" (p. 9, quoting from their earlier work Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma [2010]). It sometimes reads as if the editors are trying to convince themselves as well as their readers, bringing in repeated references to the 'other' and 'hybridity' with the rhythm of a sledge-hammer. The reader is not left with enough room to breathe and sit with one concept before another one is thrown at them. For example, an assertion that 'The "other" in this construction, it should be noted, indicates not a singular alter-ego, but a fragmented plurality of versions of otherness' [emphasis in original] (p. 9) is immediately followed by the notion that

In neo-Victorianism, Gothic is not so much 'a language, often an ahistoricising language, which provides writers with the critical means of transferring an idea of the otherness of the past into the present' (Sage and Smith 1996b: 1), as it allows them to transfer an idea of the (self-) otherness of the present into the past. [Emphasis in original] (p. 10).

In such jargon-heavy sections, the introduction reads like a literary equivalent to the wall of sound. But do not let this put you off. My criticism does not do justice to the intricacies of the points they make.

Within the collection itself, Kohle and Gutleben have brought together an impressive list of global experts who offer fresh perspectives. The weighty matters covered include history and ethics, cultural memory, the Bildungsroman, sexuality and degeneration, the uncanny or monstrous child, the neo-Victorian variant of imperial gothic which the editors term Eco-gothic and steampunk, as well as urban gothic and sensational crimes (Jack the Ripper appears a few times), and postmodern and postcolonial gothic. In Section I ('Imperial Postures and Improprieties'), Andrew Smith interrogates historiography in 'The Limits of Neo-Victorian History: Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian and The Swan Thieves'. I enjoyed Cheryl D. Edelson's 'Reclaiming Plots: Albert Wendt's "Prospecting" and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl's Ola Na Iwi (the bones come alive) as Postcolonial Neo-Victorian Gothic'. She provides a salient criticism of Western museum culture and the Enlightenment from a Hawaiian perspective, and breaks down the distinction between graverobbers and scientists and the academy.

Another nugget in this section is Sebastian Domsch's 'Monsters against Empire: The Politics and Poetics of Neo-Victorian Metafiction in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's hybrid, miscegenic graphic novels prove fascinating 'examples of the artistic and political potential of the neo-Victorian Gothic, as they combine a visual and verbal steampunk re-imagination of the more monstrous side of the Victorian era with an almost excessive metafictional playfulness and thorough ideological critique' (p. 98). Domsch explores how Moore and O'Neill blur the line between the monstrous and imperial ideology, as twentieth-century weapons of mass destruction are prefigured in steampunk's revision of late-Victorian technological warfare and idealism. Moving the discussion across continents, Jeanne Ellis discusses the South-African performance artist Leora Färber's Dis-Location/Re-Location, highlighting Färber's 'Bodily Metamorphics of Unsettlement'. At the heart of the work, Ellis argues, the doubled self of artist and Victorian settler are merged into a neo-Victorian gothic composite.

In Section II ('The Horrid and the Sexy'), Patricia Pulham revisits Colm Tóibín's 'biofiction' The Master (2004). She argues that the ambiguous, sexualised shadow plot of Henry James's novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898), is spectrally mirrored in The Master, with its 'covert and haunting expressions of homoerotic desire' that play with James's 'afterlife' (p. 149). Max Duperry and Sarah E. Maiar both discuss, in different fashions, the fin-de-siècle's shadowy, sensational 'Everyman', Jack the Ripper. They provide historical and literary perspectives on the reality and the myth. The 1888 Whitechapel serial killer created a gothic space in public opinion, and gave 'degeneration' a cross-class (perhaps cross-gender) polymorphic substance. The unsolved murders of prostitutes fuelled the vogue for Sensation and detective fiction. This literary climate at the time linked Edgar Allan Poe with Arthur Conan Doyle. In quintessential^ gothic mode, this climate is still with us today, keeping the myth and presence of Jack the Ripper alive at the start of the twenty-first century. Kohlke closes Section II with her anatomising of 'Fantasies of Self-Abjection' in both 'Female Gothic' and its neo-Victorian counterpart. Instead of emancipating female characters, she argues, gothic involves a 'voyeuristic re-victimisation' which 'seems at odds with neo-Victorianism's ethical and liberationist agenda of bearing after-witness to unrecorded traumas of the socially disempowered and marginalised' (p. 222). Kohlke examines these tensions in three, 'as yet critically neglected', novels that she suggests are 'stopping-off points in the evolution of neo-Victorian Female Gothic: Marghanita Laski's The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953), Maggie Power's Lily (1994), and Kate Williams's The Pleasures of Men (2012)' (p. 222).

The final three essays in Section HI ('Hybrid Forms') focus on the metafictional playfulness and postmodernist, interactive possibilities of neo-Victorian gothic. Van Leavenworth's 'Epistemological Rupture and the Gothic Sublime in Slouching Towards Bedlam' examines the re-appropriation of Victorian gothic detective fiction in an 'interactively produced steampunk narrative' set in an insane asylum in a reimagined London in 1885 (p. 254). Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003) is an 'Interactive Fiction (IF)' - a hybrid form of literary narrative and video game. The player/reader uses text commands to control the characters. Focusing on the gothic effects of the sublime, Leavenworth discusses the interface between the character/player (in the fiction) and the player/reader (in solving the puzzle). The race is on in this game/text to contain a mysterious epidemic, the 'Logos', that threatens to disrupt both the Victorian and contemporary twenty-first-century systems of classification. The gothic sublime here is the 'recognition of something incomprehensible which drastically undermines the coherence of one's self (p. 264). The reader becomes infected with the sense of epistemological breakdown and fears that contemporary culture may be haunted by Victorian anxieties. Kym Brindle's 'Dead Words and Fatal Secrets: Rediscovering the Sensational Document in Neo-Victorian Gothic' also plays with narrative unreliability. Drawing on Beryl Bainbridge's Watson's Apology (1984) and Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996) (which fictionalise two real-life murder cases), Brindle interrogates the 'provenance and transmission of documented events' (p. 283). As she puts it, rather than unearthing the 'truth', neo-Victorian writers 'revisit infamous crimes to orchestrate an unstable narrative mix of citation and invention that exploits inconsistencies, gaps, and secrets in historical documents that claim to evidence the "awful truths of human existence'" (p. 280, quoting from Bainbridge). Christian Gutleben fittingly closes the collection with his 'Reflexion on Humour in Neo-Victorian Gothic'. He suggests that neoVictorianism is characterised by 'an intertextual form of irony typical of postmodernism' (p. 302). This sets up a critical distance between gothic and neo-Victorianism, one which privileges the latter. Neo-Victorian revision, he asserts, allows 'an ontological reconsideration of the concepts of otherness [...] precisely because humour encourages a reflexive attitude' (p. 302). The resulting neo-Victorian text becomes a 'playful hybridisation' that signifies a 'new novelistic species' - fundamentally open-ended and fun (pp. 302, 324).

Overall, I have to admit that Kohlke and Gutleben's Neo-Victorian Gothic is a thorough piece of scholarship which enhances and opens up the fields of gothic, Victorianism, and neo-Victorianism.

Edwina Keown