Content area
Full text
Art of Darkness. A Poetics of Gothic by Anne Williams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. 323. $39.00 cloth; $14.95 paper.
In Art of Darkness, Anne Williams sets out to discover a "poetics" of Gothic, as her subtitle informs us-a set of underlying principles associated not only with the literature conventionally grouped under the "Gothic" rubric but also with its Romantic cousins, though Williams herself resists family metaphors precisely because of their thematic relevance here. Delineating such a set of "Gothic" principles is itself a tall undertaking. As Eve Sedgwick remarks, "Gothic" has not been the most supple of terms. Most of the best recent criticism of Gothic literature, including much gender-inflected commentary, has bracketed the idea of defining it, nodding only to the difficulty of doing so. Different critics have used the term "Gothic" to describe an historical designation or certain plot devices or imagistic conventions or thematics or formal structures or overlapping combinations of these. Thus Williams's project itself seems necessarily somewhat arbitrary and restrictive. To propose what Gothic itself "is" reifies the category unnecessarily. Why do so?
Williams's chief reason is to break down the long-discussed division between "Gothic" and "Romantic" in British literature, which often is identified both as to genre and as to gender: "Gothic" novelists (often women, who appeal to a popular audience) versus "Romantic" poets (men, who write high art). "Gothic" principles which cut across prose and poetry reveal what writing in different genres has in common. Of course for a long time now-certainly since Ellen Moers's classic essay "Female Gothic" and Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic-critics have resisted the idea of seeing Gothic fiction as an illegitimate relative of Romanticism. One part of Williams's discussion that I find especially lively and interesting is her description of the mutuality of the two: while "Gothic" may well have fed into a mainstream Romanticism (where one can yet perceive its "ghosts," as Judith Wilt suggested), Romanticism fed back into a "Gothic" tradition.
What I find less valuable is what Williams puts in place of the old categories: a differentiation between "Male" and "Female" Gothic. Again, such a division is made possible only because of the reified (essentialized?) way "Gothic" itself is described.
At the very beginning...