“The Gothic concerns itself with disorder and chaos.”
Consider this claim by comparing Frankenstein with at least one other Gothic work you have studied.
A. D. Bradley
The Gothic novel concerns itself with disorder and chaos insofar as it commonly portrays the tension and, therefore, struggle between the empirical world and that of the inexplicable: disorder and chaos. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as a moral tale of what happens when man ventures of the beaten path of well-order science, with all soon descending into a chaotic situation wholly with out precedent and, for this reason, ultimately uncontrollable.
The roots of the Gothic lie are connected, albeit in opposition, to the rationalist movement, that philosophical doctrine favouring reason and factual analysis over faith and religious dogma in the persuit of the truth. Acknowledging that the Gothic as pertaining to all forms of art, some critics have pointed to a 1799 picture drawn by the Spanish artist Goya in which a man lies sleeping on a desk above which all sorts of nightmarish creatures all hovering. Inscribed on the desk are some Spanish words which translate as, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”.
Shelley effectively alludes to this tradition through the young Frankenstein’s interests and choice of reading; by having him read the works of famous alchemists such as the German Cornelius Agrippa, who is widely associated with the occult, she distances Frankenstein from the traditional, more clear-cut aspects of science and rationalism.
Of course the monster created in Frankenstein would have been an obvious manifestation of chaos and disorder. Yet a closer reading of his characterisation does not permit such a crude definition. Paradoxically, the critic Peter Brooks has asserted in Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts that the “story of [the monster’s] education is a classic study of right natural instinct perverted and turned evil by the social milieu.”
The full irony of this assertion lies in the fact that the monster is discarded by one of the most malevolent and stable motifs of the novel, namely that of the family. In this way the reader is encouraged to ask if there would have been so much chaos and disorder infusing the monster had he not been rejected, firstly, by the man who brought him into the world and, secondly, by the tight-knit De Lacey family. Yet in a sense the fact that neither the ‘monstrous’ nor the harmonious conform to popular stereotype reinforces the idea of things not being quite as they should.
The traditional setting of the Gothic text also lends itself to chaos and disorder. In Macbeth, commonly regarded as Shakespeare’s most gothic offering, the play opens on “a desert place” which is inhospitable to man in every sense including the utilisation of pathetic fallacy in the withes’ gathering in a thunderstorm. I feel that the number of the witches, three, is of significance to this question too.
The motif of a trio evil women dates back to the classical period and the myths of Medusa and her sisters, but it is also one adopted by Bram Stoker to capture the Gothic mood within his villain’s castle. That three is an odd number means that there is a dearth of balance and it seems to me beyond coincidence that the image recurs so habitually in literature and drama. Likewise, while the castle itself, a ubiquitous Gothic image ever since the invention of the genre in 1765 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, may convey strength and regimented architecture, that it appears in its ruined form adds to the feeling of turmoil and, as an imperfect structure, disorder. Shelley finds an admirable substitute for this Gothic setting in the icy mountaintops of Geneva and, supremely, in the Artic barren climes of the North Pole.
The context to some much Gothic fiction is the post-theological, pre-scientific hinterland that was Britain on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, whose grandfather the physician and poet Erasmus Darwin is cited by Shelley in the Introduction to Frankenstein as an influence, provoked pandemonium in all the orthodox institutions of the land. Robert Lois Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a fascinating work regarding disorder and chaos.
In it the reader is presented with two polarities: Dr Jekyll stands for all that was considered good about Britain, science and the polite society of the day; and yet it is this paragon of trustworthiness and virtue that unleashed onto the streets of London a depraved maverick who murders children by trampling over them and frequents brothels. Here order is place in juxtaposition with depravity as in some many other Gothic texts. But in doing so Stevenson draws attention to the double standards that have come to be known as “Victorian hypocrisy”, raising the awkwardly amoral question whether is just as harmful to try and be too good as excessively evil. From this tale, and its echoes in the ambiguous characterisation of Shelley’s monster to which I referred earlier, we can conclude that disorder and chaos are not also accompanied by a disparaging tone in the Gothic novel.
Frankenstein comprises the letters and written records of a seemingly gullible British sailor to whom Frankenstein orally accounted his life story. Thus with its unreliable narrator, even the narrative of Frankenstein lacks order. Similarly, Bram Stoker’s archetypal Gothic text Dracula is an epistolary novel, in which the author includes letters, diary entries and even newspaper clippings to relate the tale. This unreliability of narrative is returned to in the modern Gothic by such authors as Angela Carter. In her collection of grotesque retellings of fairytales she switches tense mid sentence and omits the punctuation of inverted comas, thereby confusing the attribution of speech to the various characters.
Its effect is a mystically elusive atmosphere which pervades the text, encouraging readers to suspend their disbelief as the often outlandish or fanciful plots are undercut by a degree of uncertainty which mirrors the recurring themes of the novels and stories themselves. The vampire in Carter’s The Lady of the House of Love, for example, inhabits a gothic “no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and walking, behind the hedge of spiked flowers” which is unsettling in its lack of certainty and eerie in its portrayal of afterlife. The oxymoronic image of jagged flowers further adds to this sense of disarray.
To conclude, Gothic writers appear keen to include the chaotic and the disorderly in their work. It distances their creation from the real world, consequently shirking accusations of adverse criticism of the political and social norms of the time. Much of the horror and suspense of the genre is also derived from the reader’s uncertainty and fear of what lies behind the conventional and the familiar. Yet ultimately, chaos and disorder are natural phenomena and ones to which the reader can relate.
Sunday, 27 November 2005