2
as popular fiction. One could ask why, despite being called escapist and popular,
Gothic has still exerted power on other literary genres and generations of writers. The
answer resides in the fact, that, though these ―thrilling tales of horror seemingly have
no relationship to reality … gothic stories are intimately connected to the culture that
proceeds them.‖ Thus, Gothic is the genre that most adequately ―registers its culture‘s
contradictions, presenting a distorted , yet not a disengaged version of reality‖ (Goddu:
2-3), much as its plots and intriguing effects depend on the supernatural.
Considering the Gothic‘s outstanding span of literary motives it was difficult to decide
on specific authors and texts within which to trace gothic elements. Surely, many
typically gothic writers and works have been inevitably omitted. What‘s more, neither
Muriel Spark nor Carson McCullers have ever been classified as strictly ‗gothic
writers.‘ In the end, in light of post-modern literature, on what grounds can we define
a text or its author as ―gothic‖? What cultural and literary background is taken into
account when analyzing the themes elaborated by those authors? Finally, how should a
reader relate to and decipher classical gothic texts in the 21st century? Should, for
instance, Mary Shelley‘s monster be taken purely in terms of physical appearance, as
an assembly of bodily fragments sewn together? Or perhaps, in today‘s reality,
Frankenstein is better understood as the writer‘s moral essay, where the monster
symbolizes all the ―ugly,‖ ―unpredictable,‖ and ―disruptive‖ in human nature. For
their recognition of human fallibility, insistence upon the evil and the bitterness behind
the dolce vita, I decided to analyze Muriel Spark and Carson McCullers. Both are truly
moralists who bespeak the dark side of the psyche, to then treat it not as an index of
deviancy but rather of ―normality‖ in an imperfect yet perfection-oriented world.
Consequently, the first chapter of this dissertation surveys the Gothic genre‘s historical
reverberations from its 17th-century origins to its presence in contemporary fiction of
the 20th century. While following the genre‘s changes attributed to shifts in cultural,
political and social demands, the emphasis is placed on this genre‘s pivotal structural
and aesthetic traits, and its adaptation to the conditions of specific historical periods. In
fact, what is ascertained in the first chapter is the Gothic‘s extreme ability to adapt and
intermingle with diverse literary forms, and also to constantly shift its focus from fear
to terror, from deformity to eclectic artificiality, from sexual pleasure to the discourse
on gender, and so forth. Further division into the Gothic‘s developments in England
3
and America serves to document yet another type of alteration, that of new meanings
and symbologies of gothic features, that were not triggered by the passage of time, but
rather by the adjective American. The three chapters that follow are of a more practical
nature. As the second part of the title explains, the two female writers in focus are
Carson McCullers of American, and Muriel Spark of Scottish origin.
Before moving to specific examples of cross-gendering in Spark‘s The Driver‟s Seat and
McCullers‘ Reflections in a Golden Eye, in the second chapter an attempt is made to
retrace the history of the Gothic genre‘s transmutations from its origins to the Neo-
Gothic of the 20th century, with a particular emphasis on the female as its indispensable
constituent. What follows is an examination of sexual ambiguity in two characters, Lise
and Captain Penderton, shaped primarily with Freudian theory.1 Firstly, as a challenge
of the traditional gothic heroine, the figure of Lise exemplifies a classic gothic problem
of distinguishing the pursuer from the pursued. Subsequently, the study focuses on
Penderton and the notion of queer as a term previously closeted by dominant
homophobic culture for its association with sexual deviance. The discourse then passes
to the grotesque bodies of Dougal and Cousin Lymon, as probably the best articulation
of the Gothic‘s essence. The analysis serves to illustrate that the difference between
male and female is as murky and hard to determine as the Gothic itself. Thus the
aspect of ―slipperiness of gender‖ breaks down the opposition between male and
female, self and other, normal and deformed, and ultimately proves that identity,
though often conventionalized, nevertheless remains fluid.
The next chapter addresses one of the major Gothic tropes – geographical setting. I
initially introduce the two writers‘ attitudes towards the specific regions of their
nativity. The authors‘ relationships with these areas are dictated by an uncanny feeling
- nostalgia, which prompts a frequent recourse to these places in writing. McCullers‘
Southern Gothic is presented in terms of the influence of the specific Southern
landscape on the writer and this subgenre‘s African American legacy, which enriches
the Gothic with the traumatic experience of slavery and the consequent theme of incest,
1 Freudian psychoanalysis as a powerful device for analyzing literature and the timeless point of reference
for any exploration of the human mind: ―The unconscious now is not the unconscious of 1900, precisely
because psychoanalysis has increased self-knowledge and altered our picture of the self…,‖ in Ritchie
Robertson, ―Freud's Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies: An Introduction,‖ (American
Imago Summer 2003), 249. Hereafter cited in the text as Robertson.
4
with various examples of black figures and their meanings in McCullers‘ writing. The
study then proceeds with Spark‘s attachment to Edinburgh - a recurrent motif in her
narrative, and her treatment of London as a bewildering space that generates feelings
of disorientation, associated with modernism and Gothic descriptions of desolate and
menacing landscapes. The city‘s process of urbanization, industrialization, and ensuing
alienation aggravates the stability of human identity by rendering one a ―cast away‖ of
an anonymous, undefined status, and is then personified by the ambivalent, almost
abhuman figure of Dougal. The next section presents transformations of the
significance that the classic gothic mansion has acquired in the 20th century. The
edifices considered are Miss Amelia‘s café and Mr. Lowther‘s villa in Cramond - no
longer secure domestic spheres, but gothic mansions that encode in symbolic cracks or
exaggerated grandeur a disruption in the familial line and inability to create healthy
relationships within its walls. Whether intentionally or not, both writers reveal typical
gothic atmospheres through the buildings in question by visualizing an uncanny and
somehow ―haunted‖ space, which not only terrifies but is also awe-inspiring.
The last chapter refers to the set of aspects that also coincide with characteristics of the
Gothic genre, particularly emphasizing the mutual influence of individual and society.
The notion of ―disturbed communities‖ stresses the Gothic obsession with fractured or
lost identity as an effect of social activity, starting from the issue of physical disability
and its consequences: on one hand, the reason for supernatural powers; on the other,
the motive of a crippled hero‘s miscomprehension by his community. The study
proceeds with explaining the impossibility of including oneself in the community, as
exemplified by Frankie Adams‘ struggles for social acceptance, and then goes on to
inquire the dreadful nature of communal relationships between Miss Brodie and her
pupils. All of the above examples reveal one of the vital aspects of Gothic fiction: its
ability to terrify by touching upon tabooed subjects so that often the reader himself
begins to question the validity of the term normality as an undeniable absolute. The
final section of this thesis tries to intersect the mode of the ―ballad‖ as a tool to
accentuate Gothic representations in the texts. Its generic bond with the Gothic resides
in folktale motives of superstitious beliefs in the supernatural on one hand, and the
tendency to borrow ideas from other literary forms on the other, and thus becomes a
synthetic blend of a transgressive character.
5
In order to analyze gothic tropes in both authors‘ works, it may be opportune to look
back on certain shared aspects of their biographies. Interestingly, such facts as: leaving
their birthplace in search of fortune or career, unhappy tumultuous marriage,2
attitudes towards God and religion, may provide a key to explaining their subsequent
preferences in narrative style and atmosphere. Whether the two authors were aware of
it or even disagreed with it or not, these biographical factors to some extent recount
their affiliation with Gothic fiction.
While Lawrence Graver says apropos of Spark:
The license of Gothic has its liberties, and countless writers from Walpole to
Barthelme have taken them. Some, like Ann Radcliffe or Peacock, used
Gothic convention to satirize realism and provide pleasures beyond those
enjoyed by the light of common day. Others, like the Brontës or Hawthorne,
used the fantastic machinery to explore submerged human impulses and the
secrets of a universe not to be revealed by reason. Mrs. Spark appears to
have both traditions in mind.3
This is how Margaret B. McDowell sums up McCullers‘ attitude towards the Gothic:
If Carson saw her book as a comic fairy tale, early reviewers labeled it
―Southern gothic.‖ Some irony exists in the fact that she published about this
time her first critical article, in which she objected to the overuse of [this]
term in studies of current fiction. Although she considered the dominant
trend in Southern writing to be realistic and saw gothicism as highly
romantic and idiosyncratic, and although she had written her first novel in a
realistic mode, she [later] turned to experimentation with those nonrealistic
literary conventions often regarded as ―gothic.‖4
As these comments indicate, both writers paradoxically use irony and comedy to tease
readers into serious thought, according to the rule that ―ironic and satiric art allows for
2 In both cases critics use such expressions as: ―ill-fated marriage yet inspiriting,‖ which ―opened up a new
world of experience for Carson, [as] complexities of her marital situation are reflected in various ways in
her fiction‖ (McDowell: 20); or ―Muriel Camberg‘s disastrous teenage marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark, …
her twenties in Rhodesia as a bored and miserable colonial wife‖ [emphasis mine], in Jenny Turner,
―Muriel Spark: She Who Can Do No Wrong,‖ (in Jane Hindle, and Alan Bennett, London Review of Books:
An Anthology, Verso, 1996), 160. Hereafter cited in the text as Turner.
3 Lawrence Graver, ―Attending the Casseroles and a Suicidal Baron,‖ The New York Times, (28/01/09),
<http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/03/11/specials/spark-disturb.html>. Hereafter cited in the text as
Graver.
4 Margaret B. McDowell, Carson McCullers, (Boston : Twayne, 1980), 50-1. Hereafter cited in the text as
McDowell.
6
a greater inter-penetration of art and life.‖5 The mode of a parable borrowed from
imagined myths or fables serves them to convey surreptitiously the truth about a
man‘s relations towards the others, if not God alone. In fact, religion as such plays a
central role in both writers‘ works.
Muriel Spark alone admits that Catholicism has been a crucial element in her
development as a novelist, as it helped her discover all the ―absurd‖ in life by
juxtaposing religion to laicism. Thus, while she may be very religious, the larger
number of her characters are not, as ―her mordant, acidulous, sophisticated wit
operates within a rather strongly secular context.‖6 On the other hand, it was in the
creative act of writing that McCullers saw her only access to God. For her, writing bore
a secret similar to the ―divine,‖ because it was a means to articulate her love for others:
―the further I go into my work and the more I read of those I love, the more aware I am
of the dream and the logic of God, which indeed is a Divine collusion‖ (MH: 282). The
very sign of religious faith in both authors‘ works is the aspect of unwavering
optimism despite the overwhelming sense of evil. Spark manages to reveal a ―supple
merriment‖ among the ―death, waste and frustration‖ that fill almost all of her early
novels and ―[mingle] with a rising stench of the ‗abject‘‖ (Turner: 164). McCullers
shows that although ―love has power to … destroy the solitary people it touches,‖
changing into ―a mad game in which they only destroy each other,‖ she still believes in
an individual‘s revolt against enforced isolation and his urge to express the self at all
costs‖ (McDowell: 31, 64). What seems paradoxical, is that in their works the reader
participates in a kind of displacement of this religious authority by mystery and the
sublimity of human nature. Instead of a literal discussion on ethics and religion, these
writers illustrate the immensity and complexity of the human mind, an aspect that,
according to Gothic symbology, is conveyed in wild and uncanny settings. Being
aware of a human as a fallible creature rendered them more sympathetic towards
5 Peter R. Brown, ―‗There's Something About Mary‘: Narrative and Ethics in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,‖
(Journal of Narrative Theory Summer 2006), 228-9. Hereafter cited in the text as Brown.
6 In Frank Baldanza, ―Muriel Spark and the Occult,‖ (Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Summer
1965), 195. Hereafter cited in the text as Baldanza. In addition, Jenny Turner states: ―Spark‘s novels use
their author‘s religion for many things, but among those things they certainly use it as a source of a
peculiarly English sort of Roman Catholic camp. In dowdy old Protestant England in the frumpy Fifties,
becoming a Catholic was an excellent way of making manifest one‘s own felt specialness socially … as a
gesture of cultural aspiration and disdain,‖ cited in Turner: 161.
7
man‘s struggle against life adversities. Whereas McCullers explored ―complex patterns
of attraction and repulsion among human beings by means of two-dimensional
characters‖ (McDowell: 64), Spark subjects her characters to specialized laboratory
conditions that reveal the ―inescapable human condition‖ of living constantly ―under
threat of morality.‖7 The ―mysterious knowing of things‖ about which Jake Blount8 was
speaking is, precisely, these authors‘ sincere belief in the presence of God as an
embodiment of Good, which prevails in a universe immersed in evil.
In general, the characteristic shared by Spark and McCullers with the Gothic mode is
that they both base their writings on two paradigms, economy and artificiality. Peter
Prescott writes about Spark‘s brevity as ―the soul of her wit,‖ as she ―compresses her
stories most marvelously, pulling in the reader immediately, as if he had been intimate
with her characters for pages.‖9 Also attributed to McCullers are such qualities as: an
emotionally detached narrator, formality, concision, and some artifice, that
additionally suggest a kind of absurdity of the characters and situations, ―a tone of
mockery by stylistic terseness, which reveals in a sentence or two the ridiculous, odd
and petty nature of an individual‖ (McDowell: 61-2). Drawing the reader‘s attention to
the process of creating fiction, for instance, in Spark‘s The Comforters and McCullers‘
The Ballad of the Sad Café, allows them to create a myth rather than a realistic story. The
following retreat to allegory makes their works merge with the Gothic. Since this genre
permits combining comedy with horror, and the realistic with the fantastic their
narratives seem to take a decidedly gothic turn whenever the human nature of cruelty
and violence is depicted with acerbic humor. In consequence, bizarre and often
grotesque situations disclose the characters‘ abnormality and deviant behavior; their
self-centeredness leads to their self-destruction and self-imprisonment. By means of the
parable, the two writers bespeak the absence of any rational pattern in the universe, the
futility of life rather than its steadfastness, the destructive element in the world rather
than its power to create or assure. It is finally through the intuitive and sensual, or the
7 In Harry Blamires, ―The Twentieth Century Novel,‖(in H. Blamires, A Short History of English, Routledge,
1985), 418. Hereafter cited in the text as Blamires.
8 One of the characters in McCullers‘ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. He believed that ―there are those who
know and those who don‘t know. And for every ten thousand who don‘t know there‘ s only one who
knows. That‘s the miracle of all time [emphasis mine]‖ (19).
9 In Peter S. Prescott, and Anne L. Prescott, Encounters with American Culture: (1963-1972), (Transaction
Publishers, 2005), 116-117. Hereafter cited in the text as Prescott.
8
supernatural, that they manage to symbolically conjure up the dark, unconscious
elements of the psyche.
These days, theorists of the Gothic are prone to classify it as a dominant popular genre,
especially if defined loosely. It then must be defined so, ―for it is always a boundary
breaker which erodes any neat distinction between formats and modes, combining
sentimentality and the grotesque, romance and terror, the heroic and the pathetic,
philosophy and nonsense (…) This promiscuous generic cross-breeding is part of the
gothic‘s ‗subverting‘ of stable norms, collapsing of ‗binary oppositions‘ which makes it
appropriate for a postmodern sensibility.‖10
10 In Robert K. Martin, and Eric Savoy, American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, (Iowa City
: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 40. Hereafter cited in the text as Martin.
9
1
History and Aesthetics of the Gothic
The English Gothic
…It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was
imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been,
copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed
up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if in the latter species nature has cramped imagination, she
did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances. The actions, sentiments,
conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days, were as unnatural
as the machines employed to put them in motion (…)
My rule was nature…1
That the Gothic genre should be understood in terms of a ―hybrid‖ was heralded
together with the birth of the very notion – the ―Gothic story‖ brought to light in the
Preface to The Castle of Otranto by what is today declared as Walpole‘s definition of the
Gothic genre. The writer‘s contestation of the ―modern‖ as too attached to mere
quotidianity called for a return to the earlier mode of narrating and liberation of
repressed imagination. This amalgam between a boundless invention on one hand and
the rules of probability on the other implied a real shift in a form of writing and
perceiving the thing written. Contrary to reflecting the story as an imaginative
entertainment for the reader, the ―modern‖ romance, in Walpole‘s understanding,
signified adding the realistic element to improbability of the ancient romance. Thus,
according to Walpole, when describing protagonists and their ways of being the writer
should always bear in mind that even ―under the dispensation of miracles, and
witnesses to the most stupendous phenomena, [personages] never lose sight of their
human character.‖2 Reflecting on the characters‘ human nature was fundamental in
order for the reader to witness ―the private self being constituted narratively through
isolated reflection on its relation to circumstances‖ as John Bender agrees, which, is
1 Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (Preface to the Second Edition, 1764).
2 (ibid.) It meant portraying every single character of the story in its real nature, with regard to eventual
differences in social and cultural status, which in consequence would bring about an immediate change in
tone: from the sublime to naiveté, a theme also described by Walpole in this Preface. It is interesting to
learn the admiration Walpole had for Shakespeare for his ―tragicomedies‖ – the perfection he achieved by
combining the drama with comical relief that remain not without an influence on the Gothic genre.
10
enabled by the introduction of ―inner thought of the hero.‖ It is only through such
psychological modelling that the ―corporeal‖ can be restored to the center of the
gothic.3 Walpole himself addressed this type of a narrative as psycho-narration since it
aimed at reflecting the heroine‘s thoughts as they passed rapidly through her mind.4
The heritage of the ancient romance, on the other hand, allowed Walpole to go back in
time with his narrative, to revive the past. Be it so, the subtitle of the novel, the ―Gothic
story,‖ makes a historical and spatial reference to earlier times word-playing as such
within the main title where the ―Castle,‖ and not ―Otranto,‖ becomes eventually the
focus.
Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole: history of “competing myths”
The yearn for repetition and replication in the gothic narration becomes a real modus
vivendi during the genre‘s most fruitful period from 1796 to 1806. This tendency recurs
back to social discourses of Michael Herzfeld on what he called ―Gothic Nationalism‖5
in the 18th century fiction, prompted by tidal shifts in Britain‘s history (War with Spain,
declaration of a Continental Blockade against the British by Napoleon). Nevertheless,
according to Wein, the genre‘s factual birth is commonly believed to be established
before, in 1764, with Horace Walpole‘s first ever ―Gothic story‖ The Castle of Otranto
(Wein: 210). As evidenced in the beginning of this chapter Walpole claimed to have
created a new species of romance, successively described as ‗gothic.‘ Yet recent studies
of the Gothic‘s real origins criticize such mythologizing of Walpole as the ―Father and
Great Originator,‖ providing a historiographical alternative in the figure of Ann
Radcliffe, proclaimed ―the great enchantress‖ of the genre.6 In fact, the genre‘s tradition
has been polarized by criticism which, taking into account the history of the Gothic
spanning from Walpole to 1970s, divides it into two major plot lines: ‗Walpolean‘ and
3 John Bender in Toni Wein, British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms and the Gothic Novel, 1764-1824, (New York
: Palgrave, 2002), 155. Hereafter cited in the text as Wein.
4 Frequent use of exclamation points and dashes, and lack of verbal markers rendered the writing more
ambiguous. Walpole‘s interpretation of the chaotic nature of the thinking process in a human mind was, in
fact what was later to be called indirect free style (examples taken from Castle of Otranto cited in Wein: 64).
5 The concept understood in terms of ‗cultural poetics‘ of existence with particular application of
anthropological notion of ‗disemia‘- ―a mode of organizing social knowledge through cultural form" in
Rosemary A. Joyce, (eds), ―Women's Work: Images of Production and Reproduction in Pre-Hispanic
Southern Central America,‖ (Current Anthropology June 1993), 255-274.
6 In Andrew Smith, and Diane Mason and William Hughes, Fictions of Unease : the Gothic from Otranto to the
X-files, (Bath : Sulis Press, 2002), 29. Hereafter cited in the text as Smith, FU.
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