12 - Gothic Ecologies of Mind

Summary

This chapter proposes that the gothic ballad revival, and the formal experimentation it engendered, also became an opportunity for Romantic-era writers to experiment with different models of mind. From the poems Matthew Lewis included in his novel The Monk to the ‘new principle’ of meter Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed to have invented for ‘Christabel,’ metrical inventiveness was one way that poets gave shape to a gothic interest in alterity and idiosyncrasy. In his reading of gothic metrical experiments, Daniel Robinson has described this neogothic love of nonce meters – poetic forms that invent their own idiosyncratic lines and stanzas – as ‘weird form,’ aligned with a broader interest in historical difference and gothic excess (155). On my argument, that interest in ‘weird form’ also had implications for longer-standing conversations about the history of cognition. In particular, this chapter reads gothic imitations as a response to an earlier moment in the eighteenth-century ballad revival, which had framed ballads as the products of an early phase in cultural development – and which, consequently, read them as artifacts shaped by common, pre-cultural features of the human mind. Joseph Addison's emphasis on ballads’ formal simplicity and universalizable sentiment, for example, implied a uniformitarian account of mental development, where simplicity of form and feeling pointed back to a common origin point. Another way to put this is that eighteenth-century writings on the ballad revival often double as claims about the history of cognition. Those claims frequently emphasize continuity over time: literary artifacts were made to uncover and naturalize aspects of mental functioning that came to appear universal, timeless, and embodied. Neogothic experiments, in contrast, show that ballad studies also afforded a different approach to the history of cognition.

The idea that poetic meter reflected the rhythmic, embodied movements of thought itself had a long history in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Recently, that attention to rhythmic thinking has helped recover Romantic writers’ commitment to the mind's embodiment: to the idea that thinking happens in and through the body's rhythms. Yet even as gothic nonce meters and irregularities suggest that kind of embodied movement – in Robinson's words, marking ‘the pulses and beats of English meters and, at the same time, in the human psyche’ – they can still seem strangely decorporealizing, especially when the ‘weird’ seems to pull in the direction of ‘other-worldly or subconscious sources’ or an ‘evocation of the uncanny’ (164).