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The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick*
Affiliation:
Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
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Abstract

Traditional criticism of the Gothic novel, following a topography of the self derived from Freud, has linked sexuality with depth, repression with surface. Gothic convention, however, especially as Ann Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis use it, links surfaces with sexuality and contagion. The Gothic view of character is a social one, and it is concerned with writing and reference. The tracing and retracing of quasi-linguistic markings on surfaces establish personal identity, but only from outside, ex post facto, and through a draining tension between the code and its material support. The repetitious, fixating process of ocular confrontation by which characters recognize themselves and one another is like the process by which readers recognize thematic conventions.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 96 , Issue 2 , March 1981 , pp. 255 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1981

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References

Note 1 Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Sell (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969), p. xiv; my italics.

Note 2 Robert B. Heilman, “Charlotte Bronte's ‘New’ Gothic,” From Jane Austen lo Joseph Conrad: Essays Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse, ed. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 131, 121; my italics.

Note 3 The first quotation is from Lowry Nelson, “Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel,” Yale Review, 52 (1963), 251; the next two from Heilman, p. 121; and the last from Nelson, p. 238.

Note 4 In the first chapter of my book The Coherence of Gothic Convention, Gothic Studies (New York: Arno, 1980), I offer a critique of this way of interpreting images of depth and interiority in the Gothic. Briefly, “the units of this model are often not coterminous with the fictional ‘selves’ in the novels, nor does the model necessarily demarcate areas that are qualitatively, affectively, or atmospherically different from each other” (p. 12). For the influence of Freud see, e.g., An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. xxiii of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernest Jones (London: Hogarth, 1953–73), pp. 198–99. I take it, however, that a map of psychic topography very like this one is (now) not the hypothesis of a specialized few but a tenet of “common sense”: the language about depth quoted in the first paragraph of this essay was written by, and is instantly intelligible to, nonspecialists.

Note 5 “Thematic” as used in this essay means verbally explicit, at the level of denotation or etymological connotation. It contrasts with “formal” and “structural.”

Note 6 Broadwell, South Atlantic Bulletin, 40 (1975), 77.

Note 7 “It was in the church of San Lorenzo at Naples, in the year 1758, that Vincentio di Vivaldi first saw Ellena Rosalba. The sweetness and fine expression of her voice attracted his attention to her figure, which had a distinguished air of delicacy and grace; but her face was concealed in her veil.” Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents, ed. and introd. Frederick Garber (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 5.

Note 8 Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk, ed. and introd. Howard Anderson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 9. In discussing this novel I use Lewis' capitalization.

Note 9 Kiely. The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 108, 110.

Note 10 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. and introd. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 249.

Note 11 The four-part homological structure A:B::C:D is useful in apparently making possible a discussion of invariant relations that begins with specific attributes of particular things (A, B) but goes beyond the particular or thematic to play over things that have far different attributes. To give an example, if I look for elements to link thematically with a river in a poem, I am likely to look mainly for “water imagery”—for example, wet things. But if what I first perceive is an opposition between wet and dry, I can bring into relation other oppositions (A:B::C:D), including ones not based on humidity—fair and dark, for instance. Indeed, an infinite chain of these is possible.

Thematic conventions—such as “water imagery”—do not offer or invite this floating free of meaning from attributes to relations; instead, they dwell on the attribute, may even seem fixed on it. As they apply the same attribute to different things, their relational structure could be written A:B::A:C. I am suggesting that, while A:B::A:C may be a simpler homology than A:B::C:D (in the sense that it is more repetitious, more tethered to the particular, less relational, less open to the orderly free play of the Symbolic), it is not anterior to, or more elementary than, A:B::C:D; rather it assumes the latter structure, which it depends on for meaning.

For a further discussion of convention and its relation to both repetition and fixity, see Sec. 4 and n. 26.

Note 12 Further: “His cowl, too, as it threw a shade over the livid paleness of his face, encreased its severe character …” (p. 35). “… the air of proud yet graceful dignity, with which she characterized herself …” (pp. 117–18). “… the mountains … character themselves sublimely upon the still glowing horizon” (p. 161). “Vivaldi could not look upon [them], without reading in them the fate of some fellow creature … ; and, as they passed with soundless steps, he shrunk from observation, as if their very looks possessed some supernatural power, and could have struck death” (p. 197). “… a man, who had ‘villain’ engraved in every line of his face …” (p. 211 ). “… she thought ‘assassin’ was written in each line of [his face] …” (p. 250). “… a grateful heart … is the indelible register of every act that is dismissed from the memory of the benefactor …” (p. 254). “… the monk held a lamp, which gleamed over every deep furrow of his features, yet left their shadowy markings to hint the passions and the history of an extraordinary life” (p. 319). “… the same wild and indescribable character still distinguished his air …” (p. 356). “… the intermediate part of his countenance, receiving the full glare of the torch, displayed all its speaking and terrific lines” (p. 396).

Note 13 The double surface of the memory trace in psychoanalytic thought is closely analogous to this particular contagion. See Freud's “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,‘ ” Complete Psychological Works, xix, 227–32, and, among many recent writings on the subject, Nicolas Abraham's especially relevant “The Shell and the Kernel,” trans. Nicholas Rand, Diacritics, 9, No. 1 (1979), 16–28, esp. p. 24.

Note 14 How casual the slippage between surface and depth can be—that is, how readily a third dimension can be assimilated to the notion of “surface”—appears in the odd solution to a persistent mystery in Udolpho. How have invisible strangers infiltrated Chateau-le-Blanc? How do they manage to be just where the family are not and to carry off the servants? Where do they keep themselves? A thorough, absolute search of the chateau reveals nothing. Finally a returned servant reveals that he was snatched away through a door concealed behind an arras.

“This door surprises me,” said Emily, “because I understood, that the Count had caused the arras to be lifted, and the walls examined, suspecting, that they might have concealed a passage through which you had departed.”

“It does not appear so extraordinary to me, madam,” replied Ludovico, “that this door should escape notice, because it was formed in a narrow compartment, which appeared to be part of the outward wall, and, if the Count had not passed over it, he might have thought it was useless to search for a door where it seemed as if no passage could communicate with one; but the truth was, that the passage was formed within the wall itself.” (p. 632)

Indeed, the chateau turns out to be riddled with passages, all masquerading indetectably as walls.

Note 15 John Berryman, Introd., The Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis, ed. Louis F. Peck (New York: Grove, 1959), p. 16.

Note 16 For instance, Antonia, like Ambrosio, at the beginning of The Monk, “knows not in what consists the difference of Man and Woman” (p. 17; comedy about this, in which her aunt, in preaching ignorance, almost spills the beans, follows on p. 18); and her mother cannot warn her to resist Ambrosio's liberties (Antonia has no idea what a liberty is) “lest in removing the bandage of ignorance, the veil of innocence should be rent away” (p. 264). As we have seen, this careful differentiation between bandage and veil proves factitious.

Note 17 The pendant shares some traits with the Lacanian “phallus” (distinct from the penis): it circulates among men and women, it leads to definition within a larger symbolic system, its relation to the body is confusingly both metonymie and metaphoric. But see n. 18 for a problem this identification suggests.

Note 18 This “halfway toward” locus shares some traits with Lacan's realm of the Imaginary, which originates in a “mirror stage” and allows bipolar oppositions to be described psychologically in terms of a fixation at the stage of ocular confrontation. See, for instance, in English, Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self, ed. and trans. Anthony Wilden (New York: Dell, 1968), specifically Wilden's essay (pp. 159–77). But the identification of the pendant, the mirror image, with the phallus, and hence with the entry into the Symbolic system, creates a problem for the Lacanian terms, which define the Symbolic by differentiating it from the Imaginary. We have in the Gothic both a form of language that is arrested at the mirror stage and a mirror object that circulates like language in the realm of the Symbolic. Nor is the Gothic unique in displaying these anomalies.

Note 19 Lacan, to the contrary, apparently sees the inauguration of language, or the Symbolic function, as guaranteeing freedom rather than imposing fixation. Thus, the identification here of the hieroglyphic imposition with fixation itself is, in terms of the polemical background of this essay, a confirmation of the firm links Derrida and others have drawn between, precisely, writing and the uncanny.

Note 20 “Sketching from Nature,” The Elements of Drawing, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), xv, 117.

Note 21 Hannah More, “David and Goliath,” Sacred Dramas (Philadelphia: Edward Earle, 1818), p. 45. Quoted in Udolpho, p. 464.

Note 22 Joshua Wilner, to whose reflections I am indebted in this section, suggested to me in a conversation that the tripolarity of color tends to be sublated to the bipolarity presence/absence because the latter is complicit with a wish to see the self and specifically the will as unitary and integral. See below and esp. n. 24 for some related imagery in Kant.

Note 23 Examples: Laurentini in Udolpho, esp. p. 646, and Ambrosio repeatedly in The Monk, esp. pp. 304, 387. Even the final satisfactions of sympathetic—i.e., moderate—characters tend to be closer to anesthesia than to consummation. The fate of The Monk's four successful young lovers, for instance, is announced in these numb lines: “The exquisite sorrows with which they had been afflicted, made them think lightly of every succeeding woe. They had felt the sharpest darts in misfortune's quiver; Those which remained appeared blunt in comparison. Having weathered Fate's heaviest Storms, they looked calmly upon its terrors: or if ever they felt Affliction's casual gales, they seemed to them gentle as Zephyrs, which breathe over summer-seas” (P. 420).

Note 24 Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: Analytic of the Beautiful,” Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1968), Sec. 14, p. 61. The transumption is, however, an imperfect resolution of the play between form and color, to the extent that color can be viewed as a subversive and possibly a malignant or an imperialistic part of the whole: “So far are [charms] from adding to beauty that they must be admitted by indulgence as aliens.” It is the incorporative body that warily “admits aliens” that must, as in Wilner's formulation, insist on mobilizing them, even if factitiously, against a single, distinctively formal enemy.

Note 25 Neil Hertz gives an account of this grouping and its implications in “Freud and the Sandman,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism, ed. Josue Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 299–302. The main Freud passages he brings together are from Civilization and Its Discontents, Complete Psychological Works (hereafter CPW), xxi, 120; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, CPW, xviii, 60; and “The Uncanny,” CPW, xvii, 238. Jean Laplanche's Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), contains a further careful, challenging assessment of the opposition in Freud's later theory between the death drive and the other drives, concluding that “the death drive does not possess its own energy. Its energy is libido. Or, better put, the death drive is the very soul, the constitutive principle, of libidinal circulation” (p. 124).

Note 28 Here is a small example of how the structure of “looking for conventions” determines the content of what will be found. When one reads The Italian with close attention to faces, one keeps encountering the word “fixed”: “There was something in his physiognomy extremely singular, and that can not easily be defined. It bore the traces of many passions, which seemed to have fixed the features they no longer animated” (p. 35). “… his features were fixed in an expression at once severe and crafty” (p 48). “… habitual discontent had fixed the furrows of their cheeks” (p. 62). “… he yielded, though reluctantly, to the awe which, at intervals, returned upon him with the force of a magical spell, binding up all his faculties to sternness, and fixing them in expectation” (p. 71). “… a dreadful foreboding of their own destiny fixed them …” (p. 76). “… a fixedness in her look …” (p. 86). “… [Olivia's eyes] were often fixed upon her face …” (p. 91). “He … had contributed, by his artful instigations, to fix the baleful resolution of the Marchesa …” (p. 223). “The person who discovered Schedoni, would not have recollected him, had not his remarkable eyes first fixed his attention, and then revived remembrance” (p. 226). “… his look and fixed attitude terrified her …” (p. 247). “… the gleam of spirit and of character that had returned to his eyes, was departed, and left them haggard and fixed …” (p. 404; other instances include pp. 75, 87, 91, two on 104, 105, two on 236, and 237).

Everything makes it easy to perceive this particular repeated semantic choice as conventional—as fixed, like a game of chance, if not fixated, like a neurotic. It wears its name blazoned on it; its subject is usually, like its structure as convention, repeated reinscription; the meaning “ocular domination” itself comes by repetition to dominate other meanings of “fix”; and from the (inevitably retroactive) identification of fixity as convention, certain inferences, including those in this essay, can be “read” (written) back into Ann Rad-cliffe's novel. What is left out? First, in many of its occurrences, “fixed” appears as part of an antithetical pair, but its opposite number varies according to context: “animated,” “recovered,” “revived,” “convulsed,” etc. (pp. 35, 76, 226, 247). These different words, though they have a strong bond of meaning, do not come to look conventional, and neither does their relation to that conventional “fixed,” because the relations differ: sometimes the other term leads to fixation, sometimes it succeeds it, sometimes it struggles against it. Second, even that word “fix” has different content in different places—the “fixed”-ness that follows death (p. 404) is the opposite of “a fixedness in her look, too energetic for common suffering” (p. 86)—and it is from the difference of the meanings this word dominates (fixes) that we know it is a convention. Third, “to fix” is a transitive verb, but focusing on it as something repeated tends to suppress its function as something circulated. The basilisk properties of eye, like so many other properties, move from character to character (see, e.g., p. 236), but the dynamics and economics of the exchange are not properly conventional.

Note 27 Brontë, Villette (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1911), ii, 9–10.