The Gothic Literary TraditionMy efforts to establish some kind of working definition of Gothic literature as a genre proved somewhat daunting as the conventions that may be termed "gothic" have changed and evolved over the 200+ years since Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Recent literary scholarship, what Bette B. Roberts calls "an explosion of critical interest in the Gothic beginning in the late 1970's" (14), has led to a reevaluation of Gothic literature based on a variety of approaches including feminist, marxist, psychoanalytical, reader-response, and cultural literary analyses. But as many of these critics attest, this wealth of new scholarship has only served to reveal how varied and complex the gothic tradition is, rendering a hard and fast definition even more elusive. Nevertheless, many of these same critics do eventually settle on a general notion of the gothic that, despite differing critical approaches, reveal remarkably similar themes. Elizabeth MacAndrew emphasizes the psychoanalytic in claiming that "Gothic fiction is a literature of nightmare...[which] gives shape to concepts of the place of evil in the human mind" (3). Anne Williams argues that the Gothic "systematically represents 'otherness,'" the center of which is "the female, the most powerful and persistent 'other' of Western culture" (18-9). Rosemary Jackson summarizes a marxist view of the Gothic as "a reaction to historical events, particularly to the spread of industrialization and urbanization. It is a complex form situated on the edges of bourgeois culture, functioning in a dialogical relation to that culture" (96). Finally David Punter, who also takes a marxist approach, lists characteristics of the genre as "a particular attitude towards the recapture of history; a particular kind of literary style; a version of self-conscious un-realism; a mode of revealing the unconscious; connexions with the primitive, the barbaric, the tabooed..." (5). The difficulty seems to be that the Gothic can be said to be all these things and more, yet the common theme of all these definitions, that the Gothic is a symbolic site of unconscious or repressed cultural fears and desires, provides a definitional foundation on which I will build my analysis of Anne Rice's popular Gothic novel, The Vampire Lestat. Before proceeding with the analysis of the novel, I want to briefly discuss the conventions and history of Gothic literature. The Gothic conventions of setting, plot, and character have both retained a remarkable cultural resiliency while also evolving over time. The old house or haunted castle, central to early Gothic as a representation of the unconscious mind, and the landscape of the storming Nature of the pathetic fallacy that it stands in, can be represented in a variety of ways in modern Gothic as long as the setting is a closed world that possesses the same qualities of isolation, mystery, and claustrophobia (Williams, 39). Likewise the beleaguered heroines and brooding, tormented villains of early Gothic have evolved from stereotypical figures into a wide range of characters that nevertheless must confront and battle with either external or internalized representations of evil, the unknown, or the grotesque. In general, the themes of evil and chaos have moved from being represented as external and objective in the early Gothic of the 18th century to increasingly subjective and psychological representations throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries. However, the fact that representations of evil and the grotesque still take the supernatural forms of ghosts, phantoms, or monsters says much about the value these figures still have in the popular imagination. Rice's novel continues in this tradition in that she sets her scenes in medieval castles and towers, in crypts and graveyards, as well as in public spaces and modern cities. The closed world of The Vampire Lestat centers around Lestat and his relationships with other vampires. And of course, once Lestat becomes a vampire, one of the prototypical Gothic monsters, the novel's remaining action takes place only at night, the sense of prevailing darkness serving to evoke an atmosphere centered around that which is mysterious and hidden. Besides being a monster Lestat is also the epitome of MacAndrew's idea of a classic Gothic villain: He has a "twisted nature...full of unnatural lusts and passions [but] suffers the torments of the damned while committing his nefarious deeds" (82). In addition, many Gothic classics are often mediated: The narrator of The Castle of Otranto claims to have found the manuscript of the tale he's relating, the character of Robert Walton mediates the story of Frankenstein, and Jonathan Harker mediates between the reader's world and the Gothic universe of Dracula. Although The Vampire Lestat utilizes this device in that there is a frame story situated in the present by which Lestat recounts his biography beginning in the 18th century to the present, Lestat simply mediates his own story for the reader, even though it is to repudiate Louis' prior mediated tale in Interview with the Vampire. But the ambiguity of Lestat's story is present from the outset since the reader must decide what kind of credence to give a 'realistic' account of Lestat's life related by a narrator whom the reader knows to be a creature of imagination. This is only one of the ways in which The Vampire Lestat both draws on traditional Gothic conventions while attempting to dissolve the barriers between the reader and fictional world and between the hero and the monster. These Gothic conventions are employed to convey a number of themes. G. R. Thompson argues that in an age without religious faith Gothic themes represent "the drama of the mind engaged in the quest for metaphysical and moral absolutes in a world that offers shadowy semblances of an occult order but withholds final revelation and illumination" (6); he contends that both the gloomy settings and "preternatural machinery" of the Gothic help to stimulate a sense of the numinous in the reader, the sensation of which is not necessarily tied to the moral or religious (19). This idea is closely tied to the "sublime." MacAndrew explains that the sublime was an important aesthetic concept throughout the 18th century which proposed that "certain physical phenomena or human actions are the means of creating a sublime effect-tall cliffs, vast seas, dire chasms, noble deeds. Sight and sounds of great magnitude fill the mind with wonder and amazement. If an idea of danger is involved, the result will be a terror that is pleasing because the reader knows he is himself safe" (40). But Ann Radcliffe, one of the two best known Gothic writers of the 18th century, distinguished between terror and horror. Terror and the sublime correspond to the optimistic view that sees man as good and regards evil as the consequence of environment, whereas horror and the grotesque see man's evil as inherent and inexplicable (MacAndrew, 124-5). There's little doubt that The Vampire Lestat partakes of the second view. Lestat is a monster who survives by murdering humans, yet gains the reader's sympathies because he deplores what he is and agonizes over how to become a "good" vampire; he is a killer with a conscience. As already mentioned, Lestat's dilemma also evokes the theme of dualism or the double: He is both the hero and the monster, the demonic is generated from within. Finally, as many of the classic Gothic tales of the 1890's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,Island of Dr. Moreau, and of course, Dracula also demonstrate, The Vampire Lestat is concerned in one way or another with the problem of degeneration, "and thus of the essence of the human" (Punter, 239). Death and decay and how one retains one's humanity in spite of them are dealt with throughout the novel, both in the sense that Lestat is himself no longer human but is still conscious, functional and capable of learning from his experiences, and in the sense that he is the instrument of death for his human victims. Yet despite a vampire's ability to survive for centuries, the reader learns that vampires can also be killed or the oldest ones will often commit suicide, chiefly out of the sheer weariness and despair of living too long. |
