A Marxist View of the Rise of the GothicA brief examination of the history of the Gothic also seems important in that the conditions that gave rise to its emergence might also shed light on the reasons for its continued popularity today. What conditions existed in 18th century England that might have helped precipitate the birth of the Gothic novel? Punter explains that during the course of the 18th century, a greater significance began to be placed on the historical and the term 'Gothic," (taken from the name of one of Europe's northern tribes, the Goths) became descriptive of things medieval, medieval architecture at first but in time referring to all things preceding the mid-1700's (5). Thus, it was used in opposition to the classical. The 'classical' concerns of the enlightenment were well ordered, rational, simple, pure and elegant; the Gothic was chaotic, ornate and convoluted, pagan, archaic, and barbaric. Yet at some point in the century, probably as part of the Romanticist movement, a huge cultural shift took place and the primitive and wild "became invested with positive value in and for itself" (Punter, 6). The Gothic also emerges around the same time as the 'realistic' novel form itself which is generally viewed as a middle-class literary form that emphasizes individualism, reason, and progress. Such were the values espoused by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and David Hume who believed that the passions and emotions must also be controlled by reason (Punter, 27). But the Gothic, like Romanticism, arose in direct opposition to these values and are twin revolts "against a mechanistic or atomistic view of the world and relations, in favour of recovering an earlier organic model" (Kilgour, 11). Indeed, many of the great Romantic writers like Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats were both influenced by the Gothic and played a part in shaping it, especially in their uses of the three symbolic figures of "the wanderer, the vampire, and the seeker after forbidden knowledge" (Punter, 99). As I will explore later, the character of Lestat actually draws on all three of these figures. Yet whereas Romantic reactions to social conditions ranged from triumphant affirmation of organicism to bitter despair, Romanticism in general professed faith in humanity's ability to transcend or transform its conditions, either practically or imaginatively; the Gothic professed no such hopes and instead envisioned humanity trapped in darkness and misery, and doomed to explore ugliness, evil, and perversion (Thompson, 111-2). But the moral and emotional ambiguity and search for meaning that more strongly characterize the modern Gothic enable characters like Lestat to work through evil and darkness to arrive at a personal moral code that can help him attain some sort of victory. From a marxist perspective, the rise of the Gothic has much to do with the economic conditions and class developments of the time. The Gothic emerges at a stage of class relations in which the bourgeoisie, having gained social power, began to try to understand the history of their own ascent. Thus, the bourgeoisie were interested in literature that recaptured history in patterns that helped explain present conditions (Punter, 127). In addition the patterns of labor and production were changing. The rise of industry and increased urbanization which heralded the emergence of "a middle-class-dominated capitalist economy" set up a world in which older patterns of labor, tied to the seasons and simple laws of exchange, became increasingly irrelevant. "The individual comes to see himself at the mercy of forces which in fundamental ways elude his understanding" (Punter, 128). Thus, the rise of a literature that emphasizes paranoia, mystery, anxiety, the inexplicable, the irrational and the taboo is hardly surprising. And given that these structures of labor and production have only intensified, indeed helped engender, the modern sense of cultural fragmentation and alienation, the continued popularity of the Gothic and its central symbols and themes is understandable. Viewed in this way, Gothic literature would indeed seem to function as a public dream (or nightmare), as a process of cultural self-analysis, representing the real world in an inverted form, "or representing those areas of the world and of consciousness which are, for one reason or another, not available to the normal processes of representation" (Punter, 18). This definition seems to confirm Freud's theory of "the uncanny." In an essay in 1919 Freud explained that "the uncanny...is doubtless related to what is frightening-to what arouses dread and horror...it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general" (219). Rosemary Jackson elaborates that Freud also read "the uncanny as the effect of projecting unconscious desires and fears into the environment and on to other people. Frightening scenes of uncanny literature are produced by hidden anxieties concealed within the subject, who then interprets the world in terms of his or her apprehensions" (64-5). Freud's theory provides a basic framework for psychoanalytic readings of Gothic literature. The themes and plot devices of Gothic narrative, along with the terror and horror they stimulate, aim to inspire the experience of "the uncanny" in the reader by which he reconnects with his primary desires and primal fears and anxieties. The Vampire Lestat explores these universal and primal themes of death, desire, and community, and most importantly, the process by which one constructs meaning, by defamiliarizing the familiar through the figure of Lestat who is both mortal and immortal, sympathetic and horrific, specific and symbolic. Thus, Rice's novel, like all Gothic fiction, "symbolizes the unresolvable, shifting, but perpetual paradox of human nature" (MacAndrew, 250). But Gothic narratives also often rely on the tension between the desire to prolong the pleasurable experience of suspense and a desire to unveil the plot's mysteries; the deferment of revelation becomes the focus. Thus, rather than providing a direct vision of cultural fears and aspirations, the Gothic often explores the modes of repression and the psychological distortions that result; it "seems to both represent and punish the imaginations' power to realize its own desires" (Kilgour, 8). Yet the continuous "oscillation between reassurance and threat" is what Punter calls "the central dialectic of Gothic fiction" (423) in that it represents the contradictions inherent to the bourgeoisie. The rational governance of the capitalist state based on an ideology of individual achievement is disrupted by the results of this selfsame state's structure: a prevailing inequality, injustice, and exploitation which stymies such achievement. Just as Lestat attempts to reconcile the contradictions between his 'human' need for love and his 'inhuman' need for blood, Gothic literature as a whole is a symbolic site where our culture wrestles with contradictions sometimes, as in the case of Rice's novel, in a rather rational and highly philosophical way. |
