Romantic Gothic by Angela Wright Dale Townshend

Romantic Gothic by Angela Wright Dale Townshend

Author:Angela Wright,Dale Townshend
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press


The Gothic Quixote

James Gillray’s 1802 cartoon Tales of Wonder! depicts a group of ladies listening with rapt attention as one reads aloud from a copy of The Monk. The focal point of the image is a large woman with white hair who stares out from the centre of the composition, her features distorted comically in an expression of extreme horror (Fig. 10.1).

Figure 10.1 Tales of Wonder! Print by James Gillray. Published by Hannah Humphrey in London, 1802. © Trustees of the British Museum.

As the parodies by R. S., Esq., Du Bois and Lucas suggest, however, much of the horror generated by Gothic literature appears to have come from moralists and conservative critics rather than from readers themselves. Concerns about Gothic’s harmful influence on susceptible readers found expression in a large class of Gothic parodies modelled after Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) and other works in the anti-Romance tradition. ‘Gothic Quixote’ tales include Bullock’s Susanna; Eliza Parsons’s Anecdotes of Two Well-Known Families (1798); Patrick’s More Ghosts! (1798); Mary Charlton’s Rosella; or, Modern Occurrences (1799); Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Angelina’ (1801); Sarah Green’s Romance Readers and Romance Writers (1810); Ircastrensis’s Love and Horror (1812); Barrett’s The Heroine (1813); Bellin de la Liborlière’s The Hero (1813); and Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). In these parodies, depictions of deluded readers are used to expose Gothic’s lack of realism and simultaneously to dramatise a range of social concerns.

One of the earliest and best tales of Gothic Quixotism is The Hero (1799; English edition, 1817) by French author Bellin de la Liborlière. The ‘hero’ is Mr Dob, an addict of English Gothic novels, whose son stages a series of hair-raising adventures for him, which are taken directly from Dob’s favourite books. As previously noted, the work parodies the conventionality of Gothic narrative; however, it is also an example of class satire. Bellin de la Liborlière was an ousted aristocrat, and through his portrayal of the affluent tradesman, Dob, he satirises the oligarchy of nouveau riche that came into power during the French Revolution. The delight that Dob takes in fictional terrors suggests his complacency towards real atrocities. Literary satire and social satire intermingle in this work.

Ircastrensis’s Love and Horror features two Quixotes, Thomas Bailey and Annabella Tit, and targets two schools of Gothic, sensational and sentimental. Thomas’s adventures are taken from the pages of German Schauerroman. Moreover, like Scythrop Glowry in Nightmare Abbey, Thomas is a parody of the tormented heroes of the Sturm und Drang tradition. Ircastrensis uses his character to poke fun at what Peacock later termed the ‘morbidities of modern literature’ (Peacock 1818: 152). Annabella’s adventures are taken from the Gothic romances of Radcliffe and Regina Maria Roche. Ircastrensis parodies Radcliffe’s female protagonists through Annabella’s acute sensibility and artistic temperament. Among her other talents, Annabella is highly proficient at playing a musical instrument of ‘high antiquity’ – ‘the Jews’ harp’: ‘[she] had acquired such skill in this instrument, that, if she played in the fields, the cows and horses crowded around her’ (Ircastrensis 2008: 27).



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.