Margarita Dadykina: Cathy's Ghost (2019)
Sculpted figure (58 x 20 cm)
I.
Sometimes, a literary genre and a theoretical framework can become so inextricably entwined that it is difficult to discuss the one without reference to the other. Thus it is, for example, that next month sees the publication of a new collection of essays exploring the gothic from a queer perspective [1].
This notion of the queer gothic was one that I dipped in-and-out of over ten years ago, producing three papers presented at Treadwell's Bookshop; the first on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); the second on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850); and the third on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) [2].
Anyway, in anticipation of the Edinburgh Companion, here are some remarks I made back in 2014 in an attempt to (loosely) define what I understood by gothic queerness (as well as related terms, including the uncanny and the perverse) ...
II.
My concern with the gothic relates to a form of fiction that emerges during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I'm not concerned with Germanic tribes migrating about early Europe causing trouble for the Romans, or spiky-forms of medieval architecture (even if the ruins of the latter often provide a setting for many a gothic tale).
Primarily, then, it's to a bizarre, yet, in some ways, rather conventional literary genre I refer when I use the term gothic, whilst happily acknowledging that elements of this have infected many other cultural forms and fields of inquiry, including queer studies.
Indeed, such is the level of intimacy between queer studies and gothic studies that many scholars promiscuously drift back and forth from discussing the politics of desire, gender and sexual nonconformity to issues within hauntology and demonology.
Obviously, this is facilitated by the fact that not only do gothic fictions and queer theories have common obsessions, but they often rely on a shared language of transgression to explore ideas. It has even been suggested that the gothic imaginatively enables queer and provides an important historical model of queer politics and thinking [3].
We can certainly never overestimate the role that gothic fiction played in the unfolding history of sexuality. For not only does it anticipate the later codification and deployment of sexualities, but it also participates in what Foucault terms the perverse implantation of these new forms of subjectivity [4].
If it is generally accepted that Horace Walpole's Castle of Ortanto is the first gothic novel - published in 1764 - it is also usually agreed that by the publication of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820, the popular craze for gothic fiction had already peaked.
Nevertheless, the genre continued to flourish and mutate at the margins of more respectable literature in the decades that followed. Indeed, many of the works now most commonly associated with it were written in the late-Victorian period: this includes Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897).
However, whilst slowly changing in form, content, and setting over the years, many things remained the same within the gothic text to the point of cliché; not least of all the continued narrative fascination for perverse sexual practices and abnormal individuals. In this, it is similar to pornography. Both types of writing share a compulsive and "seemingly inexhaustible ability to return again and again to common tropes and similar situations" [5].
Indeed, some critics argue that, like pornography, gothic fiction might ultimately serve a conservative function in that it perpetuates stereotypes and thus ultimately re-inscribes the status quo. And it's true that gothic tales often conclude with the moral order restored and reason triumphant (though rarely with a happy ending). However, at the same time, gothic horror seems to possess an uncanny ability to pass "beyond the limits of its own structural 'meaning'" and in this manner transform "the structure of meaning itself" [6].
And so, whilst gothic literature might often be predictable, it's never boring. It constantly opens up new worlds of knowledge and provides an opportunity to explore the pleasures of socio-erotic transgression; incest, rape, and same-sex desire are all familiar themes within the genre, not to mention paedophilia, necrophilia, and spectrophilia.
Arguably, Sade takes things furthest in his One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (written in 1785, but not published until 1904), his masterpiece of torture-porn often described as a gothic novel, even though the Divine Marquis himself rejected the term on the grounds that there was nothing supernatural about the horror and sexual violence in his books [7].
So, to conclude this briefest of brief introductions to the gothic, let me make clear that what excites about the genre is not that it simply causes gender trouble or allows for things to go bump in the night. More than this, it challenges (and in some cases overturns) many of our ideas about what it is to be human - and, indeed, of how to be human. This gives it broader philosophical importance than those who sneer at ghosts and ghouls might appreciate.
And if, at times, gothic fiction fails as art due to its overreliance on sensational and supernatural elements, it nevertheless more often than not succeeds as a form of resistance to conventional thinking and the heteronormative status quo. And it is this, as indicated, which qualifies it as queer [8].
And what do I mean by queer?
Well, let me stress that I'm certainly not using the term queer or the concept of queerness as synonymous with either homosexuality or gayness [9]. Indeed, I vigorously object to those who conflate ideas in this manner and use queer as an overarching and unifying label for what are distinct forms of practice, behaviour and identity (often with nothing queer about them).
For me, the appeal of queerness is twofold:
Firstly, it is not a positivity or subject position. It's a transpositional negativity - i.e., a mobile and ambiguous concept that resists any fixed categorical definition and remains permanently at odds with all forms of legitimacy and identity. Queer, ultimately, doesn't refer to anyone or anything; it's a form of non-being "utterly inimical to [...] authentic existence, ontological or natural" [10].
Secondly, it subsumes and dissolves all forms of dualism; not only sexual and gender oppositions, but also that model of thinking which would keep life and death as absolutely distinct and separate categories. Ultimately, it's this thanatological project that I most wish to further, even if that involves unfolding it within a spooky sexual context. This project, which is both morbid and material, picks up on Nietzsche's contention that life isn't categorically different from or opposed to death; that being alive is, in fact, simply a rare and unusually complex way of being dead [11].
Death, we might say, is the material kingdom of the actual and vital signs, although real, are but an epiphenomenal effect of matter. Or, to put it another way, life is a momentary stabilization of solar energy that upon death is released from its molar entrapment back into unformed chaos and an infinite process of molecular disintegration [12]. This becomes important when arguing that there can't really be any serious philosophical objections to romancing corpses or getting it on with ghosts - even whilst there may well be legitimate moral, social, and cultural reservations.
Moving on, we must of course mention the perverse ...
The perverse might be thought of as a more aggressive and transgressive form of queerness; one that takes us to the very heart of a game involving desire, deviation, and damnation. Historically, perversion is tied to political insurrection and involves straying or being diverted from a path, destiny, or objective which is understood as natural or right. To those who live their whole lives on the straight and narrow it is obviously an abhorrent concept. But, personally, I think it’s a good thing to stray off the path; just as it's preferable to fall into sin, rather than fall into line [13].
Figures like Heathcliff or Dorian Gray are irresistibly drawn towards the perverse. Which is to say they are intellectually predisposed towards evil and that which is unnatural or anti-natural. The former, for example, knowingly engages in practices such as necrophilia and spectrophilia. And there's the rub; Heathcliff is fully aware of what he's doing and what he wants to do. It's the perversion of free will that leads to transgression, says Augustine. And it is transgression that brings death into the world.
But it is also that which brings understanding and gives pleasure and we should never forget or underestimate the pleasure of perversion. As Freud was led to conclude, it's the perversions alone that ultimately make happy [14].
Finally, there's one more term which we simply must mention; one made famous by Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche ...
The uncanny is, arguably, also a form of queerness. But in designating the sinister, gruesome, and lugubrious it moves beyond sexual strangeness and gender troubling. The uncanny is more likely to give us the creeps than excite our desire. Wuthering Heights is, for me at least, the greatest of all uncanny novels; familiar, yet alien, seductive, yet repulsive; a book in which even the mortal status of the lovers is never fixed.
Notes
[1] Queer Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Ardel Haefele-Thomas, (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
There seems to be some interesting material in this 368 page book divided into three main sections - Queer Times, Queer Monsters, and Queer Forms - although, having said that, it does seem slightly old hat (though maybe I'm just miffed that I wasn't invited to contribute to the book).
[2] 'Elements of Gothic Queerness in The Picture of Dorian Gray' was presented at Treadwell's on 18 May, 2011. This was followed by 'The Scarlet Letter: An Earthly Story with a Hellish Meaning' on 4 July, 2013 (advertised as 'A Slice of American Gothic for American Independence Day').
As for the paper entitled 'Spectrophilia and Other Queer Goings On in the Tale of Wuthering Heights', this was due to be presented at Treadwell's on 7 October, 2014, but unfortunately had to be cancelled due to unforeseen (and unrecalled) circumstances.
Together, these essays formed part of a wider project to do with perverse materialism.
[3] See George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, (University of Illinois Press, 2006).
[4] See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998).
[5] George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic, p. 9.
[6] Ibid., p. 10.
[7] Sade did admire at least one gothic novel, namely Matthew Gregory’s The Monk: A Romance (1796), a work in which every attempt was made to outrage readers in as many explicit, violent, and perverse ways as possible.
[8] I don't want to overstate the case or make too wide a claim here. Haggerty is right to carefully resist the temptation to uncritically celebrate the gothic and its literary-cultural significance. As he points out, the genre was always somewhat marginal and semi-legitimate and never succeeded in challenging the dominant mainstream fiction of the age, which remained rigidly straight and heteronormative.
Also, if it provided alternative (queerer) ways to think through the politics of desire, it was ultimately powerless to prevent the "imposition of sexological thinking at the end of the nineteenth century". At best, the gothic continued to cast a shadow across the bright new world of scientia sexualis. See Queer Gothic, p. 19.
[9] Elisa Glick is a Marxist critic guilty of this; see p. 11 of her book Materializing Queer Desire (SUNY Press, 2009), where she rather weakly explains her reasons for wanting to employ (and I would say misuse) the term queer synonymously with gay, lesbian, and homosexual.
[10] Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 140.
I’m tempted, in fact, to drop the term queer altogether here and use instead a notion of the uncanny, which is closely related but without the sexual overtones.
[11] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), III. 109, p. 168.
[12] Those who attended Treadwell's regularly in 2006 will perhaps remember my six week course on thanatology in which these ideas were discussed in detail and at length. The work can be found in The Treadwell’s Papers, Vol. II, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010).
[13] Even such a trite and common expression as the straight and narrow - thought of as the one true path into the future - reveals something crucial about Western metaphysical thinking; note the linkage of truth with linearity and teleology. People think they are strolling along this path naturally or by choice, but in fact they march along it by arrangement and coercion.
[14] Freud made the attainment of (non-functional, non-reproductive) pleasure central to his theory of perversion and stressed that it is the perversions that make happy; their repression which causes suffering and neuroses. Freud also understands that this is why many normal individuals strongly dislike queers who dare to manifest and flaunt their perversity; not only do they find them monstrous and threatening, but also seductive and this places them in the uncomfortable position of having to overcome a secret envy of those who enjoy illicit pleasures.
Note too how Freud compares the perversions to the grotesque demons used to illustrate the temptation of the saints. This is precisely how such images and descriptions continue to function within gothic literature; i.e. as uncanny manifestations and queer embodiments of the perverse; a threatening excess of difference and deformity. See his Three Essays on the Theory of Human Sexuality, (1905).
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