THE GOTHIC CONSENSUS

What is there left to say about the Gothic novel's shopworn images of clerical abuse – the forced confessions and tortures of the Inquisition, the confinements and seductions in convents and monasteries? Some time ago, Montague Summers made an effort to stifle idle speculations about their meaning by arguing that they are mere “absurdities,” and that “it is folly to trace any ‘anti-Roman feeling’ in the Gothic novel.” That advice, however, has hardly dissuaded other critics from rounding up any number of political referents for those supposed absurdities: in many such accounts the Gothic wields its images of monastic terror to figure its fear of revolutionary upheaval or its mirror-image, oppressive authoritarianism; the remedy to that fear is a typically British “moderation,” perhaps, or “repression,” or “ideology.” These alternatives do not, of course, add up to a summary of the criticism of the Gothic. Yet they do indicate the ways in which advances in historicist criticism, by viewing the genre primarily as a way of distinguishing one society from another – Britain from the continent (France, say, or Spain), the free from the oppressed – essentially see it as a means of establishing social consensus. On a model familiar to us from the likes of Freud, René Girard, or Clifford Geertz, the Gothic functions within the realm of ritual, wherein the novel represents and reinforces a set of common beliefs, and conveniently (albeit suspiciously) sounds an alarm against a host of social outcasts.