Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age: The Penetrating Eye

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Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age The Penetrating Eye

Max Fincher

Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age

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Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age The Penetrating Eye Max Fincher

© Max Fincher 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230003477 hardback ISBN-10: 0230003478 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction Gender and Gothic Sexuality Queering Gothic writing

1 2 7 12

1 Reading the Gaze: A Culture of Vigilance Horace Walpole William Beckford Matthew Lewis

23 24 30 39

2 Guessing the Mould: Or, The Castle of Otranto?

45

3 Vathek and the Monstrous Queer

65

4 Camping in the Monastery: The Monk

87

5 Caleb Williams and the Queer Sublime

110

6 Penetrating Eye(s): Lara, The Giaour, The Vampyre Feeding the vampire: Polidori and The Vampyre Penetrating eye(s): Lara and The Giaour

131 137 145

Conclusion

157

Notes

164

Works Cited

193

Index

202

v

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Judith Hawley, Sophie Gil-Martin and Robert Eaglestone at Royal Holloway, University of London, whose initial enthusiasm for my idea of the project as a PhD thesis, back in 1998, now seems like such a long time ago. This book would not have been possible without Clare Brant at King’s College London. Without her understanding, superb knowledge of eighteenth-century literature and culture, and tireless reading of drafts, the book would not have reached its present stage. I would also like to thank the support and advice of others at King’s College London, especially John Stokes, Bob Mills and, in particular, Mark Turner, whose advice on the many ways one can be queer was invaluable. Thanks are also due to Lucie Sutherland, Alison Stenton, Ralph Parfect, Lucy Munro, Fiona Ritchie, Anita Gnagnetti, Lola Cary, Jennifer Walters, Philippa Wilmott, Sarah Darby, Sharon Atkins, Donna Easterbrook, David Morris/Celia Pudwell and Simon Avery, all of whose friendship and enthusiasm for the project helped to keep me going. Thanks are also due to Matthew Bell, Lauren Fitzgerald, Frances Chiu, George Haggerty, Netta Murray Goldsmith, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, James D. Steakley, Matthew O’Rourke and William Hughes for reading drafts of chapters, giving advice, or providing leads for research which were invaluable. Finally I would like to thank my family, particularly my parents, who have endured my obsession with all things Gothic over the years and whose financial support and love has enabled me to complete the book. A version of parts of Chapters 1, 2 and 3 appeared as ‘Guessing the Mould: Homosocial Sins and Identity in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto’, Gothic Studies 3/3 (2001): 229–245. A version of Chapter 4 will appear as a forthcoming article in Romanticism on The Net, ‘The Gothic as Camp: Queer Aesthetics in The Monk’.

vi

Introduction

When I was 10 or 11 years old, I wanted to be a witch. As soon as the nights began to get dark and frosty with the leaves turning various shades of red, I would get excited at the prospect of dressing up for one special night of the year, Halloween, to be a witch. I did not want to be a warlock. I wanted to be a real, classic witch like I had seen in The Wizard of Oz and read about in the books by Jill Murphy at school.1 I persuaded my mother to buy me eyeliner and lipstick to complete the transformation with a black pointed hat and cape, a broomstick, green foundation and the ugliest set of nail extensions I could find. A group of my friends and I would then roam the surburban streets (with my mother always supervising). Those who were amused or kind gave us sweets, those who were irritated or exhausted just did not get up to answer the door, and those who were terrified, the devout Christians, opened the door and told us we would go to hell. It was all great fun. But I was told by some of my peers that I could not be a witch. I was not allowed to be a witch. I was a boy and how could a boy be a witch when girls were witches? Unless you were gay of course which might explain it, nominally at least. I had no concept of what being ‘gay’ meant when I was first called gay. Looking back now, my subsequent interest in ghost stories, horror films and later Gothic probably stemmed from an identification with the witch as a transgressive outsider figure, one that I can now see we might describe as queer. The witch is a figure that combines both masculine and feminine traits. My performance as a witch, cross-dressing and making up, had nothing to do with desiring men – that happened not long afterwards. But it was queer. This book aims to queer Gothic writing in the Romantic Age, taking as its starting point the 1760s with The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole through to poetry by Byron and the first vampire story by 1

2


John Polidori.2 Although Walpole’s novel may seem an early starting point for some to describe the beginning of the Romantic Age, the novel did mark a pronounced shift in reading tastes that can be broadly defined as Romantic in the sense of presenting us with a fantastic historical past with the interest in the supernatural. The introduction is divided into three broad topics with significant weighting given to the last two: gender and Gothic, sexuality and queering Gothic writing. Recognizing the Gothic as queer takes us to a new point in rereading (or more accurately, revisioning) these texts and critical approaches to them.

Gender and Gothic Undoubtedly, feminist criticism of Gothic writing is the major inspiration for my thinking of what might be queer about Gothic. What follows, then, is a brief and necessarily concise account of some of the developments in feminist-based criticism of Gothic writing and how these have been instrumental in the recent rise in queer readings of Gothic writing. The bifurcation of Gothic writing into ‘male’ and ‘female’ Gothic arose in the 1970s with the advent of feminist criticism when a critical re-evaluation of Gothic writing began in earnest. Following Ellen Moers who coined the term ‘female Gothic’ in her study of nineteenth-century women authors like Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, feminist critics argued for ‘female Gothic’ as a distinct aspect of the genre.3 Moers’ analysis depends upon the biographical circumstances of Radcliffe and Shelley (particularly the latter), implying that Shelley’s experience as a woman determines the literary ‘offspring’. The signifying power of texts like Frankenstein (1818) and Radcliffe’s novels can be attributed to the writers’ femaleness as a biological and physiological fact. Consequently, the result is that these texts produce responses in female readers who can appreciate the problems of being female. Subsequent critical attention significantly complicates the reading of the relation of ‘female’ to ‘femininity’ and ‘male’ to ‘masculinity’ in Gothic plots, themes and characterization: One may believe that all writing or forms of writing are ‘marked’ by gender; demonstrating this has proved extremely difficult [ ] we need to be clear about the sorts of heuristic devices or strategies which have been used in making claims about the Gothic as ‘women’s fiction’.4

Introduction

3

Whether it is critically advantageous to retain the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ to read Gothic writing is addressed in an issue of the journal Women’s Writing (1993). In his introductory essay Robert Miles attributes the emergence of the concept of ‘female Gothic’ to a more sophisticated approach to Freudian theory and fantasy: The texts with the richest meanings were not those fully mediated by the author’s consciousness, but those arising from sites of the greatest conflict. The greater the social repression, the more authors’ minds were forced into roundabout ways of addressing their experience, the more articulate their texts, and the more significant and representative their evasions.5 Miles’s argument that female Gothic writing ‘met the criteria of this aesthetic revaluation, perhaps more than any other “genre” ’ is true due to the social and material disadvantages of women during the period.6 But can this understanding of the fantastic genre, in which Gothic forms a significant part, apply to male writers too? Can ‘social repression’ encompass repression that extends to both men and women, particularly with reference to the prohibition of specific sexual desires? As Michel Foucault argues, repression and sexuality are in a dialectical relation to one another (particularly in times of major socio-economic and political upheaval like in the late eighteenth century) where the institutionalized forces of repression produces a discourse of sexuality through other discourses: Rather than the uniform concern to hide sex, rather than the general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it spoken about.7 Social repression should be taken to include the unequivocal enforcement of the law of ‘heterosexuality’. If we take a biographically-centred approach to reading the fictions of those writers whom we suspect of same-sex desires and whose gender is ambiguous or complicated, we might anticipate that their writing will in covert ways signify for a queer reader. However, one must realize that this reading practice privileges sexuality and authorial intention as the prime determinants of constructing meaning for the reader. As I discuss below, the very concept of sexuality as a socially-verifiable identity is difficult in the pre-Victorian period. Framing a discussion of Gothic writing in terms of ‘male’ and

4


‘female’ ignores or covers over those instances where the terms overlap or interchange their characteristics with one another. It also conflicts with a queer reading practice that attempts to de-essentialize categories of identity that are spoken of as essences, like sex or gender are sometimes spoken about. Recent feminist criticism of the Gothic mobilizes queer readings by suggesting that gender can be read obliquely through discourses. One way to understand discourses is to interpret them as the ‘roundabout ways’ that Miles describes women writers using. Jacqueline Howard suggests that the theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the novel as a form that is in dialogue with other types of writing or narratives is especially applicable to the Gothic: we can examine whether and how the Gothic folk-tales, fairy-tales, superstitions, myths, discourses of the sublime, everyday ‘common sense’, and fragments of discourse drawn from non-literary realms are simply reproduced or actually transformed, and in whose interests.8 The formal characteristics of Gothic writing, such as its Chinese-box narrative structures, its multiple narrators and interrupted stories, invite a circuitous reading attitude. Such a roundabout approach stands as a symbol of how we can read Gothic writing at the level of narrative as intimately related to the ‘perverse’ or ‘wayward’. Gothic stories never follow a ‘straight’ course, a fact that in itself makes them queer. Howard argues for the need to contextualize Gothic writing by women; for instance by recognizing that the late eighteenth-century interest in sensibility and the sublime are expressive discourses through which to negotiate female experience. Following Howard, feminist criticism of the female Gothic writers in the late 1990s has taken up these ideas. In her recent book Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (2000) Emma J. Clery suggests that the actress Sarah Siddons associated the sublime with femininity, both in her performances and in the critical writing about her. Clery argues that this provided a liberating image of inspiration for women writing Gothic.9 So one can reasonably conclude that queerness might require being interpreted through a nexus of other discourses which ostensibly would seem to have little relation to sexual desire. The critical premise that Gothic writing is divided along the lines of horror/terror and male/female accordingly helped to form the ontological groundwork for the binaries of early feminist criticism of Gothic writing.10 Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the

Introduction

5

Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (1979) concretized an approach to Gothic writing that was based in the idea of essentialized sexual difference. They argue that the spectacle of imprisonment in women’s writing is determined by the material oppression of women in the domestic sphere.11 But the motif of imprisonment within domesticity also applies to men in Gothic writing by men. And this is not said in an attempt to engage in some kind of war of the ownership of conventions or critical terrain, as Lauren Fitzgerald accurately points out characterizes one history of critical approaches to the Gothic.12 And as Diane Long Hoeveler has argued the representation of a victimized femininity by women authors is more complicated than by men in Gothic writing simply oppressing women and women embodying a masochistic position.13 Anne Williams develops the idea of separate spheres further. She organizes the conventions of Gothic writing along the lines of an Aristotelian paradigm of opposing forces that constitute reality.14 In particular, male Gothic writing expresses an anxiety about the mother. This anxiety results in horror because the female body is historically linked to femininity through a theological discourse of the body as materiality, or mater meaning mother in Latin. However, Williams neglects where men experience suffering and terror in Gothic writing at the hands of the father and how this too could express sexual fears and desires, whether incestuous, homoerotic or masochistic. As I discuss further in section two, it is important not to underestimate how these desires connect to ‘female victimization’. I must emphasize here that I agree with feminist readings which argue that male Gothic writing can portray a misogynistic viewpoint of women. As I outline later, in such novels as The Castle of Otranto, Vathek and The Monk the maternal is imagined as both evil and an obstacle to male power. The negative stereotyping of femininity in male Gothic writing (i.e. the castrating mother and the passive victim) is, sometimes, a result of how the erotic component, of excessive feelings between (hatred, jealousy) is diverted onto women. Why are women who disrupt the boundary between femininity and masculinity such potent objects of fear and hatred in Gothic writing that need to be marked off, if not destroyed? One useful strategy of feminist criticism is to use theories of how narratives work, paying particular attention to the positions of narrators and spectators. Susan Wolstenholme, for instance, suggests that female Gothic writing is distinguished formalistically by who narrates or observes. These inescapable structures of perception and representation mirror the social position of women as objects of observation: ‘Even

6


when in a relatively powerless position, a man assumes the powerful position of spectator more easily than does a woman.’15 However, criticism has focused upon how the female body is objectified by the male gaze. What I wish to give attention to is the implications of the gaze and looking between one man and another. Since a discourse of looking between men and women in fiction often signals the reciprocal exchange of love and sexual desire, then it is not implausible to read the gaze between men as love and desire. As I point out below, theories of the gaze offer one way of understanding how the male as the object of an other’s (male) gaze might be read as part of the queerness of Gothic writing. I do not think this is an anachronistic leap to make. With its focus on appealing to the ocular sense, its dramatic plots and repeatable conventions, it is no coincidence that the traditional figures and motifs from Gothic writing have proved so popularly adaptable to film. Allowing for differences between cinema and fiction, early Gothic writing invites the description ‘cinematic’.16 The conventions and themes of Gothic writing form the basis for the narratives and imagery of the modern horror film, and these have often been given queer resonances as, for example, in the vampire sub-genre. Harry Benshoff’s study, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, discusses how the genre of horror has circulated a semantic coupling of monstrosity with ‘homosexuality’ either in plots or images which have their origins in Gothic writing.17 Recently there has been a re-evaluation of the term ‘female Gothic’ that takes account of critical developments in the 1990s and provides new readings of ‘female’ Gothic that expand the range of texts and approaches.18 The development of queer readings of the Gothic from feminist readings has an important parallel to the development of queer theory out of feminist theory and some of the problems this has brought to light feed into the evolution of Gothic criticism.19 To some extent the above account of feminist reading of the Gothic simplifies the complex evolving nature of feminist enquiry itself. I do not wish to suggest that a feminist reading of Gothic is static, stuck in a theoretical binary tangle of what is ‘male’ Gothic and what is ‘female’ Gothic, any more than to suggest that a queer reading is the last word on reading sexual desire in Gothic. To claim that the study of sexuality in Gothic belongs to queer theory any more than gender belongs to a feminist practice overlooks how queer readings and feminist readings can complement one another. The goal of the analyses is to argue that it is not necessary to take sex or sexuality as the primary objects of reading desire between men in the period. My readings are inspired

Introduction

7

by feminist criticism but they do not automatically privilege gender, although gender is crucial to reading how eighteenth-century homophobia can open up Gothic and vice versa.

Sexuality One of the reasons that it is perhaps necessary to distance oneself from reading ‘sexuality’ in Romanticism is that sexuality suggests an essentialized position. Discussing sexuality along the lines of a modern idea of sexuality as a category of identity that we and others define us by is not so easily transferable to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Neither ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’ or ‘sodomite’ are satisfactory in capturing the complexity, spectrum and evanescence of the men and women who loved each other, desired one another or whose fantasies for one another were played out in other forms that were not immediately socially visible.20 Up until now I have been using the terms ‘homosexual’, ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality’ in inverted commas to indicate a critical distance and scepticism towards their appropriateness. Michel Foucault suggests 1870 as the date when ‘homosexuality’ was pathologized through the rise and practice of psychoanalysis: The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle;21 It would be anachronistic and reductive to apply the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexuality’ to the period under discussion. To discuss ‘homosexuality’ immediately invokes the implications established in Freud’s theories of sexuality that homosexuality is a perverse and a pathological developmental condition that needs to be cured.22 ‘Homosexual’ is a dirty word among self-identified openly gay people and queers. Because of how psychoanalysis has been subtly coercive in a political mobilization against gay men and women in the twentieth century, it is a term that many rightly prefer to disown. Rictor Norton chooses the term ‘gay’ for his discussion of the mollies in the eighteenth century, describing the beginnings of a same-sex subculture.23 I have chosen to avoid using gay because it seems to me to lack a descriptive expansiveness and

8


elasticity that queer possesses. The risk of the charge of anachronism in using queer is a risk anyone must confront who reads fiction queerly before the most widely recognized queer, Oscar Wilde. Nevertheless, there is a significant and growing body of work that seeks to challenge the idea that ‘queer’ can only apply to Wilde-and-after in the twentieth century. For the purposes of this study, I have chosen to use ‘queer’ to refer predominantly to men who engage in same-sex activity or who feel desire for one another that resists an essentialized identity category. To discuss same-sex desire solely in terms of sodomy is reductive and unsatisfactory because it immediately invokes one bodily practice amongst others which excludes other expressions or sublimations of homoerotic desire.24 It is also a term that is overdetermined in the eighteenth century and unstable. In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes suggests that the body acts as a non-verbal discourse of desire between the ‘amorous subject’ and his/her object: ‘The other’s body was divided: on one side, the body proper – skin, eyes – tender, warm; and on the other side, the voice – abrupt, reserved, subject to fits of remoteness, a voice which did not give what the body gave.’25 This disjunction that Barthes notices between the lover’s body, particularly the gaze and that of the voice, might be adapted as a model for reading the interaction between bodies in Gothic. Especially when those bodies call into question gender norms. The act of translating the meanings of the body, and in particular the gaze, that sometimes seems to be at odds with other signals, and which the Gothic foregrounds, is especially queer. I use ‘homoerotic’ to describe those representations between men that for the queer reader register a meaning that points beyond the emotions of friendship, rivalry or enmity towards desire. My understanding of ‘homoerotic desire’ therefore builds on G.S. Rousseau’s definition as ‘male-oriented friendship not necessarily oral or genital’, to describe a desire which may or may not be conscious and is usually unfulfilled sexually.26 Gothic writing in the period 1765–1820 was a cultural form through which homophobia can be explored in contexts other than the pillory, for example in more subtle forms such as the construction of a middleclass identity politics. I do not believe it to be a prerequisite of homophobia that it depends upon the term ‘homosexuality’. If we define homophobia as the fear and hatred of same-sex desire, there is ample evidence in eighteenth-century contemporary social and legal discourses for the existence of a public homophobia, albeit predominantly determined by the spectacle of the convicted sodomite.27 In

Introduction

9

Gothic writing, the fear of effeminacy and transvestism signifies for a queer reader that there could be a link to those societal fears. The question of effeminacy’s slippery meaning, both in the eighteenth century and currently, is important to take into consideration because of effeminacy’s association with a history of same sex desire.28 An exaggerated reaction against being perceived as effeminate and an equally exaggerated drive to punish effeminacy in others can be seen as a representation of internalized homophobia. Jonathan Dollimore suggests that twentieth-century homophobia can be defined as ‘integral to a conventional kind of masculine identity’ and that it ‘intersects with other kinds of phobia and hatred’.29 I think this is also true for the late eighteenth century, even though the kinds of masculine identities and the phobias are in different forms that are not so readily recognizable. Looking at the overlaps and the linguistic links between misogyny and effeminacy illustrates how we can read Gothic writing as encoding one of the structures of homophobia. By describing Gothic writing as ‘homophobic’, I do not mean to suggest that it openly targets and denounces a sociallyidentifiable group like the mollies caught and exposed throughout the eighteenth century. Rather, because gender in Gothic writing is under threat by unstable or transgressive manifestations that are invariably portrayed as evil and destructive, this can help us to see where else homophobia may be operating in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, apart from the pillory in Charing Cross in London. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire has been the most important influence on the development of my argument. Sedgwick argues: ‘the Gothic was the first novelistic form in England to have close relatively visible links to male homosexuality’.30 This book aims to examine what and where these links are, and how they are interrelated. Despite her brilliant analysis, Sedgwick nevertheless uses ‘homosexual’ which, as I explained above, is historically and theoretically problematic. I wish to suggest instead that these ‘links’ are in fact more ambiguous and not so easily perceived; they have the power to appear and disappear in the texts. A stable interpretation of gender or sexuality by the reader is frequently resisted by Gothic writing which makes it queer. Paulina Palmer has argued for the similarities between Gothic and queer, particularly in how they both deconstruct ideas of sexual identity: ‘Gothic’ and ‘queer’ share a common emphasis on transgressive acts and subjectivities. In addition both acknowledge the importance of

10 Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age

fantasy, sexual as well as cultural, and represent subjectivity as fractured and fluid. Whereas Gothic narrative explores the disintegration of the self into double or multiple facets, queer theory foregrounds the multiple sexualities and roles that the subject produces and enacts.31 The goal of my argument differs from Sedgwick. She argues: ‘The present study is concerned, not distinctively with homosexual experience, but with the shape of the entire male homosocial spectrum, and its effects on women’ [my emphasis].32 Although exploring misogyny in relation to how Gothic writing plays out homoerotic desire and homophobia is important, Sedgwick’s feminist aim to explore ‘the effects on women’ is tangential to my interest in exploring how desire works between men.33 Sedgwick’s idea that homophobia is ‘terroristic’ in its structure – that it is episodic, isolated and parochial – is one that I develop. For example the fear characters experience encountering the supernatural depends upon their isolation. The Gothic ghost is more often than not a kind of transvestite, destabilizing gender as it terrorizes the straight subject.34 Sedgwick’s account of how homosocial relationships work is useful to understand how cultural forms like Gothic writing can be interpreted from a queer reader’s perspective. Sedgwick argues that homosociality is a structure of male bonding that depends upon acknowledging the existence of ‘homosexual’ desire and relationships in order to repudiate or mark itself off from them. The presence of either femininity or effeminacy works to circumvent or triangulate homoerotic desire (either through love or hatred) in the homosocial relationship. Desire between men is triangulated, or it is negated into homophobic impulses that find expression in misogyny. As Sedgwick comments: ‘it has apparently been impossible to find a form of patriarchy that was not homophobic’.35 ‘Homosocial’ relations are predicated upon a bonding between men which is characterized by silence and unspeakability about sexual desires for one another. Silence and unspeakability come to stand in for the possibility that such homosocial bonds contain the potential for an erotic expression or interpretation. ‘Homosocial’ offers a useful term to articulate the unstable, excessive nature of relationships between men that are not specifically sexualized in terms of literal physical contact, yet through which desire operates. In thinking about how an internalized homophobia might be operating in the relationships between male and female characters, it is difficult to avoid privileging gender to enable a queer reading of Gothic writing. Foucault argues that the definitional power of gender

Introduction

11

in the construction and perception of same-sex desire begins with the inscription ‘homosexual’; before this, only specific sexual practices existed: ‘Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration.’36 Androgyny, as an awareness of being masculine and feminine simultaneously or self-consciously positioning oneself in varying degrees with types of masculinity or femininity, seems to be queer in escaping gender. Androgyny could even be freedom from gender. Foucault’s argument suggests that the psychic importance of gender for sexuality was non-existent before the late nineteenth century. We should not underestimate, however, the degree to which the culturally shifting meanings and representations of masculinity and femininity in the late eighteenth century problematized the nature of the links between sex, gender and desire. How far do newspaper accounts, legal trial papers, broadsides or pamphlets reflect contemporary social attitudes? Are there voices of support that are more obscurely expressed? Reductive as these texts are, in their imperative for evidence and the need to socially identify and excoriate those bodies whose gender does not conform or is out of kilter with ‘normality’, they converge together into a homophobic discourse. Certain kinds of masculinities complicate the boundaries between sex and gender, and consequently desire. The visibility of feminized masculinities that are thought to attract women such as the man of feeling, the fop, the macaroni and the pretty gentleman may work to make queer men invisible by comparison. If ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexuality’ are unsatisfactory terms to describe the nature of erotic male relations in the period, then so too are ‘heterosexual’ and ‘heterosexuality’ as terms to define them against. As George Chauncey argues: ‘If homosexuality did not exist in the early nineteenth century, then neither did heterosexuality, for each category depends for its existence on the other.’37 However, some term is needed to describe desire and intercourse between opposite genders that is socially visible. I have chosen to use the term ‘straight’ where I want to signal this and I differentiate this from the idea of the heteronormative, which I define below. I think ‘straight’ has an appropriate symbolic valence for Gothic. It suggests that the twisted, crooked, circuitous narratives, structures and motifs of Gothic writing are in fact less than straight. Queer readings are in a dialogue with straightness in that they are constantly alert to making visible the points at which straightness is precarious. This is particularly the case with the depiction


of the dysfunctional family unit in Gothic.38 The aim of the book is to argue that Gothic writing offers us ways of recognizing queerness in the late eighteenth century and Romantic period which exceeds the idea of sexuality itself.

Queering Gothic Writing In this section I explain why I have chosen to use the term ‘queer’ and what I understand by ‘queering’ as a critical reading practice. Despite queer often being used in late twentieth-century contexts, ‘Queer’ is useful as a noun to describe men in the late eighteenth century and Romantic period that experience and express sexual desire for other men.39 Queer moves beyond the boundary of a preformed, imposed identity category like ‘sodomite’ or ‘homosexual’, and also recognizes where these men might be erased in culture.40 Queer, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defines it, is ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’.41 According to this definition of Sedgwick’s, queer individuals problematize the links between gender and sexuality as identity categories. Queering, as a way of reading or as a verb, is intimately connected to the idea of crossing over or between places, making links that have perhaps gone unnoticed or are not immediately obvious. And it must be said, those links are open to be challenged and debated. As William B. Turner points out, queer is ‘a relatively novel term that connotes etymologically a crossing of boundaries but that refers to nothing in particular, thus leaving the questions of its denotations open to contest and revision’.42 As an adjective, queer refers to the breaking down of structures we take for granted, like gender: ‘it is to abrade the classifications, to sit athwart conventional categories or traverse several’.43 And one of the most important ways to describe pre-twentieth-century culture as queer is to pay attention to the resonances of language. The interest in historicizing novels by showing where there are overlaps and conjunctions (Sedgwick’s idea of the mesh) with non-fictional texts and discourses is now vital to queering pre-Wildean fiction.44 However, there is an observation that a queer reading practice might end up having nothing to do with sex or sexuality. The plurality of queerness might empty out the idea of queer to pertain to same-sex erotic relationships.45 Queer is also sometimes used as a catch-all term for the idea of polymorphous perverse sex, or sexual acts, practices and desires that include

Introduction

13

straight sex but which are perceived to be beyond ‘the norm’. To a degree, I am compromising queer by limiting the analysis to a focus on just same-sex desire between men, perhaps at the expense of a richer, more diverse reading.46 The emphasis on difference and non-normativity which queer theorists propose as ‘queer’ informs its reading practice. A key idea that queer reading engages with is that of heteronormativity or the heteronormative. The heteronormative is a presumptive sense that certain ways of being and identity are natural, normal and are privileged over others. The ideal family and its centrality in society is a good example. As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner explain further, ‘Heteronormativity is more than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians; it is produced in almost every aspect of the forms and arrangement of social life: nationality, the state, and the law; as well as in the conventions and affects of narrativity, romance and other protected spaces of culture.’47 A queer reading attempts to articulate these points of disruption in culture where the heteronormative is resisted, particularly by unconventional gendered behaviour(s) that disturb its underpinning. And it must be noted that heteronormativity is not a preserve of being straight or heterosexual. It is perfectly possible for gays and queers to engage in and reproduce heteronormative practices because it is so pervasive and endemic across culture(s). I understand queerness to signify as desire for and between men which contains the potential for a sexualized interpretation. Transvestitism occurs occasionally in Gothic writing and I wish to explore how changing one’s clothes is queer.48 An etymology of queer enforces linguistically the sense of crossing and throwing into disequilibrium the boundaries of masculinity and femininity which transvestitism enacts. I wish to draw attention to how I am not attempting to reclaim a particular literary period for a moralizing or reclamative position that an identity-based politics sometimes takes up. Scott Bravmann argues for the need of a critical approach to the insensitivities of gay and lesbian historiography towards differences in historical timeframes: ‘In so far as they set out to establish a pan-cultural lesbian and gay existence, certain “popular” texts that seek to reclaim a “lost” gay and lesbian history can be criticized for reiterating culturally specific identity categories as universal’ (29).49 Although my queer analysis is partly informed by a historicist approach to Gothic writing (by looking at say the parallels between homophobic texts and Gothic writing), I wish to emphasize that I do not wish to engage in a historiographical methodology based on uncovering evidence.50 Instead, I wish to argue


that queer is descriptively powerful enough to permit a reading of desire between men where ostensibly it does not seem to be visible, except in derogatory or homophobic terms. There is now a significant body of criticism on how many of the major literary figures in the Romantic period are queer or can tell us what it means to be queer in the period. As Michael O’Rourke and David Collings point out: ‘Like queer, Romanticism is always messy, excessive, overspilling historical and corporeal boundaries. Like queer, Romanticism is resistant to the impulsion of critics to define it, pin it down, place a cordon sanitaire around it.’51 Robert Tobin in Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe provides a definition of how a queer reading can be applied to eighteenth-century texts. He argues: Queering the eighteenth century means wrenching it from established contexts in order to read it against the grain of traditional readings and dissolving the accreted interpretations that stifle or avoid those textual passages that do not lend themselves to orthodox readings. Such passages might often suggest a queer sexuality, that is to say, a sexuality divergent from the assumptions of present-day heterosexual norms.52 Through close reading, I intend to queer Gothic writing by focusing attention onto those conventions which either seem to exceed their narrative content, as in the gaze and gender ambiguity, or which resonate with implications for a twentieth-century queer reading practice. In historical periods of invisibility and prohibition, there is perhaps more than ever a requirement to read obliquely, because the queer gets mediated through other signs and discourses. Other discourses such as travel literature, the sublime and religion provide relevant contexts for a discussion of the ever-present threat of the destabilization of sex, gender and desire which Gothic writing provokes us with. This pleasurable phobia can be interpreted queerly. My reading of Gothic writing as a cultural form in which the destabilization of masculinity points towards what is queer about Gothic derives, in part, from the work of Judith Butler. Butler exposes how gender is constructed as an unquestioned element of identity for the subject through the discourses of psychoanalysis and philosophy. In fact, gender, she argues, is an effect of contingent laws and attributes. She concludes:

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In this sense, gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of freefloating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative— that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed [ ] There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.53 Butler’s idea upsets the idea of cause and effect. That is, that to be male is masculine and female feminine is so routinized in culture that it goes unnoticed until the queer steps in. The implications of Butler’s argument for de-essentializing both ‘heterosexuality’ and gay and lesbianism based on the causal relation between sex and gender have been central to shaping the notion of queer. Queer desire refuses to be aligned along any one axis of identity; it refuses the idea of a coherent identity that never changes, evolves or can be seen differently from varying positions. Anna Marie Jagosé comments that Butler ‘argues that those failures or confusions of gender—those performative repetitions that do not consolidate the law but that [ ] nevertheless generated by that law—highlight the discursive rather than the essential character of gender’ [my emphasis].54 It is the points of ‘failure’ and ‘confusion’ of the readability and intelligibility of gender ‘identity’ in Gothic writing that facilitate a queer reading. As an example one might concentrate on the moments when an association of the mind and rationality with masculinity and the body and emotion with femininity is reversed – for example where male bodies are represented as hysterical or where they feel threatened by a figure of an unstable gender identity.55 Butler’s idea of gender as a reiterated performativity draws attention to how gender is constructed as natural when it is challenged by bodies and behaviour which disestablish ‘relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice and desire’.56 This deconstruction is useful to articulate how we might see Gothic writing as circulating a homophobic/homoerotic economy.57 However, the queerness of Gothic writing also emerges through an idea of gender performativity that is more self-conscious. Superficially, Gothic writing is replete with situations where changes in identity (usually class or gender) are mobilized for particular ends. Identities are mistaken, and Gothic often presents us with characters whose gender is exaggerated, theatricalized and almost


stereotyped. I interpret and term these instances as hyperbolic gender.58 I do not mean that gender is performed in a self-conscious parodic way as with drag. As Butler comments: ‘If drag is performative, that does not mean that all performativity is to be understood as drag.’59 I understand her to mean that gender is not always performed self-consciously like drag, although one might make an exception with Rosario/Matilda in The Monk who intentionally imitates a type of masculinity. What is the effect of this sense of exaggeration and excess of the gender signified? The queerness of Gothic writing is partially made up by how the Gothic is camp. Susan Sontag (one of the first to articulate a discussion of camp) locates the historical origins of camp as a style in the eighteenth century: ‘The dividing line seems to fall in the eighteenth century; there the origins of camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins and so forth).’60 One of Sontag’s defining ‘notes’ about camp is that it is recognizable as a nostalgia for forgotten cultural forms. Gothic writing’s distinct idealization of place and history suggests this nostalgia. Sontag divides camp into naive and deliberate camp: In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve. [my emphasis]61 Clearly Gothic writing can be evaluated according to the last four defining criteria. The seriousness that fails in Gothic writing is, I believe, found in its reverential, yet popularizing transposition of a set of archetypes (such as a character or a plot) from traditional ‘high’ literary culture. In his preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, Walpole explicitly outlines how the novel is indebted to Shakespeare; its five chapters attempt to mirror the five-act play. This ‘borrowing’ explains his wish to naturalize the reactions of his characters: ‘The simplicity of their behaviour, almost tending to excite smiles, which at first seem not consonant to the serious cast of the work, appeared to me not only improper, but was marked designedly in that manner. My rule was nature.’62 The effect conforms to Sontag’s pure camp. The theatricalized performativity of characters becomes what Cleto terms ‘a failed seriousness’.63 Novels by less accomplished authors also have a camp effect in their serious imitation and admiration of Radcliffe and Lewis. For example in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s early attempts at writing Gothic

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novels, Zastrozzi (1810) and St Irvyne (1811), one can only read so many claps of thunder and lightning as ominously terrifying before they become laughable.64 And there are of course parodies of Gothic writing, most famously Northanger Abbey (1818) by Jane Austen, which capitalize on the reader’s awareness of narrative conventions to induce laughter. However parody is differentiated from naive camp in that it deliberately intends its effect to be that of satire and laughter. I do not believe, for example, that Gothic writing intends to ridicule Shakespeare by burlesquing his plots. Sontag’s formulations about camp have been criticized for stripping camp of its historical specificity – its distinctive association with a gay and lesbian subcultural politics and culture that begins around the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless Sontag’s ideas and their pertinence to Gothic writing suggest that camp as queer (or what I would like to call ‘queer-camp’) has a much longer history. Fabio Cleto’s deconstructionist reading of how camp is queer is particularly useful for a reading of campness in the Gothic. Cleto’s reading of camp is informed by a post-structuralist theoretical viewpoint of how there exists a slippage between language, meaning and interpretation. In deconstructionist terms, as a signifier, camp’s implied referent is not always ‘homosexuality’, with an always and forever stable ‘gay’ signified. As a result of the instability that exists because of this gap, camp is therefore queer: But ‘queer’ in its potentially queering value does not invest just gender, but semiotic structures at large, the signs of domination moving in concert with sexual and non-sexual hierarchies, and the constitution of self-alleged naturality and univocity of the sign, in its relations of signifier, signified and referent, we are doing nothing else than stabilising in a universally consensual (and ‘natural’) code a sign [i.e. camp] that works on the crisis of codes and signs, and through these, of the cultural hierarchies that are inscribed in all ‘naturality of signs’. [emphasis added] Gothic writing can therefore be read queerly in that it frequently represents a crisis of reading the ‘relations of signifier, signified and referent’ particularly when reading gender and desire. This crisis is located in the (mis)interpretation of the signifiers of the body, such as the gaze and the voice, so that opposite meanings or intentions are deduced and gender positions reversed. As Cleto argues ‘camp works by contradiction, by crossing statements and their possibility of being’. In particular,


the principal semiotic that is in crisis in Gothic writing, and which by implication queers it, is how we read the characters’ encounters with the supernatural. Signs that we interpret as real, natural and masculine/feminine (one of Cleto’s ‘cultural hierarchies’) turn out to be false, supernatural or feminine/masculine; they become inverted. Cleto’s metaphor for how camp works uncannily evokes the settings of Gothic writing. According to Cleto, camp is ‘a queer twisted discursive building, the site of an improvised and stylized performance, a propergroundless, mobile building without deep and anchoring functions, a building devoid of stasis’. This description could apply to every castle, monastery or prison we find in Gothic writing. In these sites, gender is both performed and collapsing. The performance of gender in Gothic writing is hyperbolic, to the extent that it can be read as theatricalized and exaggerated. As I will show with The Monk, the misinterpretation of the body, especially through the voice and the gaze, are central to how Gothic novels open up questions about the concept of gender itself. It is the reversal of these codes of gender that makes a reading of The Monk into a camp experience. Although each reading focuses upon particular aspects of the texts that can be read queerly, there is a unifying theme running through the book of how the gaze works. I concentrate upon the exchange of looks between men, but not exclusively, as how men and women look with desiring eyes can be revealing. Eighteenth-century culture continues a tradition of how the exchange of looks and the gaze is a means by which sexual desire can be communicated between men and women. For instance, in the early eighteenth century the author of The Lover’s Pacquet provides the reader with a guide to the ‘kingdom of love’: ‘Not far from this grove there is an inn, at a small distance from the highway, call’d alluring glances, and this is a baiting place for travellers.’65 In Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Widow Wadman’s attempts to get Tristram to gaze into her eye by feigning she has got something in it is implied by the narrator to have sexual motives: ‘There is nothing, my dear paternal uncle! But one lambent delicious fire, furtively shooting out from every part of it, in all directions, into thine—’.66 The narrator claims he will be ‘undone’ if he gazes any longer into her eye, asserting later that ‘It did my uncle Toby’s business’, supposedly referring to a sexual encounter.67 There are probably numerous other examples from fiction that could be quoted. But how far are the gaze and the interpretation of looks and looking functioning as a conduit for sexual desire between two male characters, between a narrator and his subject, or even between the narrator and the reader? What can we infer from such visual

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relations that destabilizes the category of a straight, dominant type of masculinity? Frequently a male character who is positioned as the object of the gaze (in literal symbolic and supernatural ways) becomes both unspeakable and powerless. Anne Williams points up how there is a repeated focus on the ‘penetrating’ eyes of the hero-villain and argues: In English the first-person pronoun and the word for the organ of sight sound the same – an accident, but one that conveniently serves to repress speculation that all I’s/eyes might not be the same. The existence of Male and female Gothic narratives, however, demonstrates that they are not.68 I have used the title ‘The Penetrating Eye’ to play upon this homonym of I/eye to indicate the reversibility of the positions of subject and object of the gaze. Not all subjects or ways of seeing are the same and we can ‘see’ in Gothic writing relations of gender as more conflicted or queer. This does not mean necessarily that we have to lose the definitional usefulness of male or female Gothic but just to realize that the edges are looser than have perhaps been assumed to date. I have chosen the term ‘penetrating’ to suggest how, normatively, the male gaze is understood to symbolize the sexually dominant and active position. Penetrating also works to highlight a homophobic need to uncover a ‘core’ secret in a surface-depth model of subjectivity. My discussion of the gaze draws on those who have used both a Freudian and a Lacanian reading of how the gaze works (predictably writing on film), and although I do not investigate or apply Freud or Lacan’s theories with any sustained analysis, the result is that my readings are implicitly dependent upon them.69 The first chapter considers the issue of biography and how (until perhaps very recently) queer readings of Romantic texts and figures have to a certain extent been caught up in the question of evidence over whether writers practised same-sex desire. The aim of this chapter is to argue that the existing terminology of ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’ and ‘bisexual’ is inadequate to describe their complex and elusive sexual, and erotic positions, and to argue that to find evidence does not necessarily help us make meaning out of the texts. I shift the focus away from a reading practice that ends up with one going round in paranoiac circles and speculation, to focus on how biographers are concerned to narrativize the secret of their subject’s sexual desires. This desire to find (or penetrate) evidence is always-already Gothic and mirrors the plots of Gothic stories. The chapter looks at biographies about Walpole, Beckford


and Lewis, as well as extracts from their own journals and writings not to find out if they are conclusively queer or not, but to show how secrecy, suspicion and rumour get constructed and talked about, and to ask if we can find a parallel to this in Gothic writing. In particular, this chapter looks at how a homophobic gaze is operating and where we might find this in the novels. Chapter 2 looks at the representation of masculinity and femininity in The Castle of Otranto and argues that gender is represented as hyperbolical. The excess of Manfred’s masculinity can be read in terms of how homophobia is dependent upon both misogyny and gender confusion. The novel also initiates in Gothic writing how ‘doubting’ and secrecy operate surrounding narratives of illicit sexual desires and the supernatural. This can be read queerly because they have parallels for instance with how extortion works in homophobia. Finally, I argue that the novel focuses on how the novel dramatizes the possibility for misinterpretation, for example the gaze and the voice, the supernatural for the natural. Chapter 3, on Vathek, emphasizes the suspicions attached to effeminacy in the context of how effeminacy is linked to monstrosity and luxury. Monstrosity and the demonic in Vathek can be read queerly by their links to a homophobic discourse of representing sodomitical relations as both ‘monstrous’ and ‘diabolical’. The chapter looks closely at the metaphor of translation as it becomes linked to the translation of bodies and their gendered meanings, particularly by the character of Vathek whose frustrated attempts at classification strike a queer note. Chapter 4 on The Monk argues that The Monk can be read as queercamp because it draws attention to the possibility for the misinterpretation of bodies and desires which undermines the concept of identity, particularly through the cross-dressed character of Matilda/Rosario. The disguises and reversals of gender are particularly queer, but I argue that it is also through the mismatch between signifiers and signifieds of the body, for example the voice and dress (but especially the gaze), that this occurs. The history of the representation of the male cleric as a queer in an English Protestant culture is also emphasized. The novel genders the gaze as male and then offers several instances of its reversal, particularly at moments of experiencing the supernatural. I argue that the supernatural in Gothic writing functions metaphorically for the inability to prove both an identity and sexual desire by recourse to ocular proof. I also argue that the gaze is connected to persecution. Chapter 5 on Caleb Williams focuses particularly on the gaze. Caleb Williams’s position as a feminized narrator underlies the mutual perse-

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cution between him and Falkland. Both Caleb and Falkland represent paranoid positions about being the object of a ‘vigilant’ gaze which inscribes the difficulty of distinguishing between, if we like, the front and the back of same-sex attraction and homophobia in the late eighteenth century. Reading the discourse of the sublime as sexualized, I argue that Caleb’s reaction to Falkland’s performance of his masculinity in sublime terms can be read in terms of erotic arousal. I also argue that Caleb’s desire for Falkland is queer because he characterizes his persecution in terms of demonic possession, and continually returns to experience the thrill of Falkland’s ‘penetrating eye’. The final chapter on Byron’s Oriental tales and Polidori’s short story The Vampyre (1819) consolidates the thematic of the book that the gaze and unspeakability represent queerness, reading Byron’s biography to show how biography is always-already Gothic and queer in fostering the idea of secrecy. In Lara and The Giaour, the narrators of both poems occupy the position of the paranoid observer who is frustrated by secretive men around whom a suspicion circulates because of a lack of knowledge. Both poems draw attention to the (mis)interpretation of looks and the meaning of the gaze, and I argue that one can read this as similar to the suspicious gaze of homophobia. The Vampyre continues such themes and initiates a long tradition of vampirism’s association with queer sexual desires. The focus of the book is specifically on what is traditionally described as the ‘male Gothic’. As indicated above, queering the Gothic necessarily questions how far the biological, essentializing implications of ‘male’ and ‘female’ accurately reflect the viewpoint that Gothic represents a reactionary strain of gender politics in Romantic writing. We can, of course, queer friendships and rivalries between men in ‘female Gothic’ and between women in ‘male Gothic’ and there may be objections as to why Frankenstein is not included in a discussion of queer relations between men here. I have deliberately chosen to exclude Mary Shelley’s novel, partly because of the wealth of readings of the novel’s gender politics, particularly from feminist perspectives, and partly because any analysis would be limited when it would be pertinent to consider other women writers like Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Dacre. The thematics of obsession, escape and persecution, monstrosity and doubling have already been read as representing repressed same-sex desire in homosocial friendships and rivalries, even if these have yet to be described specifically as queer.70 Eric Daffron has recently implied that the narrative of Frankenstein is in effect queer, following Michael Warner’s idea that the novel is a narrative of ‘repronormativity’.71


Daffron also effectively illustrates how the relationship between the narrator Walton and Victor Frankenstein can be read as queer, devoting particular attention to instances in the novel where looking between the two men suggest the gaze as a conduit of desire and simultaneously prohibiting desire’s open expression. Daffron has already marked out ground I would have covered, but that is not to say that the readings of the gaze between men in Gothic writing by women have been exhausted. One final point on how the book queers the early Gothic. In perceiving the spectacle of gender as both hyperbolic and defensive in Gothic, I also discuss how ‘the closet’ operates. Although we cannot speak of ‘being in the closet’ in the Romantic period because being out is not an option, being doubted is, and this is strikingly visualized in Gothic writing.72 The desire to escape from locked rooms and prisons, as well as to investigate the half-open doors or distant archways with shadowy figures on the threshold: all of these motifs are metaphors for a desire to both escape from a closeting (or closing in) of identity and to open identity up, to release and simultaneously reinforce doubt. Imprisoning is a way of silencing, of preventing certain knowledge(s) from being publicized, which would destabilize sexual, class and power hierarchies. As Sedgwick argues: ‘ “Closetedness” itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of silence [ ] a silence that accrues particularly by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constructs it.’73 What I wish to do is to examine those points of silence between men. In particular I wish to examine the connection between the depiction of unspeakability as terror and the fear of others speaking about same-sex desire. The communication of knowledge in Gothic writing often centres on narratives of illicit sexual desire which are posited as terrifying and unspeakable and need to be translated. It does not in fact lead to a strengthening of identity as in the modern sense of ‘coming out’, but a symbolic fragmentation of it. Manfred’s castle is literally fragmented by lightning in The Castle of Otranto, Ambrosio’s body is mangled in The Monk, Falkland dies from his confession in Caleb Williams, Aubrey dies after seeing his tormentor in a love locket. If anything, we are left with a sense that in the Romantic period Gothic offered both a chance to come out silently through reading – reading alone by candlelight or in a group offered the chance to escape from imposed identities and sexualities – and a chance to reaffirm them through fantasy.

1 Reading the Gaze: A Culture of Vigilance

The subtitle of this chapter refers to two distinct phenomena. First, to describe the construction and practice of a homophobic gaze in the late eighteenth century as revealed through the correspondence of three of the writers under discussion here.1 And, secondly, it aims to characterize much of the biographical writing of those writers who have been subjected to this scrutinizing gaze. There is no intention to suggest that the two are necessarily linked to one another, i.e. that the biographies are explicitly or unconsciously antagonistic towards their subjects. However, what the following discussion aims to do is to draw out the structural similarities between an eighteenth-century need to watch for the signs of, for example, effeminacy, transvestism or codes of desire between men, and biographers’ methodologies of looking for evidence and writing about their subject’s sexuality as a fixed category of identity. With this in mind, I argue that instead of replicating this vigilant, scrutinizing or penetrating gaze to see what really lies beneath the surface of these subjects, and how this determines a reading their fiction, we need to look at how the biography of Gothic writers is to some degree always-already Gothic. In wanting to get to the bottom of the mystery of a writer’s sexuality, or positing it as a secret to be unveiled, the boundary between Gothic fiction and biography of Gothic writers merges. To some extent this focus on Walpole, Beckford and Lewis is an acknowledgment of how critical readings of their novels, The Castle of Otranto (1765), Vathek (1786) and The Monk (1796) have been informed and influenced by a fixation on them as ‘homosexual’ writers. My attempt is to question and redress this position by suggesting that reading them as queer can instead help us to read their novels queerly, but not in a deterministic, relational way to sexuality that closes other readings. 23


Horace Walpole In a letter to the Reverend William Cole of 9 March 1765, Horace Walpole describes his inspiration for writing the first work of British Gothic writing, The Castle of Otranto: When you read of the picture quitting its panel, did you not recollect the portrait of Lord Falkland all in white in my gallery? Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I can recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it—add that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics.2 [my emphasis] Critics and biographers have taken Walpole’s confession in the above letter, that he wrote The Castle of Otranto after a dream, to support largely psychobiographical interpretations of the novel. In particular, it has been suggested Walpole’s subconscious drives and repressions can be decoded, particularly a sexual desire for men and anxieties over his perceived effeminacy and his relationship with his father, the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. Significantly, Walpole describes how he sits down to write, ‘without knowing’ exactly what he would write. This acknowledged lack of intention has led biographers and critics to think of Walpole’s correspondence primarily in psychoanalytical terms, and to suggest that The Castle of Otranto is a wish-fulfillment of Walpole’s neuroses. For example in the question ‘Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance?’ the hesitant tone of ‘confess’ might suggest to a psychoanalytic critic that Walpole is self-consciously exorcising through The Castle of Otranto some private, secret sin. He could, however, be playing a Catholic. However, criticism and biography whose narrative implies that there is a direct, unidirectional relationship between the writing of Walpole, Beckford, Lewis and Byron and their sexual desires invites a re-reading from a queer critical approach. Such psychoanalytical readings rest upon the premise that sexuality is a stable and essentialized category in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when perhaps the idea of sexuality is just perhaps embryonic. These readings of the relationship

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between a writer’s sexuality and their fiction allow little room for how sexual desire and identification can be interpreted in more oblique ways. There is also the implication that a precondition of writing fiction which represents or encodes same-sex desire and a homoerotic/homophobic dynamics must be that the writer is ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’. However, the personal lives of writers like Godwin, Radcliffe and Maturin elude suspicion. Nevertheless, their texts may have much to tell us about the relation between heteronormative values and what is queer about the Romantic period. To interpret Gothic writing according to a preformed idea of sexuality further reinforces the binary thinking of ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ identity. Interpreting a genre of fiction as characteristic of a writer who is ‘homosexual’ also becomes very tricky and a limiting business. We have to ask: how does one define ‘homosexual’ in fiction of the Romantic period? Is it according to thematics, a pre-existing sensibility, the writers’ or readers’ response? The limits and gaps that this term implies, and what it leaves unsaid or unarticulated needs to be addressed. In essence, what is queer about ‘homosexual’? Speculation about Walpole’s sexual life and his desires has always existed. His interests, mannerisms and social activities, such as dressing up as women at masquerades, invited comment from a variety of observers. The diarist and friend of Samuel Johnson, Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs Piozzi), believed Walpole and his friend John Chute to be effeminate and, thus in her eyes, suspicious. Walpole appeared to represent a gender enigma that excited contempt, especially in nineteenth-century male critics of his work and personality. Behind the enigma and mystery of a great eighteenth-century personality who never married lurked the suspicion that Walpole had secret sexual desires for men. Coleridge, writing in 1834, condemns Walpole’s fiction suggesting that there is a link between his work and Walpole’s perceived effeminacy: ‘the “Mysterious Mother” is the most disgusting, vile, detestable composition that ever came from the hand of man. No one with a spark of true manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it.’3 Thomas Babington Macaulay speaks of Walpole in terms of disease, as possessing ‘an unhealthy and disorganized mind’. He characterizes him in terms that in the early nineteenth century had connotations with effeminacy and dandyism such as ‘eccentric’, ‘artificial’, ‘fastidious’ and ‘capricious’ and how ‘his features were covered by a mask within a mask’.4 The ‘real’ Walpole was only a superficial surface, there was always a secret hidden self to be seen through. The inability to authenticate Walpole’s masculinity, the possibility that Walpole’s effeminacy might signify same-sex desire that could be neither


openly affirmed nor positively denied infuriated Walpole’s enemies and detractors. Walpole could be referred to as an ‘effeminate’ or a third gender like Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s friend, the poet John Hervey, or ‘Sporus’ as he was dubbed by Alexander Pope. But he could not be openly accused as either a sodomite or a pathic (a passive sexual partner), in a court of law at least, without witnesses. Nevertheless, Walpole continues to be described in terms that close down any complexity, sexual or otherwise. For instance, Timothy Mowl describes Walpole as ‘a homosexual who consorted with other homosexuals and bisexuals of his class’.5 He suggests that earlier biographies obscure the image of Walpole to suggest that he was asexual; in fact the reading of Walpole as asexual reinforces Walpole’s queerness if we want to understand asexualism as a refusal of a sociological imperative to be heterosexual, straight or just sexual.6 Walpole’s sexuality is a secret that needs to be exposed or ‘outed’ through scrutinizing his letters. Mowl refers to Walpole’s correspondence as a source of evidence indicating that Walpole had strongly developed erotic relationships with other men that can be described as ‘homosexual’. These relationships which are explored were principally with the poet Thomas Gray both at Eton and on the Grand Tour in the early 1740s, with his cousin and MP Henry Seymour Conway, and with Lord Lincoln (later the second Duke of Newcastle). Raymond Bentham takes the view that ‘Walpole’s biographers have been unanimous in their claim that he was emotionally distant’.7 He seeks to counter this claim by examining Walpole’s letters to Lord Lincoln and argues that the expressions of love in these letters reveal a mutual, coded expression of sexual desire between the two of them. Bentham also suggests that in letters to Walpole’s other friends there are jokes, comments and innuendos about the male body, particularly the penis.8 He argues: ‘Walpole was, I believe, a man of powerful but usually suppressed feelings, which he concealed because he was sexually and romantically attracted to men’ (276). He suggests that in The Castle of Otranto Walpole deliberately tried to ‘create a kind of fiction that will use metaphor and symbol to describe darker passions, ones not easily spoken about openly’ (283). However the suggestion that Walpole relies on metaphor and symbol veers dangerously close to the Intentional Fallacy and a Freudian reading.9 Instead George Haggerty argues convincingly that Walpole’s letters self-consciously exploit a culture’s desire for a secret truth: ‘The Walpole that emerges in his letters is constructed so as to exploit the assumption that there must be something beneath the surface.’10

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The desire to find secrets is one defining narrative characteristic of the Gothic. Haggerty suggests for example that Walpole’s professions of love for Lincoln and Conway are deliberately manipulative. Walpole ‘wears the mask of truth itself’ in order to deflect attention away from the possibility that what can be read as platonically affectionate may really be expressive of erotic desire.11 Nevertheless, we have to remember who the recipients of these letters were and that they were meant to be read in private. However, one still has to remember that it would have been dangerous for men to communicate their sexual desire for one another frankly in print, no matter how discreet they believed they or their recipients were. It is more than likely that many love letters between men in this period were either burnt after being read or simply destroyed by later family generations susceptible to paranoia about reputation. Nevertheless, Haggerty’s approach is the most sensitive to articulating the complexity of reading Walpole through his correspondence; he argues that critics ‘are asking the wrong question entirely’.12 One aspect of the reading of Walpole’s letters which has suggestive implications for how the secret becomes circulated and exchanged in Gothic writing (what we might call its economy) is how Walpole’s letters are attuned to reading and misreading the body. In a letter to his friend Henry Montague, there is a description by Walpole of his observation of the covert body language of the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Pelham (Lord Lincoln’s father), who tried to prevent Walpole’s friendship with Lord Lincoln while on the Grand Tour in Italy: ‘From thence he went into the hazard room, and wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped and winked and spied, till he got behind the Duke of Cumberland, the Duke of Bedford and Rigby; the first of whom did not deign to take notice of him’ (Lewis, vol. 9, p. 232). What is revealing here are the observations about Pelham’s means of getting near to these men and his winking, which Walpole observes as a means of silently communicating his intentions. Walpole is also in the position of an onlooker, observing small details which others are oblivious to. A wealth of information on eighteenth-century social life and politics, Walpole’s letters often point to a heightened awareness of the ridiculous in social situations, a quirky humour and a tone of eccentric frivolity. One might be tempted to term Walpole’s style as ‘camp’. However, one must be careful when using this term. A predisposition to irony and a love of innuendo and theatricality do not therefore prove Walpole to be ‘homosexual’ in the way that Mowl seems to imply. These traits of style and personality can be just as expressive of a ‘heterosexual’ sensibility as well as a trait of an aristocratic hypersensitivity to matters of style and taste.


Instead of seeking out evidence to prove that Walpole is ‘homosexual’, his correspondence gives us an insight into how Walpole is aware that gender is constructed and perceived by others as always variable. In a letter to his cousin Seymour Conway at the time of Conway’s impending marriage to Lady Caroline Fitzroy (which Walpole opposed) he reveals a concern about how others perceive his masculinity: ‘I am sensible of having more follies and weaknesses and fewer real good qualities than most men. I sometimes reflect on this, though I own too seldom. I always want to begin acting like a man and a sensible one, which I think I might be if I would’ (Lewis, vol. 37, p. 170) [my emphasis]. The wish to be ‘acting like a man’ is significant for suggesting that Walpole understood that gender was a construct, not an essential given of ‘reality’. Masculinity can be performed in a theatrical sense, perhaps for the purposes of disguise. His letter to Conway, when the latter was dismissed from parliament in 1764, highlights again how he conceives of his gender in terms of performativity: I am come hither alone to put my thoughts into some order, and to avoid showing the first sallies of my resentment, which I know you would disapprove [ ] My anger shall be a little more manly, and the plan of my revenge a little deeper laid than in peevish bon-mots. (Lewis, vol. 37, p. 170) [my emphasis] At this time the source of his anxiety resided in the vociferous and public attack made on Walpole by the political writer William Guthrie after the dismissal of Conway from Parliament, in a pamphlet entitled Reply to the Counter Address.13 Guthrie’s pamphlet focuses principally on the ambiguity of Walpole’s gender, and throughout the defence Walpole is positioned as effeminate. He is ‘delicate’ and possesses ‘a most ladylike form of speaking’ as well as being Conway’s ‘very loving defender’ (p. 10). However Guthrie is finally unable to determine Walpole’s gender, ‘a being between both’ implying, as the poet Alexander Pope did with Lord John Hervey ‘Sporus’ earlier in the century, that Walpole is a ‘third sex’: there is a weakness and an effeminacy in it, which seems to burlesque even calumny itself. The complexion of the malice, the feeble tone of the expression, and the passionate fondness with which the personal qualities of the officer in question are continually dwelt on, would tempt one to imagine, that this arrow came forth from a female quiver; but as it wants both the true delicacy and lively imagination

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which characterizes a lady’s pen, the attack must probably have been made from a neutral quarter, from a being between both, neither totally male or female [ ] so halting between the two that it would very much puzzle a common observer to assign to him his true sex. (pp. 6–7) The ‘common observer’, presumably the general public, would be confused by the signs or tone of the writing. Guthrie’s homophobic attack on Walpole contains a potential affirmative reading. In Guthrie’s perception that Walpole’s gender resists alignment to one sex or the other, Walpole is queer in that he confuses the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. The predominant intention of the pamphlet is to expose a belief in Walpole’s desire for Conway. In the twenty-first century, the term ‘outing’ is associated with gay political activists who declare a knowledge of closeted same-sex behaviour in socially prominent public figures who, usually, represent an institutionalized politics that devalues gay sexuality and affirms heteronormative values and practices like family, marriage or parenting. Guthrie is not trying to expose Walpole’s hypocrisy, which would presuppose that he had evidence of Walpole’s sexual behaviour. ‘Outing’ therefore seems an inappropriate term to apply to the pamphlet’s effect. Instead, Guthrie is deploying a subtle homophobic strategy that I prefer to call ‘doubting’ – openly fostering suspicion and rumour about a person’s sexual life, suggesting there is a secret, without openly stating so. In the readings that follow, I will show that Gothic writing moves towards the exposure of the secret of an influential or powerful individual that plays with a character’s or reader’s doubts over the interpretation of secrets as sexual secrets. Guthrie’s attack also shows how Walpole’s body is suspiciously queer, described in terms which oppose it to a discourse which figures the masculine in terms of the sublime. It is significant that as a political speaker who has been trained in the art of rhetoric and gesture to powerfully overwhelm and manipulate his opponent, Guthrie attacks Walpole on the grounds of his style, ‘the feeble tone of expression’. Guthrie here could be referring quite equally to Walpole’s speech, as much as his writing style.14 Guthrie’s Reply to the Counter Address is important for showing how homophobia in the eighteenth century is constructed through the prism of gender relations, particularly the attack on Walpole as effeminate. It underscores how implicit or explicit misogyny is sometimes linked to effeminophobia and the spectre of same-sex desire that lies behind the veil. Walpole’s sexuality is constructed as suspicious by his


contemporaries and fuels a critical desire to separate truth from falsity, fact from fiction, heterosexual from homosexual. Even if Walpole was unnerved by Guthrie’s arousal of public interest in his sexual outlook, it is still not possible (or critically desirable) to say with any certainty that the fear of exposure of identity in the novel refers directly to Walpole’s experiences. Instead, there exists a cultural need for enjoying the spectacle in Gothic writing of the working through of a knowledge of a secret that reflects any number of societal anxieties, for example about power and class as much as sexual desires. With some notable exceptions, existing criticism shows the continuing power of rumour, suspicion and the need to verify sexual identities. What Gothic writing allows us to see is how a narrative of rumour and gossip about secrets (especially sexualized secrets) shows that there is a subtler form of homophobia operating in Regency England than the regulation of sodomy via a spectacle of punishment in the pillory.

William Beckford While on a tour of England’s country houses in 1779, William Beckford met William Courtenay (3rd Viscount, later 9th Earl of Devon) at Powderham Castle. Beckford fell instantly in love with Courtenay. In his letters to his cousin’s first wife, Louisa Beckford, he nicknamed Courtenay ‘Kitty’, describing his frustration at his separation from ‘her’. In 1785 Beckford went to stay at Powderham Castle with his wife Margaret. A few weeks after the Beckfords had left Powderham, Lord Loughborough, Courtenay’s uncle, accused Beckford of an indiscretion with Courtenay although he had no witnesses to provide evidence in a court of law. As Brian Fothergill, one of Beckford’s biographers, argues: ‘Loughborough hoped to catch his victim in some compromising situation and later spread the rumour that this in fact happened, that Beckford had been caught in Courtenay’s bedroom in circumstances that offered no reasonable explanation. But did such an episode occur?’15 Loughborough then instigated a press campaign against Beckford, which caused him to go abroad. While waiting at Dover for the weather to turn favourable to cross the Channel, Beckford decided to return to his home, the magnificent mock-Gothic abbey he had built, Fonthill Abbey, in Wiltshire. Fothergill interprets this return as Beckford’s confidence in his own innocence if a charge of sodomy was to be brought against him. Beckford then left the country a year later, intending originally to go to his father’s plantation in Jamaica, but travelling to Portugal. Beckford was never openly accused or charged with sodomy; one of

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his earliest biographer’s observations is therefore still valid: ‘no serious charge brought against him has any foundation stronger than gossip’.16 Despite the degree to which suspicion determined Beckford’s departure for Portugal and Jamaica, he still cannot elude the culture of vigilance that continues today in attempts to reconcile the ‘facts’ of his life and personality with his writing. There are lines of continuity with his detractors. The eighteenth-century diarist and writer, Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs Piozzi), suggests that the story of Vathek and its characterization is a transparent allegory of Beckford’s personality and supposed sexual desires: Mr Beckford’s favourite propensity is all along visible I think; particularly in the luscious descriptions given of Gulchenrouz: but his Quarantine seems to be performed and I am told he is return’d quietly to Fonthill. When we were at Milan Mr Bisset brought over the news how he was hooted from Society by my Lord Loughborough, who threatened corporal or legal Punishment for Mr Beckford’s Violation of young Courtenay [ ] no Englishman would exchange a word with the Creature; and charming Doctor Fisher’s charitable Heart pitied his wretched exclusion from the World. But since Courtenay came to his Estate and Title, and I suppose treated the whole Business as a Joke, or common Occurrence, all is over; and I hear nothing said of Mr Beckford but as an Author. What a world it is!!!!17 [my emphasis] Thrale’s judgement on Beckford reveals several important issues. First, her use of ‘Quarantine’ implies that same-sex desire is constructed in terms of disease and contagion, and that Beckford is excluded from polite society. Secondly, the practice of same-sex desire is connected to xenophobia because ‘no Englishman’ speaks to Beckford. And lastly, that there existed a conflicting opinions surrounding Beckford’s relation to Vathek. Thrale’s shock arises from how Beckford’s social status as a suspected sodomite remains distinct from his identity as an author, as she perceives Vathek to express his sexual desires for young men in the comment: ‘the luscious Descriptions given of Gulchenrouz’. This approach to Beckford is still current in contemporary critical writing that specifically perceives Vathek as an expression of Beckford’s guilt over his same-sex desire. However, the founding basis for this argument – that Beckford had sodomitical relationships – cannot be proven. It remains open to speculation whether or not Beckford fulfilled his


desire for Courtenay or other young men like Gregorio Franchi. Nor is it possible to verify with any certainty that Beckford’s insinuations of spiritual suffering and persecution (for example his prayers to his patron saint, Saint Anthony, in his correspondence) are anything more than an attraction to the performativity of Catholicism.18 Vathek provides a series of instances where queer subjectivity challenges a particular kind of ‘heterosexual’ hyperbolic masculinity in the character of Vathek. At the same time it also constructs queer sexual practice and desire as evil. But whether it encodes (as I will show critics claim) any emotional guilt and fear of punishment for same-sex behaviour is difficult to reconcile with the strong possibility that Beckford would follow his friend’s advice (Lady Hamilton) to ‘keep a perpetual watch’ over himself.19 Would Beckford write so openly about his own personal relationships, thereby fuelling the suspicion about him? Possibly, but unlikely. However, biographers and critics remain undeterred from referring to Beckford’s sexuality in solidified terms, namely as a ‘homosexual’ or a ‘bisexual’. Brian Fothergill for instance, although arguing that Beckford never expressed his desires physically for Courtenay, describes and characterizes Beckford as ‘bisexual’ (p. 93). Fothergill interprets the character of Vathek as a strongly autobiographical portrait: Here the characters of Vathek and Gulchenrouz have become fused to represent the two unreconcilable aspects of Beckford’s own personality: the temperament flawed (as he still saw it) by homosexual and other ‘wayward’ passions which threatened to make him an outcast from society, and the irrepressible longing to regain the lost innocence of childhood. (p. 133) Fothergill suggests that when Beckford met Courtenay again in 1785, he thought Courtenay had grown more effeminate: ‘The boy had physically outgrown his former persona, the androgynous qualities which appealed so strongly to Beckford and had inspired the character of the boy-girl Gulchenrouz in Vathek.’20 Ignoring for the moment the suggestion that Beckford intentionally modelled Gulchenrouz on Courtenay, the inference one can draw from Fothergill’s argument is that the younger Courtenay represented a queer body in his androgyny, rather than the elder Courtenay who was hardening into a specific social type that could be identified by his effeminacy. An implicit sense of a hierarchy or pecking order of sexuality emerges that devalues certain positions above others: ‘Beckford was not a homosexual, he was a confident, active, self-aware bisexual, and that is a much richer and

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more confusing condition.’21 Why being bisexual rather than ‘homosexual’ ‘is more confusing’ or ‘richer’ is never explained and implies a normativizing position. The reader later infers that Mowl is not really certain himself as to how he should label Beckford. Confusingly he comments: ‘Not many people these days strike attitudes about homosexuals, but paedophilia remains another thing – an area grey to the point of sooty blackness. The relationship between the two Williams was soon to become actively and physically paedophiliac’ (Mowl, p. 107). Is Beckford ‘bisexual, ‘homosexual’ or a ‘paedophile’? Paedophile seems an inflammatory and inaccurate judgement of Beckford and Courtenay’s relationship. George E. Haggerty reformulates Beckford’s sexuality to indicate a new type of male sexuality in the late eighteenth century – the paederast. But there is still some difficulty in stabilizing Beckford’s sexual desires in this way.22 However, Haggerty is attuned to the complexity of Beckford’s sexual desire. Paederasty does not imply sodomy but refers to ‘boylove’ in the tradition of Greek literary culture. Analysing the attack on Beckford and Courtenay in the newspaper, The Morning Herald, as a ‘pair of fashionable male lovers’, Haggerty argues that the description of ‘lover’ does not conform to a prevailing discourse of sodomy: ‘In fact, it articulates the possibility of a male relation that is rare in the eighteenth century, suggesting in its turn of phrase something more like our own configuration of relational possibilities.’23 The figure of the lover opens up a more positive and queerer understanding of Beckford. Beckford becomes queer if he is seen as appropriating the conventions (and arguably poses) of Romantic sensibility and love, the cultural preserves of ‘heterosexual’ desire. In a letter dated 1 July 1782 which Haggerty quotes, Beckford’s romantic attitude towards Courtenay is evident in the pastoralism of the scene and Beckford’s imaginative fancy: I often dream after a solitary ramble on the dreary plains near Rome, that I am sitting with you in a meadow at Ford on a summer’s evening, my arm thrown round your neck. I seem to see the wilds beyond the House and the Cattle winding slowly along them. I even fancy, I hear your voice singing one of the tunes I composed when I was in Devonshire. Whilst thus engaged and giving way to languid melancholy tenderness, two snakes start from the hedge and twine round us. I see your face turn pale and your limbs tremble. I seem to press you closely in my arms. We both feel the cold writhing of the Snakes in our bosoms, both join our lips for the last time and expire.24


Beckford’s dream evokes a conventional pastoral landscape as found for example in the poetry of Thomas Gray, in for instance Elegy in a Country Churchyard or in the paintings of the seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain, of which Beckford owned some originals. The Edenic scene is shattered by the snakes which are associated with Beckford and Courtenay’s bodies. Beckford interpreted the snakes as being Courtenay’s father and aunt; however the snake is also symbolic of Satan, evoking the idea of corruption through a knowledge of sexual desire. Haggerty comments: they also represent the destructive power of desire to corrupt the pure love that Beckford constantly tries to articulate when talking to the boy. It is as if he is saying that the destruction of their love is present in its very constitution.25 Haggerty argues therefore that Beckford experiences a kind of internalized homophobia about his desire: ‘internalised self-hatred seems increasingly to haunt Beckford’s paederasty [ ] desire implies death, brings the threat of death, becomes almost a desire for death as Beckford’s culture had taught him all too well’.26 But in the abovequoted passage, Beckford also indulges in ‘languid melancholy’ in a scene that could be found in any novel of Sensibility. Although not quite a Marianne Dashwood (in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, 1811), here Beckford seems to consciously appropriate those conventions of feeling that Austen feared. By expressing same-sex desire in images and figures drawn from the tropes of the culture of Sensibility – such as the mutual appreciation of natural beauty inspiring love, and bodily signs indicating overwhelming feelings, like blushing or gazing, Beckford frustrates an understanding of his sexual desire solely in terms of physical acts like sodomy. ‘Queer’ describes the emotional complexity of Beckford’s sexual desires without limiting Beckford to an identifiable type of sexuality. Beckford represents a more individualist position that has resonances with a contemporary understanding of queer. His plea to Charlotte Courtenay, William’s aunt (later Lord Loughborough’s wife), pressing her to ask Courtenay to respond to his letters, reveals this individualism: ‘Of all the human creatures, male or female with which I have been acquainted in various countries and at different periods he is the only one that seems to have been cast in my mold’ [my emphasis].27 What is noticeable here about Beckford’s phrase (apart from its implicit arrogance) is the claim for a kind of individuality that Courtenay and

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he possess. Neither of them will fit into any preformed social mould that would define them by sexual practice or even gender. Beckford seemed to recognize that his emotional and sexual desires were complicated when he commented: ‘Am I not the strangest of Beings?’ (Melville, p. 78). Another argument (perhaps even the strongest) for describing Beckford as queer is that Beckford was married. His marriage to Lady Margaret Gordon in 1783 was arranged by his mother and aunt, and although it appears to have been a conventional eighteenth-century marriage of social convenience, Beckford does claim to love his wife and his two children. He also flirted with women while travelling abroad and possibly had an affair with his cousin’s wife, Louisa Beckford. It is all too easy to categorize him as a repressed ‘homosexual’ or as a ‘bisexual’ – the latter term in particular seems to imply a self-conscious choice of sexual partners which sits awkwardly with Beckford’s romantic approach to love and desire. The uncertainty surrounding Beckford is also compounded by the inability to determine exactly which letters (or parts of the letters) in Beckford’s correspondence are invented or reveries. The reason for questioning whether Beckford’s descriptions of his feelings and thoughts are genuine stems from Guy Chapman’s argument that many of the letters Beckford wrote between 1777 and 1791 were copied out in a red leather copybook much later in his life, and that the originals were destroyed or are without trace (Chapman, p. 323). Chapman focuses on how Louisa Beckford’s replies to Beckford contain tonal variations to the letters allegedly sent by Beckford. There are also factual inconsistencies in Beckford’s letters compared to Horace Walpole’s correspondence. He concludes therefore that: the fabricator was ‘none other than William Beckford himself’ (p. 323). Chapman notes that lines and passages referring to Courtenay or ‘Kitty’ are obliterated in the letters Beckford copied out himself. He argues: ‘It is not a case of concealment; for many letters in the book refer quite openly to William Courtenay’ (p. 341). If, as Beckford claimed, Lord Loughborough possessed letters that Beckford had written to Courtenay, which he threatened would prove his accusation, one can understand Beckford’s need to change the originals. Again the search for evidence to verify Beckford’s sexual identity surfaces in Chapman’s account, and biography seems to shade into Gothic conventions. For instance, there are no surviving letters from the painter Alexander Cozens, Beckford’s drawing master, among Beckford’s papers: ‘Everything connected with Cozens, save Beckford’s own letters, has been destroyed, although letters from everyone else with whom Beckford was at all connected have been preserved, even from


William Courtenay [ ] What is the reason?’ (p. 343). Cozens died in 1786. Legally, Beckford would have been obliged to return any of Cozens’s correspondence to his son, John Robert Cozens. Chapman comments: ‘We can only conclude that there was something in Cozens’ letters which Beckford preferred should not be known’ (p. 343). Had Cozens penetrated the veil of romantic sensibility Beckford used to express his love for Courtenay? Perhaps Cozens was too candid with Beckford in a language that Beckford felt revealed too visibly the nature of his desire. One is led back into a Gothic web of searching in the closet with a candle. We must, therefore, be careful of interpreting Beckford’s attitude towards his sexual desire from a reading of his correspondence, and then projecting this onto Vathek. However, this is not to argue that all of Beckford’s correspondence or his recipients’ have no heuristic value in thinking about how Beckford’s desire is queer. Mowl argues casually that Beckford ‘forged his own life’ and that his letters, particularly to Courtenay and Cozens, are deliberately rewritten and influenced by the cult of Sensibility (Mowl, p. 1). Guy Chapman does not account for the important letter of Lady Hamilton that strongly points towards Beckford discussing his erotic attachment to Courtenay, Conaro and others quite candidly. I am not arguing that Beckford did not practise a certain kind of selffashioning and invention in his letters – clearly he did, and in a way that has fuelled psychobiographical criticism. For example in a draft of a letter, which Chapman cannot verify as having been sent, Beckford seems to apply the conventions of his own Gothic writing to his life: How is poor Ly. [sic] Charlotte? I should be very sorry if she was doomed so young to descend into the cold dark regions. And yet I should be disposed to let myself down into them were some phantom in the shape of Loughborough to scream in my ears – I have strangled Louisa and shut Wm. Up in an inaccessible tower with fifty concubines. (Chapman, p. 172) Beckford emphasizes a sense of persecution by Loughborough that positions Loughborough as a Gothic tyrant not dissimilar to his character of Vathek. In an unaddressed letter, probably either to his wife’s cousin, Louisa Beckford, or to Cozens written at Spa in the Netherlands in 1780, Beckford describes himself as persecuted and tormented by his ‘wayward love’:

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Would to God the memorable Fountains of Merlin were still attainable – I might then be happy with the hopes of forgetting a passion which preys upon my soul [ ] This wayward Love of mine makes me insensible to everything [ ] but it is in vain it pursues me – pursues me with such swiftness! seizes upon me and marks me for its own. (Melville, p. 91) Perhaps in those letters which were copied out later, Beckford selfconsciously plays up the suspicion about his sexual desires through alluding to his novel Vathek. He had after all written the novel in French and did not wish for an English translation, perhaps in a gesture of pique at society’s rejection of him. Beckford’s correspondence though provides an insight into how Beckford’s sexual desire as a stabilized category of sexuality is problematic. However, it is also obvious by the replies of his friend, Lady Hamilton, that Beckford did indeed openly discuss his sexual desires for young men and did not always feel the need to appropriate a language of romantic love to express his feelings. Lady Hamilton foresaw that Beckford would have to act very discreetly to preserve his reputation and warns him against physical intimacy: For Heaven’s sake keep a perpetual watch over yourself or you will still be a lost man. Let not a word escape you that the World may take hold of. You are so exposed to envy from your situation, but above all from those talents and parts of which Nature has been so lavish to you, that you will find it more necessary than any one [sic] to be upon your guard. If you are not, I repeat your reputation will be lost for ever, lost never never to be regained [ ] remember the Manly Energetic Hector is my Hero, not the furious Achilles, sacrificing every consideration to the violence of his passions [ ] May you be a true Hero in getting the better of every sensation which is not consistent with true honour and principle and which (if indulged) must in the end make you miserable. (Oliver, pp. 68–69) Beckford acknowledged to Cozens that he took Lady Hamilton’s advice seriously. Her letters to him were his ‘finest rule of conduct’ (Chapman, p. 83). The classical allusions to different models of masculinity point towards a defence of the expression of his desire. Beckford’s awareness of the homoerotic possibilities of the military comradeship between


Achilles and Patroclus in Homer’s The Illiad is suggested in his response to Lady Hamilton: ‘I am vain enough to imagine I should make you less averse to Achilles. Hector is doubtless more amiable but what feeling breast can refrain to sigh with the young Grecian and his agonising on the shore after the murder of Patroclus’ (Melville, p. 114). Lady Hamilton’s reply also underscores how the queer subject’s fear of being observed and watched works from the perspective of institutionalized homophobia. In a letter to the Contessa D’Orsini Rosenberg, Beckford refers to the classical image of the Argus, a monster with a hundred eyes that the Roman Goddess Juno employs to watch Io, her rival for Jupiter’s love. Beckford uses the allusion to describe both his relations and the society surrounding him: From the theatre, I take him to my bed. Nature, Virtue, Glory all disappear – entirely lost, confused, destroyed. O, heavens, that I could die in these kisses and plunge my soul with his into the happiness or the pain which must never end [ ] Do you know of a state more frightening than this which I suffer – spied upon by a thousand Arguses without hearts and without ears, constrained to abandon the unique hope that reconciles me to life, menaced at each instant, accused of the ruin of a being I adore in whom all human affections are concentrated to a point.28 The image of the Arguses watching him signals how the act of looking and gazing between men to express desire is always potentially dangerous because they are observed by spying eyes. Several references to Courtenay throughout Beckford’s correspondence discuss him in terms of looking. Writing to Louisa, Beckford comments: ‘Today it talked of languid glances – looked them – till I grew quite intoxicated’ (Chapman, p. 151). But again Beckford’s fear of exposure is framed within a metaphor of the gaze: ‘Scrag and Phemy are outrageous. They have moved Heaven and Hell to alarm L. [Loughborough] but as yet some Daemon spreads a thick film over his eyes – and prevents him seeing a conflagration which every duty calls him to extinguish’ (Chapman, p. 151). Scrag and Phemy remain unidentified. The ‘L.’ could equally refer to Lord Loughborough or to Lord Courtenay, William’s father. In A View of Society and Manners in High and Low Life (1781), the writer Madge Culls suspects that men and soldiers cruising in St James’s Park use their bodies to communicate with each other while the casual bystander is blindly oblivious to the meanings such signals indicate: ‘These wretches have many ways and means of conveying intelligence, and many signals

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by which they discover themselves to each other.’29 Madge Culls then proceeds to give an example of the use of handkerchiefs – but presumably these signals could also include the use of the eyes and the gaze to signal desire – indicating that there existed a climate in Georgian Britain in which men were scrupulously watched and observed. The paranoia about the gaze finds a parallel of the fear of being watched in Gothic writing: By means of these signals they retire to satisfy a passion too horrible for description, too detestable for language; a passion which deserves the punishment not of the law only, but an exclusion from Society [sic] on the most light glance of just suspicion of it.30 [my emphasis] The gaze and the glance are both instrumental to homophobia in the late eighteenth century and is one of the ways in which men can signal desire for one another. Even if we cannot verify the authenticity of the above letter to Louisa about Courtenay, it has interesting implications for how Beckford describes a supernatural agency intervening to obscure Lord Loughborough’s, ‘L’, perception. This occurs in Vathek with Vathek blindly following the commands of the Giaour. The ignorance of being watched over by a higher uncontrollable or undefined power which leads to the subject’s destruction works as a metaphor for a culture eager to police gender boundaries and illicit desire. The novel’s narrative of seeing how others make mistakes that lead to a terrible punishment can be read alongside how those men who loved one another needed to self-regulate the language of love to avoid suspicion from the moral Arguses of society who would condemn them to the pillory, or worse.

Matthew Lewis With Matthew Lewis, writer of the infamously popular The Monk (1796), there has been a tendency to either ignore Lewis’s sexuality or discuss him within the anachronism of ‘homosexuality’. Discussion of Lewis’s private life brings into play the accusation that there is an element of paranoia, i.e. the fear that every text might contain a potential queer reading.31 The objection that is levelled at readers performing paranoid readings is that such readings are seeing something more in the text than there is evidence or grounds for justification. Again, interpretation becomes a matter of visibility and invisibility. Queer critics are seeing things that are not apparent (apparitional?) to other critics. Refutations and confirmations of ‘paranoid’ readings hinge on referring back to an


argument centred on proving by evidence that a writer did or did not experience same-sex desire and therefore can or cannot be described as ‘homosexual’: On the other hand, the statement that Lewis was homosexual, while it would require for confirmation more convincing evidence than has been presented, is impossible to confirm or disprove. Moreover, the term is popularly used to cover such a wide range of phenomena, from the mere enjoyment of the company of one’s own sex to the most appalling abnormalities, that a biographer who applies it to his subject would seem to need a careful definition of what he means, to say nothing of strong evidence. To publish the statement with such assurance was rather a pity, because since its appearance it has become fashionable to add piquancy to accounts of Lewis by describing him as sexually abnormal. (Peck, p. 66) [my emphasis] It is clear that Peck is circumscribed by his own normative values about same-sex desire when he was writing in 1961, in a pre-Stonewall era of repression. The flexibility Peck suggests resides in the term ‘homosexual’ is, more accurately, present in the term ‘queer’ which wishes to move away from an idea of sexuality as a fixed identity. The sexuality of Lewis cannot, in fact, be defined as sexuality, as a visible social identity that others recognized him by, as it was for late nineteenth-century writers such as Oscar Wilde. Peck tells us that as a young boy, Lewis used to cross-dress: ‘He delighted to dress himself in whatever of his mother’s jewelry and gaudy clothing he could find and parade before a mirror, a foreshadowing, perhaps of the lavish display of costume in his melodramas’ (Peck, p. 4). Or perhaps a foreshadowing of something more unspeakably queer which Peck does not wish to confront? Or are we seeing a ghost of transvestism that is not really there? The accusation of performing a paranoid reading is upped if queer criticism becomes too fixated on the question of biographical evidence, especially according to the theory that ‘paranoia is drawn towards and tends to construct symmetrical relations, and in particular symmetrical epistemologies’.32 One example of these ‘symmetrical epistemologies’ (epistemology being a philosophy of how we possess knowledge and what we do with it) is in lining up a writer’s life or personality with their writing. Even if we suspect that Lewis had same-sex relations, where does this take or advance our reading of The Monk, if we can prove or disprove, once and for always, what we had already known all along?

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D. L. MacDonald has recently rewritten Lewis’s biography, paying significant attention to his sexuality. He also notes the factual inaccuracies of Montague Summers’ romantic construction of Lewis as ‘homosexual’, pointing out Summers’ romantic interpretation of Lewis’s correspondence. MacDonald’s argument is that ‘The evidence suggests that he was attracted to men, but that he thought of these attachments as (in Louis Crompton’s terms) romantic friendships rather than love affairs or (in Eve Kosofsky’s Sedgwick’s terms) as homosocial rather than “homosexual”.’33 However, this argument seems to conflict with MacDonald’s use of ‘homosexuality’. For example, discussing the anecdote by Margaret Baron-Wilson’s of Lewis cross-dressing as a young boy, he comments: ‘Lewis’s culture seems to have associated homosexuality with cross-dressing and transexuality even more insistently than ours does’ (MacDonald, p. 69). MacDonald quotes a letter from William Lamb to his mother in 1800 about Lewis: ‘He might be pleasant enough if he were not always upon the strain [ ] I hear he intends proposing to Emily Stratford [ ] She will make him shed more tears and look more doleful in assembly rooms than ever I did’ (MacDonald, p. 64). MacDonald argues that this proves that Lamb thought of the ‘homosocial and the homosexual as essentially continuous’ (MacDonald, p. 68). The continuum of male relations and relationships does not make it easy to know or see queer desire. The late nineteenth-century definition of ‘homosexuality’ as a socially recognisable and pathologized identity had not arrived yet. However, ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosocial’ are used as distinctive terms when he argues that the poems Lewis sent to Lord Holland from Inverary Castle in 1807 ‘touch more or less lightly, on homosexual or homosocial themes’ (MacDonald, p. 70) [my emphasis]. In the preface to another poem, ‘St Anthony the Second’, Lewis describes the inspiration for a poem about sexual temptation. At dinner one evening he praised a pie on the table and as a result: ‘the Ladies drest up a female figure [ ] with the intention of placing both that and the Pye in my bed’. I listened looked and longed; By turns surveyed Now the Goose-pye, and now each white-robed Maid. Now hunger led me tow’rds the savoury Pye, But the fair Nymphs recalled me with a sigh: Now leaving That, I hastened towards Those; But then the Pasty caught me by the nose! Less strongly tempted Grandsire Adam fell; Eve bought him with a hard raw Non-pareil;


More powerful bribes did Satan here produce; My Eves were three, and seasoned was the Goose. (MacDonald, p. 71) MacDonald focuses on how Lewis’s gender becomes ambiguous by his reference to himself as ‘Calista-like’ and adopting feminine poses. He argues that eating is connected to ‘an infantile orality’ which is, in turn, ‘associated with homosexuality, either directly or through the common association with childishness’ (MacDonald, p. 72). If the pie represents a symbol for same-sex desire, it also represents a choice. And what appears most strongly is the oscillation between the choice of an oral pleasure and the choice of a pleasure of intercourse with the virginal ‘white-robed Maids’. Desire extends in both directions but as the choice of temptation is left inconclusive, it cannot strictly be read as ‘homosexual’. Rather it inscribes desire as queer in suggesting a variety of possibilities and positions. Lewis’s interest in the companionship of men younger than himself could simply be a pleasure in the company of the young, reflecting Sir Walter Scott’s observation of his ‘boyishness’ (Peck, p. 51). Or possibly, it could refer to a homoerotic interest in young men. There is also the possibility that Lewis is queer because he is asexual and unattractive to women. MacDonald quotes from the satirist Susan Wilcock who describes Lewis’s lack of manliness. What is most interesting however (in terms of the gender performance of The Monk) is the implication that Lewis may have consciously been playing it straight. He may have adopted the role of the seducer for instance as a kind of straight performativity, as a means of averting any suspicion away from accusations of same-sex desire. The Prince Regent’s wife, Caroline, recognized the artifice of Lewis in a letter to her lady-in-waiting, Lady Charlotte Campbell: Lewis did play de part of Cupidon, which will amuse us, as you will suppose. He is grown so embonpoint, he is more droll than ever in that character; but he tink [sic] himself charming, and look so happy when he makes les yeux doux to the pretty ladies, that it is cruel to tell him, ‘You are in the paradise of fools’. (MacDonald, p. 66) Whether Lewis deliberately assumed a disguise to mask suspicions about a preference for younger men, or was really in earnest with Princess Caroline is quite difficult to tell from this passage. What is clear is that

Reading the Gaze

43

others perceived his flirtations as performances which made him seem ridiculous to women as a sexual partner. Lewis was obviously aware of the power and the necessity of disguise. In a poem to Charles William Stuart, a lieutenant-colonel of the Royal Irish Dragoons, the metaphor of veiling, so often found in Gothic writing, is used by the speaker selfreflexively: ‘Veil with assumed content your keen affliction, Nor wish his heart to feel a pang like yours’ (MacDonald, p. 67). It is unclear whether the need to masquerade his distress at his friend’s departure is due to Stuart’s ignorance of the depth of his love, or to the suspicion with which a display of intense feeling for another man might be regarded by society. Lewis’s attitude to Giovanni Battista Falcieri, his manservant on his continental tour and who accompanied him on his second voyage to his Jamaican plantations when he died of yellow fever, also suggests that Lewis was mildly amused by effeminacy. In his Journal of a West India Proprietor Lewis records the agonies of his second sea voyage in 1817: Then we had a young lady who was ready to die of sea sickness, and an old one who was little better through fright; and I had an Italian servant into the bargain, who was as sick as the young lady, and as frightened as the old one. The poor fellow had never been on board ship before; and with every crack which the vessel gave, he thought that to be sure, she was splitting right in half.34 While he was in Venice Byron employed Falcieri, possibly through Lewis, and he became his gondolier. After Lewis’s death, Falcieri, or ‘Tita’ as Byron affectionately termed him, was taken into Byron’s household, and is referred to in his will.35 Was there a kind of homoerotic economy operating between Lewis and Byron in the circulation of young Venetian working-class male bodies? The answer to the question may not advance our queering of The Monk, but the question may be applied instead to thinking about relations between bodies in the novel. In The Monk, the idea of the exchange of Ambrosio between men (i.e. the Devil and in Matilda, a quasi-man) is suffused with sexualized imagery. The impulse to reveal and confirm the sexualities of Walpole, Beckford and Lewis as identity categories is a misplaced critical endeavour. Even if we did discover conclusive evidence to prove that Lewis practised same-sex love (which is unlikely) it does not necessarily follow that Lewis would inscribe same-sex desire in his fiction for all to see. On the contrary, in a culture of fear and repression, same-sex desire is just as likely to be as evanescent as the ghosts found in Gothic writing.


Sedgwick observes ‘paranoia is characterized by placing in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se – knowledge in the form of exposure. Maybe that’s why paranoid knowing is so inescapably narrative.’36 What I understand her to mean by ‘narrative’ is that if such a knowledge about Lewis becomes available, it can close down the potentiality of the novel’s meanings. It would limit a reading of Lewis’s writing to a deterministic, parallel relationship between Lewis’s sexual behaviour, and the meanings of desire in the text. Reading Walpole, Beckford and Lewis’s behaviour and desires as queer does not necessarily mean that they recognized their feelings, desires or positions accordingly. Queering their writing does not depend upon whether we read them as ‘homosexual’, ‘bi-sexual’, ‘asexual’ or even straight but showing how their novels can represent a homophobic culture and also how this is subtly reinscribed through a biographical penetrating eye. The insights we derive from reading their correspondence and biographies about the importance of secrecy, suspicion, gender ambiguity and the gaze to the queer subject and homophobia are all present in Gothic writing.

2 Guessing the Mould: Or, The Castle of Otranto?

The Castle of Otranto’s thematics, such as the sins of the father, divorce and incest, do not appear to have much to do with a reading of same-sex desire and queerness. However, one theme that emerges strongly and is related to how we can understand same-sex desire in the late eighteenth century and Romantic age is the fear of the exposure of a secret to a public, penetrating eye. It is with this theme in mind that I will be exploring how the novel is a cautious warning against suspicious narratives and paranoid interpretation which characterizes homophobia in the eighteenth century, looking in particular at extortion and the drive to see queer desires in effeminate bodies. With this in mind, the question form of the title of this chapter is meant to play on both the alternative titles many Gothic novels were given and to suggest how secrets always keep readers asking questions about the relation between Walpole’s own sexual identity and his novel. The central antagonist, Manfred, and his false claim of possessing the castle and principality of Otranto, is a subject who has the potential to be exposed, much like the eighteenth-century male who desired his own sex as I will describe below. Manfred’s tenants and subjects suspect that the ancient prophecy predicting that the castle will ‘pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it’ is the cause of Manfred’s urgency to marry his son Conrad to Isabella. We are told that Manfred’s ‘family and neighbours [ ] did not dare utter their surmises on this precipitation’ (73).1 It is implied that Hippolita knows Manfred’s secret, and as his wife, she holds the most private intimate relation to Manfred above the other characters. Manfred continually attempts to prevent a public exposure of his secret. He is, in effect, in a kind of closet, albeit a semi-public one, as the public knowledge of the prophecy points to a secret. In his defensive 45


narrative to Frederic about his grandfather, Ricardo, Manfred is unable to name the act of betrayal and usurpation, a breach of the chivalric code of honour between these men: ‘My grandfather was incapable — I say, sir, Don Ricardo was incapable-Excuse me, your interruption has disordered me — I venerate the memory of my grandfather’ (120). Significantly, the secret that prompts all the subsequent developments in the novel is left unspeakable. The meaning of Ricardo’s secret creates a discourse of the secret which leaves its meaning unsignified and freefloating. What I am underlining here is how the state of unspeakability that defines the possession or knowledge of a secret (one that is both personal and political) is in Gothic writing foregrounded for itself, despite later revelations of what that secret actually is. For readers attuned to a knowledge of how same-sex desires and practices have either been erased from history, or have been spoken about in circumlocutory ways, because such desires and practices are termed unspeakable, there always remains the possibility that the secret referred to might be a queer one. Theodore, the true heir to Otranto, represents for Manfred the threat of exposure. Drawing attention to the similarity between the helmet Conrad is crushed by and the helmet of the marble statue of the knight Alfonso in the church, Theodore is imprisoned by Manfred under the helmet. The space of the helmet becomes a metaphorical closet. Manfred’s anger at Theodore derives from his fear about his vassals’ interpretation of the visual connections Theodore makes between the armour and the statue: The folly of these ejaculations brought Manfred to himself: yet whether provoked at the peasant having observed the resemblance between the two helmets, and thereby led to the farther discovery of the absence of that [the helmet] in the church; or wishing to bury any fresh rumour under so impertinent a supposition; he gravely pronounced that the young man was certainly a necromancer. (77) Theodore also embodies the uncanny. Freud observes that: ‘the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads us back to what is known of old and is long familiar’.2 Theodore becomes uncanny for Manfred as we are told by Bianca of Theodore’s resemblance to ‘the picture of the good Alfonso in the gallery’ who she describes as ‘a lovely young prince, with large black eyes, a smooth white forehead, and manly curling locks like jet’ (95). Manfred does not recognize this resemblance until Theodore is disguised in armour trying to escape from the castle. According

Guessing the Mould 47

to Bianca, it is implied that looking at portraits is sexually arousing, as Matilda quickly denies she ‘gazes’ on the portrait when she is told Bianca has been watching her. ‘Everybody’ is in love with the portrait. As a visual reminder of Alfonso then, Theodore recalls to Manfred’s consciousness his need for secrecy about his true family history. Significantly, it is the armour, a stylized, exaggerated exterior of a man’s body, all hard edges and angles, which terrifies Manfred the most; he is in ‘an agony of amazement and terror’. The image and presence of Theodore confirms Manfred’s guilt over his secret and destroys the identity he has constructed for himself. This moment of recognition takes place in a public space with Manfred’s vassals looking on. As such, it can be read as inscribing the fear of the recognition of a secret between two men, particularly a secret that is charged with the queer overtones of unspeakability. The tragic and apocalyptic resolution of the ending of the novel with the vision of the true owner of the castle, the giant Alfonso, destroying the castle, implies that the fear of the revelation of one’s identity lies in the potential for such knowledge of secrets to be used as power. In chapter two, Matilda and Bianca speculate on the question of who Theodore is: Do, madam, let us sift him. He does not know you, but takes you for one of my lady Hippolita’s women. Art thou not ashamed, Bianca? said the princess: what right have we to pry into the secrets of this young man’s heart? He seems virtuous and frank, and tells us he is unhappy: are those circumstances that authorize us to make a property of him? (98) Matilda’s objection implies that Bianca’s use of ‘sift’, meaning to examine for evidence of authenticity but resonating with the idea of sorting out people into types, is unethical. Theodore would become their ‘property’ by the exchange of a secret or their discovery of such, and be rendered even more powerless. Matilda refuses to trust Bianca with her mother Hippolita’s secret, arguing that secrets should be kept within families. The above scene is central to thinking about how we might wish to consider the genre of Gothic writing as manifesting an anxiety about secrets, particularly secrets to do with the exposure of taboo sexual desires. The silence and invisibility that surrounded queer bodies in the Romantic age, and the punitive legal system that increasingly condemned those convicted of sodomy to the pillory or hanging, was


perhaps particularly difficult for aristocratic or middle-class men in the public eye, especially vulnerable to those eager to profit from this socio-cultural repressiveness. Isabella’s suggestion that Theodore would become their ‘property’ suggests that Bianca could perhaps blackmail Theodore if she was so inclined. However, the nomenclature of blackmail did not exist in the eighteenth century. As Netta Murray Goldsmith states: ‘[ ] blackmail was deemed a species of robbery and very little account was taken in law of the psychological damage suffered by anyone menaced with the loss of his good name’3 . Instead, throughout the long eighteenth century, there were several cases of extortion where the accused was charged with intimidating the defendant by accusing them, usually by letter, either of practising sodomy or of sodomitical intent.4 Frequently there was a ring involved in orchestrating the extortion, occasionally impersonating night-watchmen or acting as false witnesses. Sometimes younger men or boys, desperate for money, were bribed to act as victims on behalf of the accused. It is also very likely that a significant number of those accused of practising extortion could have been queer themselves. Certain public places in London such as Covent Garden, St James’s park and Moorfields presented opportunities for potential perpetrators of extortion to accost their victims publicly, and threaten to expose them to the mob. Messages for people to rendezvous at taverns were common. Both the lower classes and the aristocracy could be at risk. However, servants extorting money from their aristocratic masters or middle-class employers by threatening to expose their secrets are almost non-existent. However, that is not to say this did not occur more frequently and that there is no surviving evidence because of the need for secrecy. The merest suspicion would have motivated many men to have paid their persecutors (or perhaps done worse) to preserve their reputation. In 1767, John Preston, claiming to be a servant, wrote to the Marquis of Carnavon demanding money. When Martha Quinn, Preston’s go-between was turned away from the Marquis’ door, it is likely that the Marquis’ servants sent for the constable, Joseph Brown, to catch Preston and his accomplices in the act of writing another letter at the Cherry Tree tavern in Southgate. This letter threatened to expose the ‘unnatural freedom’ the Marquis had taken with Preston unless he provided for him and his supposed wife, Quinn. According to this last letter, the Marquis’ servants may have suspected their employer to have been a victim of extortion and forestalled the inevitable accusatory letter Preston sent: ‘I have sent several before, and could not get any answer from your Lordship, for I suppose your servants have kept them, and


you have not seen them.’ Although we must be wary of judging from the evidence of a convicted extortionist, Preston’s letter shows that servants occupied an ambiguous position; they could be loyal and sensitive to their employer, or unscrupulous by poking into their secrets.5 But perhaps one of the most important cases involving the extortion of the nobility is that of Walpole’s own brother, Sir Edward Walpole.6 Walpole was accused by John Cather, a young man who had been recommended to him while staying in Dublin, of battery with the intent to commit sodomy. When Cather came to London, he was employed in Edward Walpole’s household and then later discharged. Walpole asked for an open hearing and he seems to have wanted to have made Cather an example to deter other potential extortionists. He went so far as to hire a private detective, James Worsdale, who was an actor and cross-dressed as a woman to find evidence against Cather and his supposed associates.7 What is particularly notable is that throughout the case Horace Walpole remains fairly inconspicuous. Although he produced his journal entries as evidence when testifying at the trial against one of the accused, he makes no mention of the trial itself or even his brother in any of his letters. As Goldsmith indicates, it is possible that Edward desired young men.8 We are only left with speculation and suspicion as to why Horace makes no mention of his brother or the trial in his letters. A popular text about extortion between two men in the eighteenth century that Horace Walpole was aware of is the Love Letters between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr Wilson; this was published anonymously in 1723 and later in 1745.9 The relationship between extortion and the closet, and the extremes men will undertake to resist even the suspicion of sodomy are foregrounded in this text. In his essay that attempts to separate out the facts and fantasy of the Love Letters, G.S. Rousseau argues that Walpole was aware of the historical basis for the text, although Walpole was evasive on the precise dates and details: ‘Even Horace Walpole, who continued to disguise the nature of his sexuality in old age when there was little reason for doing so given the reclusive manner in which he lived at Strawberry Hill, blurrily remembered the events of 1694 almost a hundred years later.’10 The ‘facts’ of 1694 read like a prototype of a Gothic novel, not least because they cannot be proven. According to Rousseau’s evidence from the letters of the writer DelaRivière Manley, Elizabeth Villiers, a mistress of William III, met Richard ‘Beau’ Wilson in a London park and subsequently on several occasions, supporting him in a luxurious


lifestyle. She always arranged to meet him veiled, but one day he tore off her veil to discover who she was. The unveiling outraged her so much that she arranged to have him murdered by John Law (a corrupt Scottish financier) in a duel. There was no suggestion in 1694 of Wilson having been supported as a catamite by a nobleman, or of his having any sexual relations with John Law. In a letter to the Earl of Buchan who was writing a history of the biographies of prominent Scottish figures, Walpole refuses to substantiate for Buchan any possible homoerotic connection between Law and Wilson: I cannot contribute anything of consequence to your Lordship’s meditated account of John Law. I have heard many anecdotes of him, though none I can warrant, particularly that of the duel for which he fled early [ ] I have two or three different prints of him, and an excellent head of him in crayons by Rosalba [ ] Law was a very extraordinary man, but not at all an estimable one.11 Whether or not Walpole knew of the Love Letters is not indicated here; he has no comment on Beau Wilson. The rumours could refer equally to Law’s involvement in The South Sea Bubble, a political disaster for the government of Walpole’s father, Sir Robert Walpole, as to any rumours of sexual indiscretion. Even with the remote possibility that Walpole did not know of the Love Letters, the text is illuminating for the representation of extortion between men of different classes in the eighteenth century, and also for how it foreshadows characteristics of Gothic writing. The preface is reminiscent of much Gothic writing in arousing mystery, which is designed to appeal to a popular audience, and creating uncertainty as to whether the letters are real or fictitious: ‘The only Contest among the politer of Mankind will be, Whether the Facts are true, and the letters genuine, or only a fictitious Scene of the worst Sort of Gallantry, and the Product of a mercenary pen’ (12). This deliberately equivocal comment indicates both the implicit homophobic intention of the writer of the letters and the attempt to cover his hypocrisy in recognizing the advantage of creating a discourse of doubt to a scandal-hungry public. The posture of the prevaricating narrator about to reveal a deep, terrible secret is one that is adopted repeatedly within Gothic writing, and one the editor of the letters employs here. The narrator also suggests that there is something unspeakable about how the letters have come to be circulated: ‘How, or by what Means this was done and from what


Hand they are made Publick, is a Point too tender and consequential to relate’ (p. 13). The letters bring to our attention how we might need to give more thought to how powerful the threat of extortion may be as an explanatory factor for the relative invisibility of same-sex desire in comparison to, say, the late nineteenth century. The explanatory appendix in the original edition informs us that the nobleman used a female relation, Cloris, as a ruse to deceive ‘Mrs V-ll-s’ [sic], and that he later brutally attacks Cloris in a park after she threatens him with a gun because he has abandoned her while she is pregnant.12 The argument for reading the letters as fictional, and not real, is strengthened by how they reinscribe and reiterate a misogynist ideology that is displaced onto the queer. The editor or author of these letters reinforces the stereotypical representations of queer men, such as the mollies, who were popularly represented as misogynistic.13 What is more significant for a reading of The Castle of Otranto is how extortion occurs in the gap between the classes, and how positions of power and class are reversible. Both Bianca and Theodore symbolize these possibilities. In Letter IV, the nobleman warns Mr Wilson about a plot by Wilson’s friends to get Wilson drunk so he will reveal the source of his wealth. He is anxious to keep their liaison a secret: ‘Don’t let us meet, nor be seen together ’till this Business is over’.14 Wilson is later bullied with a pistol by a Great Lady to: ‘make me reveal what those private Meetings between us meant’ (p. 20). The nobleman sends Wilson a copy of a letter that has been sent to him (which is not seen by the reader) but which seems to imply from Wilson’s answer in Letter XX that Wilson has been secretly meditating to extort money from his lover. The letter which is sent to the nobleman, probably by the mysterious ‘Mrs V-ll-s’, indicates a manipulation of their respective states of paranoia. The nobleman’s fear of dishonour and his loss of reputation, status and power are played upon by the anonymous writer of the letter who accuses Wilson of planning to practise extortion. To return to the scene in The Castle of Otranto in Chapter two between Bianca and Isabella with this context in mind, Matilda’s use of the word ‘property’ suggests a condemnation of the economic commodification of the secret that the extortionist uses. It also suggests a fear of the closet, of being put into a position of knowledge about another person that makes one vulnerable. When Theodore asks if he can trust Matilda, she replies: ‘Speak boldly, if thy secret is fit to be entrusted to a virtuous breast’ (99), with the implication that if it is of a sexual nature it will compromise Matilda’s ‘virtue’. Theodore is interrupted as he is about to speak by the labourers coming into the fields. There are other similar


moments in the novel where the communication of secrets is deferred. The hermit in the wood at Joppa fails to disclose his secret to Frederic on his deathbed. Later on, Frederic ‘on the ground in a conflict of penitence and passion’ in Hippolita’s oratory after receiving a warning from the ghost of the hermit cannot tell Hippolita what he has learnt: ‘I cannot speak’ (158). The state of unspeakability, and the inability to name the secret, suggests to a queer reader a discourse of the secret as a secret about sexual desires and practices, particularly as sexual relations between men have both legally and culturally been understood as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. The communication of secrets is also represented in Gothic writing as a fearful or unsettling experience. In Chapter four, when Hippolita tells of Frederic’s agreement to Manfred’s idea of marrying Matilda and Frederic, there is the implication that fear and terror are the emotions one experiences when a secret is voiced because one cannot anticipate the substance, which might always be the unspeakable: ‘What art thou going to utter? said Isabella trembling. Recollect thyself, Matilda’ (142). Hippolita suspects that Isabella is in a kind of closet herself over Matilda’s secret: ‘thou art conscious to this unhappy secret, whatever it is. Speak ![sic]’ (142). One of the most important ways in which we can read the novel as queer is that The Castle of Otranto represents gender as a performative act. Masculinity and femininity, although they appear to be represented as polarized opposites by the stereotypical characterization, are in fact shown to be more complicated on a closer reading. There is a crossing over of masculinity and femininity that is central to understanding the Gothic as queer. In fact, the stereotypical characterization is self-conscious; masculinity and femininity are shown to be artificial constructions and poses that can be assumed. More often than not, for example, masculinity is almost hysterically exaggerated, what I would call hyperbolic gender.15 One can read the novel as demonstrating (implicitly) how eighteenth-century homophobia is concerned with the elimination of effeminacy in male subjectivity. In both the characterization and the movement of the plot we can perceive a reflection of a cultural homophobia about the fear of effeminacy lurking within those men whose masculinity is questionable. Diane Long Hoeveler has argued that the ‘female Gothic’ hyperbolizes a sentimental, naturalistic image of the female as domestic, maternal and embodying self-sacrificing virtues, which exposes the misogynist law of patriarchy but occasionally appears to reinforce it.16 Can this hyperbolism of female characters with its ambivalent political and ideological effects in the ‘female Gothic’ also be applied to male characters? What are the sources and origins for


masculinity displayed in Gothic writing and do those representations subvert or reinforce those sources? Manfred’s displays of his power and authority reflect back on his status as an implicitly homophobic subject. In particular Manfred’s masculinity draws attention to itself; he invites us to see how masculinity works in a dialectical relation to femininity. At the opening of the novel, Manfred’s son Conrad is destroyed by a predominantly masculine symbol, a military helmet. Conrad’s lack of potential as a father is immediately pointed out to the reader as a possible source of dissension between father and son. He is ‘a homely youth, sickly and of no promising disposition, yet he was the darling of his father’ (73). The narrator implies by ‘yet’ that the reverse ought to be true. Manfred should be disappointed by his deficient virility because it borders on effeminacy, denoting physical weakness, but also perhaps the possibility of homoerotic tendencies. Isabella subsequently declares that she was ‘indifferent’ to marrying Conrad. Manfred attributes Conrad’s death to Providence because Conrad does not conform to a kind of masculinity in his physicality: ‘he was a sickly, puny child, and heaven has perhaps taken him away that I might not trust the honours of my house on so frail a foundation’ (22). There is an emphasis on his delicate physicality, with the repetition of ‘sickly’. Manfred, by contrast, proudly pits his virility against Conrad in his proposal of marriage to Isabella: ‘Instead of a sickly boy, you shall have a husband in the prime of his age, who will know how to value your beauties, and who may expect a numerous offspring’ (80). He becomes determined to prove himself to her. The implication of the narrative is that Manfred will rape her if he catches her in the vaults or if he can persuade her to return from the convent to the castle. If we turn to the characterization of femininity, we can explore further the idea that the characterization of Manfred represents an example of internalized homophobia in the eighteenth century, if we consider that to be perceived as effeminate borders on being queer. Initially, in terms of the story and characterization, women and femininity seem to be treated negatively. Hippolita, Matilda and Isabella do not openly challenge Manfred’s authority or cruelty. Matilda for instance allows her mother to believe that Manfred is grieving with ‘manly fortitude’, when in fact he has just told Matilda he does not want a daughter and slammed the bedroom door in her face. Women are described as suffering from the effects of love and terror that are archetypal to the heroines of Sensibility. As G.J. Barker-Benfield points out, such displays of bodily terror contain a sexual frisson for male characters and spectators.17 All three women are reduced to mere


commodities, objects over which tyrants like Manfred and Frederic can squabble in their desire to continue their family lines. Manfred asserts the law of patriarchy when he tells the friar Jerome: ‘I do not use to let my wife be acquainted with the secret affairs of my state; they are not within a woman’s province’ (102). The homosocial bonding between men that underpins the patriarchal structures of inheritance and property is dependent upon mystification and secrecy, from women. Manfred’s ‘state’ has as much a personal as a political resonance here for the queer reader. William Patrick Day has argued: ‘Manfred regards Isabella neither as a person nor even as a sexual object; she is just another human mechanism for the replication and maintenance of his identity and power.’18 If, as Day argues, Manfred rejects the feminine component of his personality while recognizing his dependence on women by requiring Hippolita to give him a divorce and Isabella an heir, then one might read Manfred as a characterization of how one form of homophobia in the eighteenth century is based upon the effeminizing power of women upon men. Running throughout eighteenth-century observations of those convicted for sodomy, or suspected of sodomy, is an attack on effeminacy that shows how the prevalent form of homophobia in the eighteenth century is predicated on misogyny.19 Manfred’s ‘insensibility’ over Conrad’s death confirms his masculinity in refusing to show his suffering. Manfred secrets himself away in his chamber to supposedly weep unobserved. He only impersonates the late eighteenth-century man of feeling, crying before Frederic’s knights in order to persuade them to allow Isabella to remain in Otranto.20 Isabella, Matilda and Hippolita are portrayed as innocent, virtuous, modest and self-sacrificing – the prototype for Ann Radcliffe’s later heroines. The female is persecuted and punished in the novel; she is driven underground, removed to enclosed sanctuary spaces and, in Matilda’s case, dies. When Manfred chases Isabella in the castle, the spectacle of the female subject in distress may satisfy an erotic desire in the narrator and/or male reader. The narrator permits the reader access to the fear she experiences. Isabella is situated conventionally within the tradition of the sexually-persecuted heroine of sentimental fiction whose distress only serves to arouse her persecutor: ‘Yet where conceal herself! How avoid the pursuit he would infallibly make throughout the castle!’ (82). However, one might also read the narrator as sympathetic to her persecution. Matilda voices her protest at Manfred’s ‘disdain’ and ‘causeless severity’ towards Hippolita, both to Bianca and to Hippolita herself: ‘Weep not, my child; and not a murmur, I charge thee. Remember he is thy father still. — But you are my Mother too, said Matilda fervently;


and you are virtuous, you are guiltless! Oh must not I, must not I complain?’ (141). Arguably, the characterization of Hippolita’s hyperbolical femininity produces an ironic effect. The etymology of her name links her with the mythical figure of Hyppolita, a queen of the amazons in Greek myth, serving to underscore the slightly comic effect of her devotional ineptitude to a tyrant; Hippolita is the polar opposite of the quasimasculine female warrior. In Chapter one, Manfred reminds Hippolita cruelly of her sterility, yet she is portrayed as dutiful and deferential to the point of absurdity. In Hippolita’s consciousness, it appears as if she has exaggerated the remembrance of her marriage vows obsessively: ‘he is dearer to me even than my children’ (79). Marriage is exalted above maternal love and even sacrificed to personal suffering, so that it seems to be almost mocked as a state to produce happiness. When Bianca warns Matilda about existing self-sufficiently, one might read Hippolita’s pronouncement ironically, as it is being propagated by Bianca, who is not married herself, and is, supposedly, ignorant: ‘I do not wish to see you moped in a convent, as you would be if you had your will, and if my lady your mother, who knows that a bad husband is better than no husband at all, did not hinder you’ (95). Arguably, it would appear then that the novel depicts the ‘heterosexual’ family and marriage as ultimately flawed and dysfunctional, setting the pattern for later Gothic writing. Matrimony is depicted as rather absurd and redundant for women. Hippolita supposes naively that Manfred is grieving like herself; she does not realize that his only interest is in furthering his ambition: ‘Manfred cannot support the sight of his own family [ ] and dreads the shock of my grief’ (79). It is difficult to ascertain whether this irony implies a contemptuous opinion of women in the blind foolishness of one remaining married to a man who cares nothing for her, or whether such innocence over Hippolita’s own procreative sexual power is to be commended as a virtue. As I have argued above, the misogyny of Manfred can, at one level, be read as an example of how a certain type of homophobia in the eighteenth century is motivated by the increasing presence of effeminacy, which blurs the boundary between masculine and feminine behaviour. Reading the novel with this context in mind theodore is important in this respect. Theodore functions as an uncanny double for Manfred’s past, but he also works against Manfred’s ideas of what it is to be manly because he is, confusingly for Manfred, both a peasant and refined, of a lower status but of a higher status in his feelings. In the latter respect he can symbolize the disrupting presence of the


queer. Raymond Bentham suggests that in Theodore Walpole creates ‘a hero from the sentimental tradition who can function successfully in a rough and violent society’.21 He is certainly not ‘irrelevant’ nor is he ‘alienated from the values of the feminine’.22 He has the most interaction with the female characters, and, after all, he inherits the castle of Otranto. Theodore represents an alternative to the masculinity of Manfred; he possesses the qualities of compassion, softness and honour that are the antithesis to Manfred’s aggressive double-dealing. The narrative events that revolve around Theodore are anchored consistently by the idea of his integrity; he keeps his word, he does the right action by others, so that at a symbolic narrative level he stands for the truth. In the opening scenes, he alerts the community to the resemblance between the helmet and the statue and is punished by Manfred for this ‘outing’. Theodore enters the community and causes disorder. He signifies the racial/class/sexual outsider who enters the bourgeois domestic household and proves ‘uncanny’ by causing that which is hidden to be exposed. Theodore’s class (signalled by his clothes) and his behaviour disturb Manfred. As a peasant he has ‘a mixture of grace and humility’ in defying Manfred that makes him a contradictory figure. We are asked where the borderline is between the act of those in a lower position exposing and criticizing their superiors when they believe them to be acting wrongly, and when this moral purpose becomes a situation for personal or (to return to the idea of extortion) monetary gain. Arguably, the narrator’s sympathy is with Theodore whom Isabella terms a ‘necromancer’, an outcast who is in disguise, and who is treated as a scapegoat for Conrad’s death. The narrator reflects sarcastically on the impossibility of one man moving such a great weight as the helmet. Theodore embodies reversal. He is later discovered to be the son of Count Falconara, now Friar Jerome. When Manfred expects to meet Isabella in the vaults, his expectation is reversed by meeting Theodore instead: ‘What was the astonishment of the prince, when, instead of Isabella, the light of the torches discovered to him the young peasant, whom he thought confined under the fatal helmet!’ (85) [my emphasis]. ‘Astonishment’ connotes speechlessness and unspeakability; Manfred is later ‘staggered’ by Theodore. The power Theodore wields over Manfred, which results in Manfred’s speechlessness and astonishment, is that Theodore threatens to expose Manfred’s masculinity as a façade used to maintain his power. Theodore is substituted into Isabella’s position, so that the gaze of Manfred does not meet the object he anticipates. This reversal of gender can also be read as terrifying because it invokes


the possibility of a homoerotic attraction that cannot be articulated but only registered as ‘astonishment’. Manfred terms Theodore an ‘imposter’, suggesting Theodore’s ability to pose and fool others with an assumed identity. It is likely that this early form of passing was a strategy that queers cultivated to survive, even more so if they were aristocratic because of the threat of extortion. Ironically, it is this very process of posing that Manfred objects to, because his authority and power (those attributes that define his masculinity) are threatened by Theodore’s refusal to confirm his identity. What aspect of his identity, for example his gender, class or sexuality, is not explicitly stated in the text. Theodore is, in effect, a queer body, one which cannot be verified with any certainty. Matilda’s exclamation – ‘I fear, said the princess, I am serving a deceitful one!’ (125) – and Manfred’s accusation of necromancy also suggest that Theodore is allied with the demonic. One characteristic of the demonic is that is continually changes its shape so that it is not readily identifiable; the demonic is also ‘unnatural’, a key word for marking off the sodomitical body in the eighteenth century. Manfred’s threats to extract ‘sincerity’ from Theodore via torture and imprisonment dramatize the condition of the queer subject as persecuted by the power of the State which is determined to verify the queer’s identity. Theodore perhaps expresses best Walpole’s attempt at ‘blending’, which is why he frustrates Manfred’s clearly defined notion of what it means to be a man. Any queer signification he implies is closed finally by his willingness to die for Matilda and his marriage to Isabella. Manfred is symptomatic of how the act of looking becomes symbolic of a kind of masculine-defined prerogative of sexual penetration in the Gothic. Gothic writing dramatizes the fear of secrets haunting its male protagonists. It symbolizes this thematic with a visual correlative, i.e. that characters in Gothic writing are physiognomists and interpret both the looks, and the act of looking of others. Motivations, character and intentions are read from the expressions and looks of others. In Gothic writing, one person is ‘seen’ through by another, they are found ‘out’ through a disguise or a veil being penetrated. This thematic of a penetrating gaze provides a way of thinking through how the gaze and looking inscribe how a homoerotic/homophobic dynamic work in the late eighteenth century. After the wounded Frederic is taken back to the castle, Matilda and Isabella try to interpret the meaning of Theodore’s looks. Matilda reflects: ‘His eyes, it was true, had been fixed on her in Frederic’s chamber; but that might have been to disguise his passion for Isabella from the fathers of both’ (137). The


narrator describes how ‘Isabella, not less restless, had better foundation for her suspicions. Both Theodore’s tongue and eyes had told her his heart was engaged, it was true—yet perhaps Matilda might not correspond to his passion’ (137). Both women attribute sexual desire, ‘passion’, to the process of looking and being looked at. Looking and gazing are also foregrounded to have the capacity for misinterpretation. Matilda suspects that she is not the real object of Theodore’s gaze, but that he gazes as a deflective tactic against the scrutinizing looks of Frederic and Manfred. Matilda’s deduction that looks have the capacity to be used as a means of concealment and can be misinterpreted should be remembered when we read that Isabella’s ‘suspicions’ have a more solid foundation in seeing Theodore’s ‘eyes’ as confirming his love. There is an implication that we are to read Isabella’s belief in the power of reading the gaze as confirming love or desire cautiously. To return to how we might think about the novel in the context of the extortion of queer desire, the novel also implies that to be secretly watched over, as for example by an invisible supernatural force, is particularly terrifying for men in positions of power. When the sable plumes of the giant’s helmet wave backwards and forwards, Isabella tells Manfred: ‘Look my lord! see Heaven itself declares against your impious intentions’ (81). The supernatural occurrences such as the massive sabre that magnetically clings to the helmet, the statue of Alfonso that drips blood, and the reports of the giant hand and leg in the castle all terrify Manfred. The interpretations given by his servants suggest that he is being watched invisibly by another male, either Alphonso the Good, or God. Jerome warns him that heaven ‘will continue to watch over’ Isabella. The metonymic instances of Manfred’s secret past are those of the supernatural armour and the dismembered body of Alfonso, both of which are phallic in their associations. The armour reflects Manfred’s terror at the prospect of the exposure of his masculinity in contrast to a stronger, more virile version represented by the supernatural.23 Beyond the supernatural as terrifying per se, it can be argued to represent a cultural fear of the male being watched by another unidentifiable being. The sword, foot and hand are all phallic signifiers that cause terror and alarm, as for example in Bianca where her comparison is significantly left unspeakable: ‘as big, as big’ (154). To be the subject of the gaze that attempts to penetrate into the heart of an identity or uncover the ‘true’ or ‘natural’ face of a subject is also a phenomenon that occurs with the social pastime of the masquerade in the eighteenth century. There is an overarching narrative present in


The Castle of Otranto about how the representation of secret identities and desires that need to be uncovered, exposed and often punished links in with how Romantic period homophobia operates. First, the ways in which disguise and reversal are used in Gothic writing can provide a way of reading queerness in the eighteenth century. If we think about Walpole’s novel according to how the masquerade functioned in aristocratic eighteenth-century social life, this connection underscores further the queerness of the novel. The masquerade’s importance as a performative, public spectacle that simultaneously licensed the opportunity for secret meetings between men who could express their desires under the cover of appearing as women should not be underestimated in any discussion of same-sex desire in this period. In terms of the masquerade’s aesthetics, and the costumes people frequently dressed up in, Gothic writing is similar to the spectacle of the masquerade in its tendency towards flamboyant exaggeration. Terry Castle comments how social, sexual and class identities were problematized even further by the phenomenon of the masquerade: ‘The true self remained elusive and inaccessible – illegible within its fantastical encasements.’24 The suggestion is that the whole structure and experience of the masquerade was based on a kind of an open secret where individuals could fantasize, and, sometimes, act out their desires safely. The potential for sex, gender and desire to be mistaken created an eroticized fear that is not dissimilar to the tension surrounding bodies without a confirmed identity found in Gothic writing. The types of characters that were impersonated at masquerades could quite easily be found inhabiting the pages of Gothic novels: ‘Witches, conjurors, demons, hermaphrodites and druids and other more or less marvellous beings crowded eighteenth-century masquerade rooms; the Devil was a ubiquitous presence.’25 This particular choice to impersonate supernatural beings may have derived its source from the popularity of the Gothic, especially as the enjoyment of reading Gothic crossed all classes of reader. The reversal of gender was a very important part of the pleasure of the masquerade. It offered its participants who crossed over from masculine to feminine and vice versa the opportunity to temporarily explore desiring their own sex with their ‘real’ identity invisible. In Gothic writing, the act or moment of a reversal overturns and unbalances truths and supposedly established certainties. To those who are witnesses to the reversal of an identity, this induces self-doubt and questioning because they are forced to renegotiate their own identity position. Perhaps the key emotional effect of reversal that is present in The Castle of Otranto


is the fear of betrayal. This is the founding basis of Manfred’s original secret and the backstory of the novel. Ricardo (who poisoned Alfonso the Good) was Alfonso’s chamberlain. As well as meaning a person who manages the private chambers or household of a nobleman, ‘chamberlain’ can also mean someone who is a personal attendant of a king or aristocrat in the space of the bedroom. The post of a chamberlain to a nobleman is one of those intimate positions in the bedroom space between two men that is also shared by the valet, or the personal manservant. As his chamberlain, Ricardo might be privy to a knowledge of sexual secrets that might include same-sex desire between valets and nobleman, especially in the context of the Love Letters I discussed above. As well as suggesting political treachery, Ricardo’s betrayal could also encompass the potential for blackmail in his homosocial intimacy with Alfonso and his knowledge of any bedroom secrets. Reversals of gender occur throughout the novel: Manfred expects to catch Isabella in the vaults and instead finds Theodore; Theodore later believes he follows a man in the caverns and comes across Isabella. Fear is experienced in the reversal of these anticipations. In Chapter five, when Frederic goes to look for Hippolita, he sees instead an unidentifiable figure whose gender he is not entirely sure of: ‘As he approached nearer, it seemed not a woman, but one in a long woolen weed, whose back was towards him’ (156). Turning round the figure reveals itself to be the spectre of the hermit in the wood at Joppa. The point of ‘turning slowly round’, or reversal, is dramatized as the origin for terror, and the turn works as a symbol for the general pattern of extreme reversals of identity, as in Manfred’s turn from sexual predator and patriarch to celibate and outsider. The effects of reversal are both tragic, for Manfred who retreats into convent to do penance, and emancipatory, for Theodore who claims the castle as his property. Reversal also represents the disappearance, or a vanishing of something that once existed but cannot in the present be proven to have been a reality. Those who witness the supernatural are represented as hysterical and delusional because it is an experience which requires ocular proof to be believed by others. They are isolated in their own belief. After the ambiguously-gendered figure of the hermit turns round, and then disappears, we are told that Frederic’s ‘blood froze in his veins’; he falls ‘prostrate on his face before the altar’; weeps ‘a flood of tears’, and lays on the ground in ‘a conflict of penitence and passion’ (157). When Hippolita discovers him she misinterprets Frederic’s ‘transport’ to relate to herself, ‘I see thou feelest for me’ (158). She has not seen the spectre so she cannot understand the real cause for his passion. When Theodore


offers to investigate the reports of the servants about the appearance of the enormous pieces of armour in the castle, Manfred replies, ‘I am so circumstanced, that I dare trust no eyes but my own’ (90), suggesting he will only believe what he can see. Robert Miles has explored the relationship between the concept of ‘ideal presence’, an idea that was formulated by the Scottish philosopher and lawyer, Henry Home, Lord Kames, in Elements of Criticism (1774), and how Gothic writing seems to transform the morally instructive purpose of ideal presence.26 Miles views Horace Walpole, William Beckford and Matthew Lewis as ‘sexual dissidents’ resisting the ‘flow of power’ between the subject and the civilizing, improving experience of ideal presence as it is generated by art forms, notably reading and the theatre. He comments: The recurrence of these writers to the instabilities of the ‘male gaze’ represent discursive interventions standing against ideal presence. Their texts mimic Kames’ mechanism of moral impression, but for doubtful ends. One of the reasons why these texts may seem so uncertain and irresolute is that their object is hidden from us. Their visual sabotage may appear to have no purpose beyond baiting the bourgeoisie. However, the picture changes once we accept that ideal presence encodes a normative model of subjectivity, one deeply implicated in those eighteenth century discursive practices which sought to stabilize the civil subject.27 The implication of Miles’s argument is that because of their marginalized subjectivity, and their resistance to a ‘normative model’ of subjectivity, the concept of ideal presence is disrupted for the reader by how these texts parody ideal presence through how the supernatural works. This argument suggests that Walpole, Beckford and Lewis are self-consciously and even actively queer, i.e. ‘sexual dissidents’ mimicking the structures of bourgeois culture in their art, than my reading of them would allow for. It is, of course, difficult to say how far these writers consciously thought of themselves in a way that we might now call queer, particularly as the problem of how we can, or should, read a text according to authorial intentionality arises. There is a further complication in that Walpole and Beckford participate in, even shape perhaps in Walpole’s case, polite eighteenth-century culture.28 The instability of the male gaze often occurs around the encounter with the supernatural, as for example when Manfred is terrified by seeing the pieces of armour, and the example quoted above with the character of Frederic. Miles compares the effect of the supernatural in Walpole, Beckford and Lewis’s


writing to Etienne Gaspard Robertson (who made the Phantasmagoria shows popular) and argues that their use of the supernatural corrupts the educative purpose of ideal presence, because the supernatural is presented as a deception, and, like the phantasmagoria shows, an illusion manipulating the spectator for economic gain.29 I would argue that the representation of the supernatural as deceptive goes beyond a wish to exploit readers’ pockets and suggest that these works enlighten us as to how illusion and deception function in understanding the eighteenth century’s fascination with wider forms of what is invisible, such as same-sex desire. The use of the supernatural in The Castle of Otranto works against a normative view of gender relations by suggesting that masculinity and femininity are reversible, and almost interchangeable. The panic and fear this causes in the male spectator, and by extension the reader, can be related to a concomitant social need to define and stabilize gendered behaviour, and by extension to suppress and regulate unorthodox desires. The points of reversal and revelation in the narrative also function to confirm or confute narratives that have proliferated around unidentifiable or mysterious male bodies that may have something to hide. The Castle of Otranto implies an anti-homophobic attitude to the destructive effects of gossip and speculation about social reputation, and to how paranoia functions. It suggests that these oral stories are uncontrollable once they are set in motion. Jerome manipulates Manfred’s jealous suspicion that Theodore is Isabella’s lover in order to prevent Manfred’s plan of marrying her: ‘With this unhappy policy, he answered in a manner to confirm Manfred in the belief of some connexion’ (107) [my emphasis]. Manfred in turn manipulates Frederic’s knights to retain his hold over Isabella: ‘Is it possible, sirs, continued the prince, that my story should be a secret to you?’ (121). He is discovered to be concealing information when one of the friars reveals that Isabella is staying in the convent to claim sanctuary from Manfred’s pursuit. However it is Bianca, originally a peasant before becoming a lady-in-waiting to Matilda, who is portrayed as the principal manipulator of stories and rumours. Bianca plots the fragmented accounts of the supernatural armour by Manfred’s servants, Diego and Jaquez, into a coherent, but embellished narrative that gives her a measure of authority. Bianca represents a dissident voice and the fear of the power differential between the classes being dislodged in favour of the servant class, in accessing the secrets of their masters and mistresses with the consequent potential for exploitation and blackmail. Could these secrets encompass the possibility of the discovery of same-sex desire? In an oblique way, via the rhetoric of straight courtship


and incest, we can understand the narrativization of secrecy which we can then extend to think about same-sex desire. Bianca also represents the female equivalent of Ricardo in her potential for betraying Matilda. The bedroom is metaphorically a confessional as well; Bianca implores Matilda to confide in her – ‘Oh dear madam, cried Bianca, what were they?’(96) – and is criticized on the grounds that she is not really a part of the family. The sexual life of others also forms the grounding basis of Bianca’s narrativization of what happens, particularly with Theodore and Isabella. Her maxim, ‘A by-stander often sees more of the game than those that play’, has sinister implications for the prospect of bodily and verbal signs being misconstrued and used against the players. Interestingly, Bianca’s repeated exclamation of ‘I accuse nobody’ works against itself rhetorically so that the implication of a pre-marital sexual encounter does indeed fall on Isabella and Theodore, which even Matilda begins to believe. The narrator indicates how suspicion progresses insidiously through Bianca calling into question Isabella’s motives and identity: ‘No, no madam; my lady Isabella is of another guess-mould than you take her for. She used indeed to sigh and lift up her eyes in your company, because she knows you are a saint – but when your back was turned –’ (101). Is she a sinner, a whore, a lesbian when Matilda is not actively looking at her? The use of ‘guess mould’ suggests that The Castle of Otranto can be read queerly through the implication that visible sexual identities still may be read uncertainly. Certain bodies and behaviours provoke doubt and suspicion because they can never be completely authenticated. The implications of the concept of the ‘guess-mould’ that Bianca alerts us to are that bodies and looks are not always what they seem to be, and that this can work both for and against the queer body in the eighteenth century. Certain signifiers of sexual orientation also allow for the possibility of concealment in that they can correspond to non-sexual meanings and nothing can be proven or verified. Yet those very signifiers generate suspicion and rumours that are difficult to disprove once they are circulated. These narratives provide the impetus for the paranoid condition that Manfred often displays which culminates in the murder of Matilda, his daughter, in the mistaken belief that Isabella is romantically and sexually attached to Theodore. Throughout the novel Manfred is depicted as susceptible to misconstruing narratives, and supernatural and human signs. When Frederic and his knights arrive at the castle, we are told that ‘he [Manfred] put several questions to them but was answered only by signs’ (119) and he becomes angry and frustrated. Isabella cautions


Manfred against being ‘discomposed’ at ‘the glosing of a peasant’s son’ (134), meaning she fears the effects on Manfred of an artfully misleading interpretation. Previous to the denouément, his conversation with Bianca in Chapter five reveals how any communication becomes distorted to fit his preconceptions that are based on ignorance and fear, the staples of paranoia and panic about the queer body. The secret that Manfred so ardently desires to know is not revealed by Bianca, but she has hinted enough to confirm Manfred’s suspicion that Theodore and Isabella are lovers ‘Indeed! said Manfred: has it gone so far?’ (152). When he thinks he overhears Theodore and Isabella talking in the church of Saint Nicholas his violently jealous reaction is based upon the misinterpretation that they are meeting one another secretly and results in the tragic end of mistaking Matilda for Isabella. The novel’s dynamics show how speculative gossip can function as a powerful instrument to incite paranoia, particularly with Manfred’s response to Theodore’s masculinity whose effeminacy suggests he may be queer. The opening chapter focused upon how biographical interpretations of Walpole’s sexuality offer a way in to read the novel queerly. The precarious situation of upper-class men like Walpole, whose social status might be constantly undermined by the servant class or political rivals like William Guthrie, allows a discursive frame in which to read the theme of secrecy in Gothic writing. Further work could be undertaken to look at how Walpole’s correspondence contains a good deal of gossip which ‘doubts’ the motives and behaviour of those in eighteenthcentury society. Arguably, Walpole attacks his enemies, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with a strategy that he most fears himself: gossip. Gossip about sexual orientation and same sex desire is dependent upon an absence of knowledge and the possibility for the signifiers of gender to be interpreted as ambiguous. The Castle of Otranto reflects those paranoid dynamics of homophobia in the inability to control narratives about the self and to identify the queer body and its desires.

3 Vathek and the Monstrous Queer

Vathek is a hybrid novel that refuses classification. A composite of different genres of late eighteenth-century writing, its flexibility and uniqueness mark it as a text replete with queer potential. Vathek is an Oriental tale, an embellished narrative of a historical figure, and a moral fable. Perhaps best described as a work of the fantastic, it combines different sub-genres of the fantastic.1 The most predominant sub-genre is ‘Gothic’ and I include it under the rubric of Gothic writing while recognizing that the work can adapt itself to different generic expectations and conventions. Elements from both the Oriental genre and Gothic writing could be said to overlap: for example, the monstrous, threatening genii found in The Thousand and One Nights (more commonly known as The Arabian Nights) are supernatural figures and these are found in Gothic writing.2 The ‘inexplicable’ nature of the world of Vathek includes how queer bodies and sexualities are represented and queerness is celebrated but also complicated by an association with evil. A substantial part of Vathek explores the cultural implications of the supernatural and the demonic, central themes in Gothic writing. In addition, the depiction of ambition, evil and monstrosity are also closely associated to the supernatural and the demonic and feature in later Gothic writing such as The Monk and Frankenstein. However, Vathek refuses to fit or conform to any one of these genres, and it is its generic hybridity that is a metaphor for the queerness we find in the novel. As in the discussion of The Castle of Otranto in the preceding chapter, I wish to move away from the psycho-biographical readings of Beckford that have, until fairly recently, dominated the discussion of the representation of sexuality in Vathek.3 To begin with, reading the novel as an intentional expression of Beckford’s sexual desires becomes more difficult when the history of the publication of the novel is considered. 65


Significantly, the English version of the novel was a pirated translation by the Reverend Samuel Henry whom Beckford had employed as a translator while Beckford wrote the novel in French. The questions of ownership, authorship and intentionality (and consequently the production of the text’s meaning) are complicated by this fact. Reading the novel as an expression of Beckford’s own personal desires is risky. Henley’s English edition appeared in 1786, followed by Beckford’s two French editions published in both Paris and Lausanne in 1787 and without the four episodes which Beckford stipulated to his publisher must be included: ‘The question as to which of these editions is the single, authoritative one is not amenable to straightforward answer, and that fact itself suggests that the traditional model of primary author/authority is particularly problematic in this case.’4 Complicating the picture even further is Beckford’s assertion that he wrote the novel in three days which is contradicted by the evidence of his correspondence which suggests he took much longer to compose it. And how much of the novel is the translator Samuel Henley’s? As argued in the introduction, the ‘author’ is often deliberately de-centred in queer readings of a novel’s representation of gender and sexual desires. In some cases, we can infer a close relationship between characterization and a writer’s sexual preferences, but the reading of sexuality itself is problematic in the Romantic period. All the writers chosen for discussion here (except for Godwin) cannot be described in terms that are absolute and abiding which is why they invite the description queer. It is therefore a reductive move to simplify, say, the character of Gulchenrouz to a fictionalized version of William Courtenay that Beckford, as the author, purposely includes in the novel.5 Roberts and Robertson explore how the problems surrounding the authoritativeness of the text as a translation are mirrored in the text’s resistance to interpretation. This focus on interpretation allows us a way into reading Vathek queerly. If ‘ “translation” can be seen as the organizing principle behind the sort of hermeneutic task a reader of Vathek must undertake’, we can include the translation of gender ambiguity and sexual otherness.6 They conclude that ‘experience is radically ambiguous, pleasure and pain coexist, Vathek/Vat(h)ek is a text that marks the uncertain character’.7 Taking this argument one step further, I suggest that one of the ‘associations’ which is connected to translation is the interpretation of the queer body and its desires. If queer means in one sense a movement across and between two borders or poles, then one might compare the queer body to a script or a text that needs to be translated or interpreted, to be understood and ultimately controlled. The theme of translation works as a metaphor for how the signifiers of

Vathek and the Monstrous Queer

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the body, particularly its desires, represent a foreign language that needs translation. Any translation is always an act of loss or addition in relation to its original meaning. The translation always calls into question the sense of a real, original meaning. Rather like the queer body complicates and causes us to question the authenticity of gender. Because translation borders on creativity there is the potential for ambiguity and embellishment. In the ever-widening gap between the translations, the original text and any sense of an authentic, original signified the stability of an interpretation of a text, an identity or a body is never assured. The sabre with the constantly changing characters is the most powerful symbol of this. Characters (in both senses) frustrate Vathek’s attempts at interpretation. Vathek boldly states: ‘I have skill enough to distinguish, whether one translates or invents.’8 The implication is that translation or interpretation always contains the possibility of a degree of invention and performative creativity. The invitation by Vathek is a call to anyone to prove their powers of translation in a public forum with an audience. The act of translation as performance provokes doubt as to what is original and authentic, both in bodies and in texts. In fact, Vathek’s professed power of discriminating translators from inventors is a defensive posture on his part. Vathek is powerless to know if the Indian’s tale is authentic or not because he is offered conflicting translations. Vathek claims to know the ‘true’ interpretation beforehand. His resistance, his absolutist desire for a translator to reveal the empirical truth on the sabres, is symptomatic of a rationalist, eighteenth-century need for gender, sexuality and race to be clearly outlined and signified for the maintenance of patriarchal power. In this context, the issue of the signature as a proof of one’s identity in the eighteenth century is pertinent. Paul Baines’ study of the parallels between economic and literary forgery shows how the need to control and punish forgery can be linked to the need to safely demarcate identity in the eighteenth century: ‘Alongside the perennial search for monetary authenticity, the goal of the inimitable note, there ran the need for a perfect, unassailable touchstone of human identity against which all falsifications could be measured.’9 The multiplicity of potentially conflicting interpretations created by the symbolic and the fantastic in Gothic writing mirrors the fear of those queer bodies whose gender or sexuality cannot be easily read and who remain suspicious. In Vathek, ‘the Indian’ or Giaour who brings the sabre embodies an identity that cannot be translated or verified, and therefore signifies a queerness in his resistance. The character of the Indian/Giaour is formulated in terms of the monstrous. His corporeality inspires repulsion: ‘a


man so abominably hideous that the very guards, who arrested him, were forced to shut their eyes, as they led him along’ (31). In the lurid description of the Indian, his body is described as being disproportionate and in terms that characterize him as monstrous and terrifying: The man, or rather monster, instead of making a reply, thrice rubbed his forehead, which, as well as his body, was blacker than ebony; four times clapped his paunch, the projection of which was enormous; opened wide his huge eyes, which glowed like firebrands; began to laugh with a hideous noise, and discovered his long amber-coloured teeth, bestreaked with green. (32) The Indian’s body implies that monstrosity is linked to hybridity and disproportion, as well as inflecting monstrosity as racial difference. However there are other conceptions of monstrosity in the eighteenth century which suggest that the authenticity of identity is constantly challenged by how bodies look and behave. Marie Hélène Huet discusses how in the eighteenth century theories and fantasies of monstrosity were often related to questions of sexual identity and kinship, particularly around hermaphroditism.10 Huet quotes the widespread belief that unfaithful wives in the eighteenth century, by the force of their imagination, could produce a child who resembled their spouse: ‘Thus though the monster was first defined as that which did not resemble him who engendered it, it nevertheless displayed some sort of resemblance, albeit a false resemblance, to an object external to its conception.’11 The idea of resemblance in the heteronormative family then became dubious as a means of proving the existence of one’s identity. Gothic writing often presents us with narratives where we finally discover each family member and their ‘real’, occasionally monstrous relationship with one another. These theories of monstrosity reinforced the prevailing opinion that sex difference was essentially natural and the order of things. The monstrous is transgressive and unnatural because it blends those categories that should be classified as distinct. During the latter part of the eighteenth century there was a marked interest in the monstrous, with even a society devoted to investigating the concept.12 The identification and stigmatization of queer bodies, in for example the mollies (as I will show further below), is often described as ‘monstrous’. The man who desires other men but who can also imitate and even, in some cases, simulate femininity calls into question the authenticity and stability of masculinity or femininity.13 This kind of body fuses and juxtaposes signs


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that are, ordinarily, to be kept separate. ‘Queer’ suggests a discontinuity between sex and gender. For instance when the Indian finally relieves Vathek’s thirst, the narrator juxtaposes both images of death and beauty onto the Indian’s body: ‘In the transports of his joy, Vathek leaped upon the neck of the frightful Indian, and kissed his horrid mouth and hollow cheeks, as though they had been the coral lips and the lillies and roses of his most beautiful wives’ (37). There is an implication here that this act is both unnatural and monstrous. Vathek should not be kissing the Indian both because he is male and because he is physically monstrous. Judith Halberstam perceives monstrosity as a metaphor for constructing subjectivity and the fear generated by monsters as linked to identities that cannot be reduced to any one form: ‘the production of fear in a literary text (as opposed to a cinematic one) emanates from a vertiginous excess of meaning’.14 Throughout the eighteenth century the term ‘monstrous’ was used as a constructive synonym for the bodies and desires of queer men, particularly by evangelical Christian writers. Above all, it was the idea of using one’s body improperly that gave the most offence: ‘in using his orifice ‘improperly’ he became more monstrous still, a sodomite’.15 Monstrosity was clearly connected with the creation of the unnatural body (such as the hermaphrodite) or the use of bodily parts and organs in what were perceived to be inverted or reverse ways. Certain eighteenthcentury journalists and commentators often vehemently perceive samesex desire to be expressive of the monstrous, and demand its punishment in biblical terms of the exodus of people: ‘such casting out of Sodomites is demanded by the voice of reason and nature; for they counteract the foundation laws [sic] of all human society; [ ] No monstrous births are equally hateful and offensive’16 . ‘Monster’ and ‘monstrosity’ become ritualized terms of fanatical abuse and a way of linking samesex desire to the unnatural and to the demonic. A poem appended to the pamphlet, Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy (1749) by ‘a gentleman commoner’, shows how the queer body is thought to be monstrous. The body that provokes such amazement and outrage is not a specific individual nor an identifiable social group, such as the mollies. Instead, it is implied that the person described is one of the ‘pretty fellows’ whose ubiquitous presence, effeminacy and ambiguous sexuality is denounced in the eighteenth-century London press. The writer of this pamphlet and poem is particularly disturbed by the difficulty of reading his gender: I stand amaz’d, and at a loss to know To what new species thou thy form


Dost owe? [ ] Thou appear’st to humane eyes, Like some ape of monstrous size; [ ] Thy oddities so much my mind perplex; I neither can define thy kind or sex. Art thou substance, art thou shade? That thus mounst’rouly [sic] array’d, Walking forth in open day Dost our senses quite dismay?17 The typological designation of ‘species’ indicates how same-sex desire was thought to be monstrous because, in an abstract sense, it consisted of two mutually separate categories or species such as male and female. The discontinuity of the narratives of Gothic writing like The Castle of Otranto and Vathek signals a textual monstrosity that plays with the reader. We are taken from one story strand to another and then back again; coherence is sacrificed to gaps, interruptions and the deferral of information. Vathek embraces the genre of the fantastic wholeheartedly, in that the representation of excess ranges in its effects from sublime fantasy to horror. And excess is nearly always connected to the body in Vathek, often transforming the body into an example of the monstrous. While staying in the Emir Fakreddin’s palace, the Emir invites Vathek to join him and his attendants at prayer. For a modern, twenty-first century readership this particular episode is problematic. We are told that Vathek enjoys ‘the multitude of calendars, santons, and derviches who were continually coming and going’ (63). However, he is particularly fascinated by the ‘bramins, faquirs, and other enthusiasts’ (63–64), all members of various Indian religious sects. The display of their individual ability to withstand excessive bodily pain is conceived of as monstrous; for example, ‘There were some amongst them that cherished vermin, which were not ungrateful in requiting their caresses’ (64). Vathek’s sado-masochistic personality is fascinated by the endurance of bodily pain these travellers undergo. Babalouk views them as monstrous and, in a language that is reminiscent of eighteenth-century pamphleteers on sodomy, calls for their destruction in terms reminiscent of the fire and brimstone preachers in the British press: Your majesty should be cautious of this odd assembly; which hath been collected, I know not for what. Is it necessary to exhibit such


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spectacles to a mighty potentate, with interludes of talapoins more mangy of dogs? Were I you, I would command a fire to be kindled, and at once rid the estates of the emir, of his harem, and all his menagerie. (64) The ‘odd’ assembly – can this be extended to suggest a possibly queer crowd? – assembles for unseen, invisible purposes or pleasures. Babalouk’s proposal for an auto da fé is thus sinister. Although Vathek reproves of Babalouk’s fearful intolerance by claiming that ‘all this infinitely charms me’, both his attitude and the narrator’s is no less intolerant than Babalouk’s, particularly in his mockery of the religious convictions of those he meets: These rambling fanatics revolted the hearts of the derviches, the calendars, and santons; however, the vehemence of their aversion soon subsided, under the hope that the presence of the Caliph would cure their folly, and convert them to the mussulman faith. But, alas! how great was their disappointment! for Vathek, instead of preaching to them, treated them as buffoons, bade them present his compliments to Visnow and Ixhora, and discovered a predilection for a squat old man from the Isle of Serendib, who was more ridiculous than any of the rest. (64) Reading Vathek, we might sense that the novel embraces, and even celebrates the monstrous for its own sake. However, this parade of religious ascetics from a variety of faiths as monstrous, because of their excess, sits uncomfortably with a gallery of those with physical disabilities: ‘At noon, a superb corps of cripples made its appearance; and soon after advanced, by platoons, on the plain, the completest association of invalids that had even been embodied till then’ (64). It is difficult to judge the tone of the writing here. Is the novel celebrating the diversity of humanity, including queer desires? Or is this another example of Fakreddin’s excessive generosity in contrast to Vathek’s selfcentredness? The ‘cripples’ are displayed after all to ‘extol the munificence of Fakreddin’ (64). At this point, the subtle suggestion that there is an element of freakish display is perhaps out of sympathy with a twenty-first century viewpoint of understanding and inclusiveness.18 Although there seems to exist an undercurrent of the enjoyment of breaking down the boundaries between reality and fantasy through the display of excess, this pleasure is problematic. Those who transgress boundaries, both physical and cultural, are ridiculed and often punished.


The Indian, for example, is a racial and social outsider, travelling from a region of India that is ‘wholly unknown’ (37). His ability to travel beyond boundaries and his physical mutability is a source of wonderment and terror. The Indian transgresses socio-cultural laws in that he refuses to submit to the will of Vathek’s gaze and to his authority. Metamorphosing himself into a self-propelling ball, his superhuman power enables him to defy Vathek. He leads him and his people like a magnet to the gulph of Catoul where he cannot be caught or contained. Refusing to name himself at Vathek’s command, he proves a challenge to Vathek’s power, because Vathek cannot penetrate or fix his fluid identity: ‘tell me who he is, from whence he came’ (32). The sabres the Indian brings with him, with their continually changing hieroglyphs, function as a metonym for how the demonic and evil are shown to operate. The hieroglyphs continually change their characters, a characteristic that is central to the ideology of the demonic.19 Inscribed or floating on the portal of the subterranean palace, the letters continuously alter their shape so no final signified can be attributed to them, which infuriates Vathek and cause him to lose his self-control, a sign of his masculinity. The signs that defy interpretation actually weaken him physiologically, challenging his masculinity: ‘The perplexing occupation inflamed his blood, dazzled his sight, and brought on such a giddiness and debility that he could hardly support himself’ (35). Vathek experiences dizziness and disorientation in looking upon the monstrous subject. The Giaour, an agent of Eblis and represented in monstrous human form by the Indian, offers Vathek the treasures of the pre-adamite sultans in a language of eroticized courtship calling him his ‘beloved’ (36) and asking ‘ “Wouldest thou devote thyself to me?” ’ (22), a phrase that is evocative of a kind of marriage. His stipulation for Vathek to obtain these treasures is that ‘I require the blood of fifty children’ and that they must be ‘the most beautiful sons of thy vizirs and great men’ (42) [my emphasis]. Vathek has to interpret who is the most physically attractive of his young male subjects. The scopophilic eye of the narrator suggests an erotic pleasure in the description of the scene: ‘The fifty competitors were soon stripped, and presented to the admiration of the spectators the suppleness and grace of their delicate limbs’ (43). In this pseudostriptease Vathek is positioned like a male pimp, serving to help the Devil: The Caliph, in the meanwhile, undressed himself by degrees; and, raising his arm as high as he was able, made each of the prizes glitter in the air; but, whilst he delivered it, with one hand, to the child,


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who sprung forward to receive it; he, with the other, pushed the poor innocent into the gulph; where the Giaour, with a sullen muttering, incessantly repeated; ‘more! more! (44) The landscape of the ‘yawning’ gulph and the boys being pushed into it is a metaphor for the act of sexual penetration between men. The cannibalistic sacrifice of the Giaour can be readily translated into sexual desire, as the imagery of eating as a displaced sexual desire is established early on. For instance, when the Indian arrives at Vathek’s court, Vathek is disturbed by his voracious hunger which he equates to sexual desire. He implies to Babalouk that he is terrified by the Indian’s fearlessness and hunger: ‘what would be the consequence should he get at my wives!’ (38). The Giaour is specifically linked to the demonic which is terrifying and monstrous. The sacrifice symbolizes an act of sexual desire that connotes the dark, the forbidden, the unknown and the terrible through the image of the bottomless chasm the victims are pushed into. The sacrifice of the 50 boys to the Giaour then acts as a condensed metaphor for anal sex incorporating eighteenth-century associations of sodomy with the demonic and the monstrous. Moreover, any act of penetration is explicitly tabooed in the novel. The eye of the general populace is forbidden to penetrate beyond the veils of the harem, to sexualize the Arabic woman’s body. Vathek’s curiosity to look into things, to build a tower of Babel, is expressly condemned as an ‘insolent curiosity of penetrating the secrets of heaven’ (31). Penetration, in almost any form, is formulated as transgressive. Vathek is afraid of how the Indian threatens to undermine his masculinity. It is implied that he challenges Vathek’s sexual prowess and his control and authority. An example of this is how the Indian meets the gaze of Vathek’s eye which is capable of literally killing his subjects when he gazes upon them. Richard Dyer comments on how the male gaze in film is a discourse through which sexual desire can be asserted and gender norms reinforced: ‘The idea of looking (staring) as power and being looked at as powerlessness overlaps with ideas of activity/passivity. Thus to look is thought of as active; whereas to be looked at is passive.’20 He goes on to argue: ‘it is the taboo of anal eroticism that causes masculine-defined men to construct penetration as frightening and the concept of male (hetero)sexuality as ‘taking’ a woman that constructs penetration as an act of violence’.21 The disembodied voice that Nouronihar overhears which describes Vathek constructs him as ‘masculine-defined’, in that Vathek’s penetrating look (and his height) is connected to an active sexual desire: ‘a prince six feet


high; and whose eyes pervade the inmost soul of a female, is inflamed with love for her’ (70). When Vathek meets Nouronihar for the first time, looking is signalled as a silent language of unspoken desire: ‘He approached Nouronihar with a throbbing heart, and seemed enraptured at the full effulgence of her radiant eyes, of which he had before caught a few glimpses: but she instantly depressed them, and her confusion augmented her beauty’ (70). At the entrance to the palace of subterranean fire, desire transcends the body or the material world through the gaze: ‘they gazed on each other with mutual admiration; and both appeared so resplendent, that they already esteemed themselves spiritual intelligences’ (91). Thus looking between men and women is established as indicating love and desire. By returning the look of Vathek, the Indian disturbs Vathek’s sense of his power which he needs to reassert more strongly and openly. Like Manfred in The Castle of Otranto, Vathek is another example of a hyperbolical masculinity. The excess of his posturing and actions suggests that he is not so assured in his masculinity as he would like others to believe: ‘Up, cowards! Seize the miscreant! See that he be committed to prison, and guarded by the best of my soldiers!’ [ ] No sooner had he uttered these words, than the stranger was surrounded, pinioned and bound with strong fetters, and hurried away to the prison of the great tower; which was encompassed by seven empalements of iron bars, and armed with spikes in every direction, longer and sharper than spits. The Caliph, nevertheless, remained in the most violent agitation. (32) [my emphasis] Even surrounded and imprisoned by such a potently phallic symbolism, Vathek still fears the Indian’s capacity to make him seem ineffectual. When he discovers the Indian is missing, his rage ‘exceeded all bounds’ and he kicks his guards interminably. Is kicking an inherently masculine act? If women kick, are they thought to be behaving like men? There is a sense that Vathek is performing his masculinity for all to see, to instil fear in his subjects and to maintain his power. This performativity also extends to the relationships with his wives. Vathek’s harem is never closed off completely, but rather his sexuality always has an audience that foregrounds the display of his virility. This occurs when Carathis comes across Nouronihar and Vathek in a sexual embrace. However, some of his wives seem to be chosen to test his


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masculinity. When he is forced to touch the soil while crossing the desert from Samarah, the narrator describes how: one of his Ethiopian wives (for he delighted in variety) clasped him in her arms; threw him upon her shoulder, like a sack of dates, and, finding that the fire was hemming them in, set off, with no small expedition, considering the weight of her burden. (56) [my emphasis] Assuming an active, masculine role, this woman suggests that Vathek’s masculinity and sexual interests are more ambiguous than at first appears. When he later sees Nouronihar’s body his reaction is more typical of a swooning heroine from the fiction of Sensibility: ‘With a trembling hand he raised the veil that covered the countenance of Nouronihar, and uttering a loud shriek, fell lifeless on the floor’ (73). Despite declaring that the character of Gulchenrouz has ‘been brought up too much on milk and sugar to stimulate my jealousy’ (77), Vathek is afraid that Nouronihar prefers Gulchenrouz to himself. He is disturbed by how Nouronihar prefers ‘the most delicate and lovely creature in the world’; she appears to reject a masculine identity that he believes women are attracted to. Gulchenrouz is characterized as effeminate and his display of feeling, his qualities of tenderness, softness and compassion are attractive to women. The narrator describes him as physically inept: ‘but his arms, which twined so gracefully with those of the young girls in the dance, could neither dart the lance in the chace [sic], nor curb the steeds that pastured in his uncle’s domains’ (66). He faints like a woman and, as Nouronihar informs us, he would not be able to endure the terror she is subjected to: ‘Dear Child! how would thy heart flutter with terror, wert thou wandering in these wild solitudes, like me!’ (69). His typically sensuous and refined accomplishments such as composing poetry, singing, dancing and drawing arabesques are expressive of his sensibility. While his natural father is away on a ‘voyage’ he is raised in the harem within the company of women. We can read Gulchenrouz within the discussion about the nature of effeminacy that predominated in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Gulchenrouz has all the characteristics that were perceived to define effeminacy but also men of feeling who were not necessarily queer.22 In the interrelationship between Vathek, Gulchenrouz and Nouronihar, the novel can be read alongside late eighteenth-century discussions about how effeminacy marks either an asexualism or a childlike innocence, and is imbricated with suspect sexual desires. The relationship between Gulchenrouz and Nouronihar is more maternal and


sensual; it is essentially desexualized. When Fakreddin organizes a staged death to fool Vathek, the text recalls the convention of the feigned death in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. This allusion to Shakespeare’s play romanticizes the innocence and sexual purity of their relationship. Gulchenrouz imagines an Edenic, pre-lapsarian scene with Nouronihar: Gulchenrouz was amused with the delusive hope of once more embracing Nouronihar, in the interior recesses of the mountains, where the ground, strewed over with orange blossoms and jasmines, offered beds much more inviting than the withered leaves in their cabin; where they might accompany with their voices, the sounds of their lutes, and chase butterflies. (78) What is imagined in Gulchenrouz’s childlike fantasy is an Arcadian scene that is erotic in its appeal to the senses, and romantic in its sensibility. It is however a delusion. There is an implication that Gulchenrouz has experienced sexual desire for Nouronihar: ‘for he was now persuaded he should actually be damned for having taken too many little freedoms, in his life-time, with his cousin’ (87). But Gulchenrouz’ ‘heterosexuality’ still arouses suspicion. This suspicion resides in the ambivalence about Gulchenrouz which is signified by his transvestism. The narrator observes how ‘when Gulchenrouz appeared in the dress of his cousin, he seemed to be more feminine than even herself’ (67). His gender reversal in his cross-dressing repulses Vathek: ‘as if it were less an honour for you to espouse the sovereign of the world, than a girl dressed up like a boy!’ (77). Vathek reverses Gulchenrouz’ sex – from boy into ‘girl’ – indicating his sense of confusion to Nouronihar even more pointedly. Carathis also implies that Gulchenrouz’ effeminacy is a sexual attraction for the Giaour: ‘This [sic] is nothing so delicious, in his estimation, as the heart of a delicate boy palpitating with the first tumults of love’ (83). The gender ambiguity of Gulchenrouz has been read as both morally dubious and affirmatively subversive.23 The subversive quality of Gulchenrouz lies in the confusion he causes over whether he is masculine or feminine. His ability to disturb Vathek’s unquestioned perception of heterosexual relations supports a reading of him as queer. It is specifically his ambivalence – that he might be asexual, a lover of his own sister and might be mistaken for a girl all at the same time – that asks for him to be nominated as queer. Transvestism is also the mode for reading how the relationship between two princes in one of the ‘Episodes’ of Vathek is queer.24


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In ‘The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah’, an obsessively destructive relationship develops between prince Firouz who is a refugee in the protection of prince Alasi, while Firouz’ father fights Vathek’s troops who are supporting the rebels in his city. We discover that Firouz is in fact Firouzkah, and that she has been brought up as a boy because her father’s advisors feared a rebellion if the King Filanshaw did not produce a male heir. Nevertheless, Firouzkah/Firouz persists in performing as male. She lets Alasi see a cameo of herself and then explains that the picture is his twin sister and that she has been kept in hiding since the war with Vathek. The transvestism allows the possibility to read their friendship and attraction as queer. Firouzkah comments: ‘Alasi is insensible to a woman’s charm. It is in the guise of friendship that I must make him feel a woman’s power’ (49). It is after Firouz’ revelation of his sex as female that events take a turn for the worse and Alasi’s damnation is sealed.25 After they find themselves in the Palace of Subterranean Fire for religious persecution and the disfigurement of the Princess Rondabah, Alasi’s bride-to-be, Alasi reflects that Firouz/Firouzkah’s love needed to be masqueraded as friendship: ‘ but Love, which in its own shape would have been repelled, took Friendship’s shape, and in that shape effected my ruin’ (21). So the conclusion we perhaps reach about queer love or desire is a bit pessimistic. Neither a sexualized love (one that would be repelled) nor friendship leads to ‘that divine sojourn in which a happy eternity of mutual love and tenderness may be enjoyed’ (53). In keeping with the ambivalence surrounding Gulchenrouz in Vathek, the ambiguous gender is apotheosized as an ideal. Rondabah, the Princess of Ghilan to whom Alasi is betrothed from birth, possesses the best qualities of both genders: ‘Is it not said that the Princess of Ghilan unites to the fortitude, the courage of a man, all the charms of her sex? What more will you want when you possess her?’ (25). If it is accurate to describe how the implied same-sex desire between Alasi and Firouz/Firouzkah leads to corruption and evil further reinforces a reading of Vathek as a conforming to a conservative ideology of homophobia, then it is also true to say that this episode celebrates the figure who transgresses the gender boundary in Rondabah.26 In the unfinished third episode, ‘The Story of the Princess Zulkaïs and Prince Kalilah’, the theme of inseparability leading to a corruption of values is present again. Similarly, there is the implication that the combination of both features of the sexes from their spending too much time together leads to moral degeneracy. The monomaniacal Emir, Abou Taher Achmed, wishes to control the future and renounces Islam for


a belief in ancient Egyptian magical rites. Determined to bring up his son and daughter as ‘extraordinary beings’ (queer people perhaps?), Zulkaïs and Kalilah cannot endure separation from one another. The natural consequence of this inseparability is, supposedly, incest, with both of them ‘ always with eyes [sic] always looking into each other’s eyes’ (139). Perhaps, unsurprisingly, this unconventional upbringing is later regretted by the Emir. He berates his son’s lack of perceived manliness such as Kalilah’s disinterest for physical activity, in terms that are suggestive that Kalilah may well turn out to be a queer: Must the sun, as it rises and sets, see you only bloom and fade like a weak narcissus flower? . You are now nearly thirteen, and never have you evinced the smallest ambition to distinguish yourself among your fellow-men. It is not in the lurking haunts of effeminacy that great characters are formed; it is not by reading love poems that men are made to fit to govern nations! Princes must act; they must show themselves to the world. Awake! . I see well enough that it is she who is perverting you. (186) [my emphasis] The reference to ‘narcissus’ might remind us that the myth of Narcissus is often taken as a displacement for two men desiring one another, perhaps in an unattainable way. ‘Lurking’ effeminacy brings us back to how effeminates inspired fear, suggesting a shadowy life that is hidden from the eyes of others and not on full display with nothing to hide. The Emir wants to model Kalilah after ‘great characters’, who are active and whose masculinity is on display. Finally his call for him to cease ‘to haunt’ the company of his sister and to ‘Awake’ suggests that Kalilah’s developing effeminacy is vampiric. He is one of the undead whom she has perverted, with all the implications that term has for post-Freudian readers. The debate about the representation of the men of sensibility and effeminacy was largely fuelled by the suspicion that surrounded their sexual desires and practices in the late eighteenth century. This was particularly evident for example with a group of upper-class men who were referred to popularly as the ‘Macaronies’ throughout the 1770s and early 1780s. The ambiguity of these men rested in their physical appearance, dress and mannerisms and in their cultural interests, for instance an interest in Italian culture, particularly Roman art and history. Some could be taken to be foppish or queer as one writer observes: ‘If I consult the prints, ‘tis a figure with something uncommon in its dress or appearance; if the ladies, an effeminate fop; but if the ‘prentice-boys, a queer fellow with a great large tail.’27 As Rictor Norton explains, these were


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two different perceptions of the same man: one is an ‘effeminate fop’ and the other an ‘effeminate sodomite’. Queer obviously had a semantic currency in the 1770s to denote the reaction of working-class men to men who did not appear to be men, superficially at least. Even if they were married or had mistresses, as many of the macaronis probably did to screen their intense and intimate friendships with other men, or their cruising excursions, effeminate men still provoked suspicion. How they incurred the penetrating eyes of the moral guardians of society is indicated by the following diatribe: but Suspicion, that jealous, troublesome passion. Suspicion is got abroad – the carriage – the deportment – the dress – the effeminate squeak of the voice – the familiar loll upon each other shoulders – the gripe of the hand – the grinning in each others faces, to shew the whiteness of the teeth – in short, the manner altogether, and the figure so different from that of Manhood, these things conspire to create Suspicion; Suspicion gives birth to watchful observation; and, from a strict observance of the Maccaroni Tribe, we very naturally conclude, that to them we are indebted for the frequency of a crime which Modesty forbids me to name.28 Clothing, bodily gestures and movements, even eye contact perhaps, contained the potential for misreading and for ambiguity relating to sexual desire. In William Kenrick’s satire, Love in the Suds (1772), about the famous eighteenth-century playwright-manager David Garrick, we find an observation on the precariousness of the cruising practices that took place in and around St James’s Park: ‘Yet slight the cause of Nyky’s late mishap; Nyk but mistook the colour of the cap: A common errour, frequent in the Park, Where love is apt to stumble in the dark.’29 Misinterpretation of desires and intentions or looks is then a common occurrence for men who desire other men. Carter comments on how the sermon writer James Fordyce refers to the macaronis in the 1770s: ‘he [Fordyce] applied the term more generally and more seriously as a label for a faceless, but apparently very real breed of social miscreants’ [my emphasis].30 What Carter means by ‘social miscreants’ here is not explained but most probably refers to men soliciting in public places like St James’s Park. ‘Faceless’ implies a social invisibility and an absence of identity, and suggests that the confusion about reading the body whose desires resisted a secure classification in the eighteenth century is similar to our modern understanding of what it means to be queer.


In his Addresses to Young Men, Fordyce takes a social constructionist view of effeminacy, suggesting that effeminate types of men are the result of upbringing: Such, I am sure, is the natural tendency of the conduct we reprobate; nor can I help thinking, that we often perceive in the nursery the embryos of those distorted beings called fops, fribbles and cox-combs. So at least they were wont to be called: but it is one of our late refinements to give them an Italian appellation.31 [my emphasis] The ‘Italian appellation’ referred to here is the macaroni. A silent suspicion of the existence of a hazy continuum between effeminacy and same-sex desire is also implied by Fordyce: I am in earnest when I say, that the lax nerves, the ludicrous decorations, the affected jargon, the trivial conceits, the courtly simper, the soft insipidity and the unfeeling heart, of the thing now termed a — but no, I will not name it — may generally, in the first instance be attributed to the effects of the nursery.32 The refusal to name the macaroni invokes the idea of unspeakable sin suggesting that Fordyce, as a Christian writer, is perhaps also referring to sodomy. What is revealing is how he anticipates that his argument of a connection between early education, effeminacy and possibly same-sex desire will not be taken seriously by his protest that he is ‘in earnest’. The heteronormative family and how it educates its sons and daughters may be responsible for bringing into society the ‘distorted beings’ that Fordyce and others condemn. ‘Distorted’ brings us back again to the idea of queer as referring to twisting. Effeminacy is also a recurring example in eighteenth-century debates about luxury and one of the central themes of luxury. I would argue that the censorious conservatism, which the novel states about luxurious excess, is also central to shaping Vathek as Gothic writing. Vathek is ultimately conservative in approaching bodies and sexualities that disturb the categories of masculinity and femininity and heteronormative relations. Moral degeneracy of the individual and the state are linked to problematic bodies and desires. Vathek complains to Fakreddin about Nouronihar’s choice of Gulchenrouz as a husband: ‘would you surrender this divine beauty to a husband more womanish than herself; and can you imagine, that I will suffer her charms to decay in hands so inefficient and nerveless?’ (71) [my emphasis]. The physical presence and effect of


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Gulchenrouz’s gender ambiguity would cause Nouronihar’s own body to decay, perhaps a process that invokes the idea of the body becoming a corpse or monstrous-like. Vathek characterizes Gulchenrouz’s body in terms of a degeneration that echoes writing about the effect of luxury on masculinity in the eighteenth century. The Scottish philosopher and lawyer, Henry Home, Lord Kames’s study of the ‘progress’ of various aspects of Western society, Sketches on the History of Man, characterizes luxury as creating an excessive, self-perpetuating desire that causes individual and social morality to degenerate: The luxury of a great city descends from the highest to the lowest, infecting all ranks of men; and there is little opportunity in it for such exercise as renders the body vigorous and robust superfluity of animal spirits, and love of pleasure, form a character the most liable to vice.33 As with eighteenth-century writers who condemned transgressive sexual behaviour, Kames employs an ideology of human development that is founded on an ideology of ‘natural’ behaviour. For example, he argues that marriage arises from how children are necessarily helpless, and that promiscuity in men and women is unnatural compared to the behaviour of animals: ‘pairing in the strictest sense is a law of nature among men as among wild birds and that polygamy is a gross infringement of this law’.34 Within the eighteenth century there was a broad evaluative change in the concept of luxury situated within a political and/or economic discourse to a moral discourse.35 As the century progressed, the term ‘luxury’ came to stand in for what was perceived to be socially undesirable behaviour such as adultery and same-sex desire. Kames’s evaluation of the way luxury leads to immorality is noticeable for how luxury is linked to effeminacy through assumptions that luxury made the male body physically soft, voluptuous and less restrained in its sexual appetite. Berry’s observation points up how this came to be associated with sexual behaviour which went beyond the heteronormative marriage bed: What connects these two concerns [luxury and effeminacy] is the classical link between luxury and effeminacy. While the ancients were, on balance, more concerned with the lack of military virtue exhibited by the effeminate, in the modern period the lack of procreative potency associated with the effeminate came to the fore.36


This concern over sexual behaviour(s) that are not focused on procreativity, and which might displace a social organization centred around marriage and children, is voiced by James Fordyce who characterizes luxury as ‘without limitation and without end’ (115) and: tending to alienate the heart from the company of the wife and worthy, from the duties and joys of domestic life; [ ] to beget a disrelish for virtuous attachments in those that are not married, to supplant affection in those that are, [ ] when this is the case, can you easily conceive a more alarming symptom, or a more fatal perversion.37 [my emphasis] Fordyce warns his readers specifically about adulterous relations as a result of the corrupting force of effeminacy through luxury. However, there is an implied concern over how luxury produces a lack of boundaries that might be connected to the boundaries of the body and the expression of any sexual desires and practices considered to be beyond the pale. There is an unexpressed fear over the regulation of bodies and desires which are characterized by excess. Read in terms of how late nineteenth-century sexologists and psychiatry pathologized same-sex desire, Fordyce anticipates a Freudian ideology of perversion. By contrast, Vathek can also be perceived as an example of the debilitating effects of luxury that Kames and Fordyce discuss. However, luxury does not effeminize him in the sense that we may think that he is attracted to men, even if he is in love with a certain kind of tyrannical, machismo image of himself. We are told that ‘Notwithstanding the sensuality in which Vathek indulged, he experienced no abatement in the love of his people, who thought that a sovereign giving himself up to pleasure, was as able to govern, as one who declared himself an enemy to it’ (30). It would seem then that Vathek’s self-indulgence is not incompatible with ruling the state of Samarah, in contrast to a Kamesian theory that the individuals pursuit of luxury and his effeminacy corrupted the political state at large. Vathek would seem to engage in a fantasy of the public and private spheres being erased for the political leader. However, this is exposed by the narrator to be a naïve aspiration. Vathek abandons Samarah for self-gratification, chaos ensues and he is punished in hell. He neglects the worlds of business and government because of his desire for luxury and sensuality, as expressed by his building the palaces of the five senses. His ability to rule is degraded and enfeebled by the appetite that controls him. Although we are told he ‘rarely gave way to his anger’ (29), this is contradicted by how Vathek is a victim to


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his passions. The implication of sexual degeneracy is present in Vathek’s sacrifice of the 50 boys to the Giaour as a means to gain what he wants. Elfenbein notes that there is an element of seduction between Vathek and the Giaour which contains an erotic charge: ‘an especially bizarre version of the casual homoeroticism endemic to market relations themselves, in which men must attract other men to buy them’.38 Vathek has to lure and seduce his people through a display of luxury. By having a feast, Vathek is able to attract the boys to the edge of the gulph for the Giaour to devour them. Throughout the novel, the moral status of the characters is figured in typically Romantic images of ascension and descension. The narrator ironizes Vathek’s view of his masculinity as morally superior to the effeminacy of Gulchenrouz. Both the fates of Vathek and Nouronihar to end up in hell are predetermined by Allah, whom the narrator permits us, but not Vathek, to overhear in Allah’s judgement of Vathek’s ‘irreligious conduct’ (4). Allah allows Vathek to continue blindly in his pursuit of power by preventing him falling into the chasm after the Indian: ‘an invisible agency arrested his progress’ (40). Vathek’s autonomy, his belief in his own active self-empowerment and ambition, is thus shown to be an illusion. He fails to perceive that his decisions are controlled and determined by a higher destiny. For example he does not interpret his raging thirst as a warning to himself. No less does Nouronihar, who, after following the omen of the moving light, eavesdrops on her potential fate in the dialogue between the two divinities, which turns out for the worse. Her choice of Vathek as a partner proves ironic in that through renouncing Gulchenrouz whom she hears described as a false, inverted version of masculinity, she finds herself condemned with Vathek in a place characterized by excess. Vathek descends the stairway into the subterranean palace of Eblis to damnation, while Gulchenrouz is apotheosized by the Genius and, along with the 50 boys sacrificed to the Giaour, ascends to heaven: ‘Remote from the inquietudes of the world; the impertinence of harems, the brutality of eunuchs, and the inconstancy of women; there he found a place truly congenial to the delights of his soul’ (85). This vision of an innocent, homosocial heaven contrasts with the mutual torment Vathek and Nouronihar experience in the subterranean palace: In the midst of this immense hall, a vast multitude was incessantly passing; who severally kept their right hands on their hearts; without once regarding any thing around them [ ] Some stalked slowly on; absorbed in profound reverie; some shrieking with agony, ran


furiously about like tigers, wounded with poisoned arrows; whilst others, grinding their teeth in rage, foamed along more frantic than the wildest maniac. They all avoided each other, and, though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number, each wandered at random, unheedful of the rest. (92) The pattern of inversion reaches its apex in the descriptions of the palace of Eblis recalling Vathek’s palaces in its vastness. Unrestrained desire is symbolized in the sublime architectural imagery of the palace, the limits of which cannot be seen: ‘all without bounds or limits [ ] all adorned with the same awful grandeur’ (95). Like the continually-changing characters on the sabres, hell is characterized by bodies that are deteriorating physically and psychologically and which cannot be understood by one another. It is not so much sexuality or the direct expression of tabooed sexual desires that is being punished, but those bodies which represent excess and defy understanding, and whose uncontainability might represent the possibility of sexual transgressions too. Vathek does not confine itself to the implication that only queer male bodies are linked to the demonic and the monstrous; it suggests that women can be queer too. Randall Craig argues that: ‘the novel envisions a parity between genders, with the implications that the faults of ambition and pride are not exclusive to masculinity’.39 Carathis, Vathek’s mother, is the first evil female character we find in Gothic writing. As a witch and a necromancer she connotes deviance and a dominant sexuality, traditionally associated with masculinity. Carathis displays ‘masculine’ qualities in the use of her intellect. She is ‘a person of superior genius’ (33). Advising Vathek on how to avoid the anger of the mob, the narrator judges her to be deceptive and dominating: ‘This Princess was so far from being influenced by scruples, that she was as wicked, as woman could be’ (45). The suggestion is that her evil unsexes her like Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare. Her femininity is also inscribed within traditional associations with the demonic. Morakanabad, Vathek’s ‘prime vizier’, is suspicious of her duplicity and her capacity to change her form and shape like the Devil: ‘Nor did he know well what to think of Carathis, who, like a chameleon, could assume all possible colours’ (50). Her ‘cursed eloquence’ is reminiscent of the characterization of Satan by Milton. Described as ‘chastity in the abstract, and an implacable enemy to love intrigues’ (82), Carathis, like Vathek, is also sadistic. Pursuing Vathek to the city of Ishtakar, we are told that ‘Carathis enjoyed most whatever filled others with dread’ (80). She suggests to Vathek the emasculating


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idea of burning the beards of those who feign to interpret the cryptic writing on the sabres. She also enjoys letting poisonous snakes bite her friends and then ‘amused herself in curing their wounds’. Part of her moral depravity is the implied incestuous desire for her son, evident in her extreme rage and hatred for Nouronihar: ‘Thou double-headed and four-legged monster! what means all this winding and writhing? art thou not ashamed to be seen grasping this limber sapling; in preference to the sceptre of the pre-adamite sultans? (82–83) The accusation of monstrosity levelled against Vathek reveals how the manifestation of sexual desire for her son by another woman reflects her own unconscious desire for him. Carathis’s desire is figured in metaphorical terms when we read the description of her lighting a fire at the top of the tower to perform a magical rite on behalf of her son: The oil gushed forth in a plenitude of streams; and the negresses, who supplied it without intermission, united their cries to those of the Princess. At last, the fire became so violent, and the flames reflected from the polished marble so dazzling, that the Caliph, unable to withstand the heat and the blaze, effected his escape; and took shelter under the imperial standard. (47) This event is a metaphor for masturbation: the fire and the ‘cries’ of Carathis can be interpreted as sexual passion. The fact that Vathek cannot watch the ecstasy of his mother suggests that he experiences a sublimated incestuous desire for her. He is rendered passive by it: ‘he fell down in a swoon’ (47). Alternatively, he may need to escape from a situation in which the public expression of female desire supplants male sexuality because he cannot control it. This magical ceremony of Carathis produces a magnificent feast, enabling him to satiate his gluttony. If we accept that eating is established as a metaphor for the satisfaction of sexual desire in the novel, the relationship between Carathis and Vathek takes an incestuous turn, albeit an implicit one. In the palace of Eblis, Soliman Ben Douad tells Vathek a story which is a warning against the potential of men’s excessive desire for women to destabilize male power. Vathek blames his mother for his principles being ‘perverted’ and for his punishment in hell, but should he be blaming Nouronihar according to Douad’s experience? In spite of the moralistic tone of the narrator warning against the transgressive power


of excess, the narrator does not discriminate and suggest blame be apportioned to either men or women: ‘Such was, and such should be, the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds! Such shall be the chastisement of that blind curiosity, which would transgress those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge’ (97). If we can include same-sex desire among ‘unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds’ (120) then the novel would seem to reinforce a conservative, implicitly homophobic stance against same-sex desire. Translation and transgression – the two are related through reading the body of the queer, particularly the effeminate male who baffles the gaze of the reading public and the killing eyes of Vathek. The overarching narrative of Vathek’s story is that an unregulated, private desire that questions the boundaries of a hierarchical order or consumes itself at the expense of the individual or public welfare is destructive. Looking at the novel momentarily as an example of the Oriental genre, one of the key aspects of that genre is that the stories are a displaced reflection or exploration of Western civilization and its fears and concerns. In this way, Orientalist fiction shares similarities to Gothic writing in the act of displacement – Radcliffe, Lewis and Maturin’s novels all take place in displaced settings, even if they are less geographically and culturally distant than the Middle East. Vathek offers a fictionalized engagement with how queer bodies and desires in the late eighteenth century came increasingly to be described in terms of monstrosity. The figure of the Indian and the Giaour are two of the earliest monsters who represent queer sexuality. Vathek’s attempts to decipher the Indian and his sabres with the hieroglyphics reflect the societal vigilance and paranoia of late eighteenth-century society about effeminacy and queer desire. The questions and doubts are those Judith Halberstam identifies: ‘The reading subject (but also the characters and seemingly the writer) of the Gothic is constructed out of a kind of paranoia about boundaries: do I read or am I written? Am I monster or monster-maker? Am I monster hunter or the hunted? Am I human or other?’40 Vathek explores the question of interpreting those identities and bodies that are ambiguous or confusing in their gender. An irreducibility of gender is often formulated in terms of the supernatural and an ideology of evil, and makes the novel Gothic. It suggests an unholy alliance with a homophobic ideology, one which scrutinizes and destroys the queer body that will not permit its desires to be defined and regulated by the authoritarian discourses of law, religion and a heteronormative culture.

4 Camping in the Monastery: The Monk

The Monk (1795) contains just about every conceivable possibility of anti-heteronormative sexual interests: incest, sado-masochism, autoeroticism, necrophilia, voyeurism and same-sex desire.1 Meanwhile, an ambiguously gendered, Cagliostro-like figure destroys the reputation of a symbol of a tyrannical and repressive institution that regulates its members’ sexuality. What more could one ask for? Rosario/Matilda’s infiltration of the monastery, where she temporarily camps out (and camps it up) to tempt the abbot Ambrosio, is queer in the act of appropriating certain gender characteristics to unsettle the patriarchal order. Specifically, Matilda’s gender indeterminacy and her playful manipulation of whether she is male or female and Ambrosio’s perception are the keys to unlocking the queer vault of this most self-consciously shocking of novels. There have been recent attempts to penetrate into this vault by exploring how the initial attraction between Rosario/Matilda and Ambrosio can be read.2 One strand of Clara Tuite’s argument is that ‘not everything is “laid bare” in The Monk. What The Monk does not uncover, what it does not present in “libidinousness minuteness” is the romance plot of monastic male homoeroticism’.3 The reader is left to decipher the descriptions, speeches and characterization of Rosario (or Matilda) and Ambrosio in the opening of the novel before Rosario reveals that he is Matilda. The first description of Rosario emphasizes that there is a ‘Mystery’ surrounding him. The amorphous, shapeless effect of the cowl he wears makes his gender ambiguous for Ambrosio who has no reason to suppose that Rosario is female. However, the reader may be aware of how Gothic writing plays upon Shakespearean conventions and may expect a reversal. We are told that ‘He seemed fearful of being recognized, and no one had ever seen his face’ (42). Timidity and his 87


lack of participation in the activities of the monastery set him apart as different: ‘The Youth had carefully avoided the company of the Monks’ (42). If some eighteenth-century men gravitated towards homosocial communities, like the monastery or the navy, as places where same-sex love could be sublimated or sometimes acted upon, then there is already in place a space in which to read Rosario as queer.4 Rosario’s name also resonates with gender ambiguity. As Stephen Blakemore points out: ‘Even the endings of both names (Rosario–Ambrosio) suggestively link both “males” together, in scenes that are homoerotic.’5 These early scenes are mildly homoerotic, but they are also queer in that they can be read to contain a surplus of desire and emotion between two men that cannot be adequately explained by the narrative framework of their relationship as father and son, teacher and pupil. The intensity of Rosario’s emotional melancholia about his secret is also suggestive of the unspeakable secret of desire for Ambrosio. There are also literary ghosts present in the queer vault whose presence supports the queerness of their relationship. The declaration by Rosario/Matilda that he is female occurs in a garden monastery, the description of which strongly recalls Milton’s Eden in Paradise Lost: ‘the walls were entirely covered by Jessamine, vines and Honeysuckles. The hour now added to the beauty of the scene.’ This recalls the ‘blissful bower’ of Adam and Eve in Paradise: and each odorous bushy shrub Fenced up the verdant wall; each beauteous flower, Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought Mosaic;6 When Ambrosio advises Rosario that misanthropy will make him unhappy, his pedagogical relationship to Rosario represents an inverted parody of Adam and Eve where Adam lectures Eve on Sin. After Rosario’s revelation, when Matilda is about to leave the garden, Ambrosio is bitten by a serpent that lies ‘Concealed among the Roses’ (71). Ideas of death, sin and sexual knowledge are concentrated in this overdetermined symbol which is derived from Milton. The implications of this literary trope now shift the connotations with Eve from Rosario to Ambrosio, so that ‘Ambrosio is also explicitly presented as a male Eve who acts entirely out of lust’.7 Rosario is characterized as effeminate in his taste for flower arranging in Ambrosio’s cell and in his subservient role. Rosario’s personality and

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behaviour are confusing for Ambrosio. His actions and his melancholia suggest an effeminacy which Ambrosio finds intriguing and attractive without being able to explain why. The relationship between Ambrosio and Rosario is also one of mutual attraction: ‘Ambrosio on his side did not feel less attracted towards the Youth’ (42) even though this is qualified by ‘He loved him with all the affection of a Father. He could not help sometimes indulging a desire secretly to see the face of his Pupil’ (43). After Rosario is on the point of declaring what we might anticipate to be love for Ambrosio, he goes to pray at Vespers, a service for early evening prayers marked by the appearance of the evening star of Venus, and of course symbolizing the Roman goddess of love. When Rosario reveals that he is in fact Matilda, a woman, it would appear that this revelation closes this narrative of homoerotic attraction. Tuite, for instance, argues that from this point of revelation the text splits into two structures of sexuality: From the moment at which homoerotic desire is buried under a tableau of heterosexual libidinal excess, two distinct sexual economies are generated within the text: one of orgiastic excess, and one repressed or marked by the operations of the closet. These are the conflicting dynamics that mark the circulation of hetero- and homosexual economies, respectively.8 In fact, it is not so easy to perceive these economies as separate; it is the ‘excess’ of the heterosexual economy that undermines its description as ‘heterosexual’. Its excess signifies that there is something which we can call queer about the straight relationships depicted, although this is to move towards a queer reading that encompasses those polymorphous perverse aspects of sexuality that the novel expresses.9 We must also remember that Matilda is still an ambiguous figure. Is she a woman or a supernatural demon in the guise of a woman? Rosario’s confession represents for many a classic coming-out scene, where the truth about one’s sexual identity and desires is revealed to others. A queer reader would strongly anticipate that Rosario will declare that he loves Ambrosio, because of the emphasis given to unspeakability and his ‘unaccountable behaviour’ (45). His silence is determined by his fear of Ambrosio’s potential disgust and hatred: ‘Ah! Father, how willingly would I unveil to you my heart! How willingly would I declare the secret, which bows me down with its weight! But Oh! I fear I fear!’ (58). This primary event of the novel can be interpreted like a palimpsest, where the erasure of same-sex desire occurs in the change


of sex, but the traces and echoes of this initial suspicion of attraction still reside in the reader’s memory. The narrator implies that Ambrosio resists acknowledging his desire for Rosario even as Matilda: ‘Still less did He perceive that his heart throbbed with desire, while his hand was pressed gently by Matilda’s ivory fingers’ (62). From the point at which Matilda threatens to stab herself unless he agrees for her to remain in the monastery, Ambrosio’s sexual desire is associated with the death of femininity. Ambrosio’s desire for Antonia, as both a fetishized body and one who is dead and buried, develops out of a homophobic need for control over those bodies like Rosario/Matilda. Femininities are the source of physical horror and supernatural terror in The Monk, and return us to the suspicion and fear surrounding effeminacy at the turn of the nineteenth century. The manner in which the female body is eroticized through the eyes of the narrator, and the destructive, graphic descriptions of the successive deaths of the Abbess, Elvira and Antonia position women as victims. The sources of the novel also reside partly in French pornographic texts such as Joseph Marsollier’s Camille, or The Vault (1791) and Jacques Marie Boutet de Monvel’s The Cloistered Victims (1791). To a certain extent this confirms the accusation that the novel titillates its male readership in its pornographic overtones.10 Nevertheless, the representation of the maternal is another important aspect of how femininity and masculinity are shown to be complex conditions. The maternal woman is complicated in The Monk. She is represented in turn as a victim, a sacrifice and a survivor who overcomes death. The narrative of the subplot with Agnes and the Prioress envisages the maternal in terms of physical horror. What makes one question that the text is pointing at something beyond its generic limitation of exposing a corrupt Catholic institution and its inhabitants is how the descriptions are designed to arouse horror. Agnes breaks her vow of chastity with Raymond in the convent garden and plans to escape. The discovery by Ambrosio of her elopement and her illegitimate unborn baby bring down a harsh exercise of his power over her by him: ‘Shall St. Clare’s Convent become the retreat of Prostitutes? Shall I suffer the Church of Christ to cherish in its bosom debauchery and shame?’ (46). In Ambrosio’s rhetorical question, Agnes is positioned like an infant within the mother Church’s ‘bosom’. This occurs in the interval between Rosario telling Ambrosio he has a secret and the unveiling of Rosario in the monastery garden. Thus, we might see Ambrosio’s exposure of Agnes as a displaced reaction to what he fears Rosario will tell him. In condemning Agnes, Ambrosio recalls the excessive hyperbolical


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masculinity of the tyrants Manfred in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Vathek in William Beckford’s novel. This tyranny conflicts with his attempt to understand Rosario. By moving into the position of the exposer (as opposed to the powerless, anticipatory position of the listener), Ambrosio resists a move into another closet with the knowledge of Agnes’s pregnancy. While Ambrosio focuses specifically on her sexual sin, she emphasizes her maternal status ‘I shall soon become a Mother’ (47) and it is as a mother that she curses him: ‘You are my Murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn Infant’s!’ (48–49). When Ambrosio subsequently murders Elvira, which Lucifer reveals later on to be matricide, the repeated occurrences of Ambrosio’s sexual desire being linked with the death of the maternal is maintained. There are parallels to be found in other Gothic writing by Lewis, in particular his immensely popular play The Castle Spectre (1798) where the villain, Osmond, is tortured by a vision of the ghost, Evelina, his sister-in-law, whom he has murdered 16 years ago and whose husband is imprisoned in the dungeons of the castle: While speaking, her form withered away: the flesh fell from her bones; her eyes burst from their sockets: a skeleton, loathsome and meagre, clasped me in her mouldering arms! [ ] Her infected breath was mingled with mine; her rotting fingers pressed my hand, and my face was covered with her kisses!11 Evelina is characterized as a Madonna-like figure, especially in the stage directions when she appears as an omen to her daughter Angela, whom Osmond is trying to seduce: ‘the Oratory is seen illuminated. In its center stands a tall female figure, her white and flowing garments spotted with blood [ ] her eyes are lifted upwards, her arms extended towards heaven, and a large wound appears upon her bosom’ (79). She also acts with divine intervention to save Osmond from stabbing Reginald, Angela’s father. This mixture of the iconography of religious female figures with the images of suffering and death is also central to The Monk. At the very matrix of the narrative and the convent is the imprisoned Agnes, over whom the Prioress has performed a mock burial. In the ‘Conclusion of the History of Agnes de Medina’, narrated by Agnes, the description of the dying child she holds to her breast provokes physical revulsion in the auditors and the reader. The Prioress’s cruelty and sadism contradict her position as a symbolic figure of motherhood. Her ambition, cunning and violent reputation invert the model of selfless


femininity she professes to follow. Consistent with the novel’s pattern of inverting familiar iconography, the image of Agnes and her child plays upon a pictorial tradition of the Madonna and child, inverting its image of divine beauty and love into one of horror and death designed to arouse disgust: It soon became a mass of putridity, and to every eye was a loathsome and disgusting Object; To every eye but a Mother’s. In vain did human feelings bid me recoil from this emblem of mortality with repugnance: I with-stood, [sic] and vanquished that repugnance. I persisted in holding my Infant to my bosom, in lamenting it, loving it, adoring it! (412–413) Agnes supposedly implies that this maternal devotion was a state of madness – ‘reason at length prevailed’ (413) – but while she is imprisoned she does not share the perception by the other nuns that the body of the child is ‘disgusting’. It is disgusting to ‘every eye but a Mother’s’. Agnes’s narrative suggests more widely that monstrosity is only in the eye of the beholder and argues against a social pressure to reject the child. In allowing Agnes to survive, and giving her a voice (albeit one of a ventriloquist in sounding similar to the narrator), there is the suggestion that Agnes’s defiance represents a challenge to the homosocial order of things in loving a child, which in the eyes of others is monstrous and disgusting. Femininity is a contested category in the novel. Women who transgress the boundary between femininity and masculinity, and who articulate their sexual desire publicly are the target of the narrator’s satire and ridicule. In the opening scene in the Capuchin Cathedral, Antonia’s aunt, Leonella, aggressively ‘penetrates’ through the congregation ‘By dint of perseverance and two brawny arms’ (8). The contrast between Leonella’s feminine voice and her physicality, which verges on the masculine, is emphasized when Raymond and Lorenzo meet her. However, the reversal of their expectations has a comic effect against them too. This reversal suggests that her voice frustrates the association between the supposed characteristics of a feminine voice, softness, lightness with soprano notes, and its alignment with a female body: ‘Hearing this appeal to their politeness pronounced in a female voice, they interrupted their conversation to look at the speaker [ ] Her hair was red, and She squinted. The Cavaliers turned around and renewed their conversation’ (9). Leonella’s voice which arouses their attention contradicts the expectation of beauty they expect to see so that she no longer


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becomes an object of interest. Leonella’s status as an ‘old maid’, who is self-sufficient, renouncing sexual or economic dependence upon men, is mocked: ‘I always knew how to keep the men at a proper distance.’ ‘Of that, Segnora, I have not the least doubt’ (15). She is at the same time a stereotype of the garrulous, older woman and a woman who protests against another stereotype – a meek and submissive femininity – such as Antonia: ‘Indeed, as her Niece was generally silent in her company, She thought it incumbent upon her to talk enough for both: This She managed without difficulty, for She very seldom found herself deficient in words’ (15). One detects here a tone of sarcastic bitterness which does not quite square with what is supposed to be comedy.12 The desire to silence the assertive female voice occurs when Raymond arranges for Agnes’s tyrannical chaperone, Dame Cunegonda, to be literally gagged while he plans Agnes’s escape. One must also remember that Raymond is narrating this part of the plot retrospectively to Lorenzo, and that it is designed to justify his elopement with Agnes. Therefore, his portrayal of Donna Rodolpha, Agnes’s aunt, is designed to silence her version of the events. It is important to Raymond to preserve his friend’s approval of his honour, integrity and reputation as a suitor, which defines Raymond’s masculinity. Thus, the homosocial investment of the narration of these events is strong; Donna Rodolpha’s public condemnation is a threat to him. Donna Rodolpha’s tyrannical imperiousness recalls the tyrants of hyper-masculinity Manfred and Vathek, and reverses the active/passive role of husband and wife: ‘Her Husband paid her the most absolute submission, and considered her as a superior Being [ .] Her passions were violent: She spared no pains to gratify them, and pursued with unremitting vengeance those who opposed themselves to her wishes’ (133). The ridicule of Rodolpha continues when she mistakes Raymond’s gallantry for the language of desire. Declaring her passion for Raymond, he clarifies his intentions towards her and she feels humiliated ‘you have mistaken for the solicitude of Love what was only the attention of Friendship’ (136). Through the veil of heterosexual courtship, we can see that friendship between men or between women might be taken for love, and vice-versa. Both Leonella and Donna Rodolpha are different examples of women who are ridiculed and portrayed as threatening, because they fluctuate between being both masculine and feminine. Over the course of the novel, this depiction of the woman’s voice which silences the male can be traced back to the persuasive rhetoric of Matilda and the relative silence of Ambrosio after Matilda announces she is female.13 The fear that the silencing female voice inspires in men might be explained by how a silenced man


destabilizes a male claim to power through possession and control of a symbolic language of patriarchy. There is also the implication that if a man is attracted to a woman who embodies the social and linguistic attributes normally apportioned to men, then perhaps he may prefer to romance a man instead. Matilda’s queerness precipitates Ambrosio’s final violation and murder of Antonia and her mother. Matilda effectively reverses Rosario’s submissive masculinity into the aggressive, persuasive femininity of Matilda. This change is marked by a move from Rosario’s silence to Matilda’s questioning verbal presence that disturbs Ambrosio. Joseph Andriano suggests that Matilda undergoes a progressive gender transformation and becomes increasingly masculinized, and that in vampire folklore: ‘the symbol of absolute, aggressive evil was seen as male, whereas many lesser demons were androgynes’.14 Peter Grudin has also shown that the mythical basis for Matilda’s androgyny resides in the tradition of the vampiric Incubus-Succubus where ‘the term is hyphenated because it denotes alternate forms of the same essence’.15 The alternate forms denote masculinity and femininity in the sexual positions they adopt towards the victim. And as noted above, Matilda is also linked with the image of Satan as the seducer, tempting Eve in the garden. Matilda describes her education and upbringing as unconventional in her material freedom and her power to marry whom she chooses. Within the context of eighteenth-century educational theory and practice, her instruction would have been more suited to a young man: ‘Under his instructions my understanding acquired more strength and justness, than generally falls to the lot of my sex’ (60). Ambrosio terms her an ‘Enchantress’, associating her with the idea of the witch, a powerful cultural symbol of a fear of the feminine, and he acknowledges his passivity towards her. She places him in an impossible situation by threatening suicide as the result of his rejection and declares her intention to expose her situation to the brotherhood. It is analogous to the older queer in a position of authority who fears exposure by a younger male, in that Matilda blackmails him with her suicide threat. At the point of trying to kill herself, Ambrosio is sexually awakened to her as suggested by the narrator’s eroticizing eye: ‘She had tore open her habit, and her bosom was half exposed. The weapon’s point rested upon her left breast: And Oh! that was such a breast! The Moon-beams darting full upon it, enabled the Monk to observe its dazzling whiteness’ (65). The whiteness of the spectacle of Matilda’s flesh (and, for example, The Bleeding Nun who haunts Raymond) can signal a desire for the


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absence of femininity.16 The narrator repeatedly emphasizes Ambrosio’s powerlessness: ‘He found it impossible’, ‘He was incapable’, ‘He was irresolute’. Ambrosio’s fear of a tangible, dominant femininity leads him to a position of weakness: ‘He began to feel that He was not proof against temptation’ (68). The wish for the absence of Matilda/Rosario’s problematic gender is also evident in how Ambrosio expresses affection for Matilda as Rosario, even after he believes that she is female: ‘He remembered, the many happy hours which He had passed in Rosario’s society, and dreaded that void in his heart which parting with him would occasion’ (66) [my emphasis]. After the description of their lovemaking, Ambrosio acts as if Matilda is still Rosario reassuring Father Pablos that Rosario is recovering from the snake-bite in the garden. Later, although Ambrosio ‘forbore to show that it affected him’, the narrator describes Ambrosio’s susceptibility to Rosario/Matilda’s ‘soft melancholy’: She had resumed the character of the gentle interesting Rosario: She taxed him not with ingratitude [ ] Matilda saw, that She in vain attempted to regain his affections: Yet She stifled the impulse of resentment, and continued to treat her inconstant Lover with her former fondness and attention. (258) She hopes to gain his love in her performative role as Rosario. Ambrosio’s use of pronouns oscillates between ‘him’, ‘his’ and ‘her’; this reinforces Ambrosio’s initial attraction to Rosario as a man. When Matilda feigns her death, telling him she sucked the poison from his serpent-bite while he was asleep, Ambrosio asks her to return to their original intimacy. He wants to go back into the closet, to be ignorant of Matilda’s sex: ‘Remember in what lively colours you described the union of souls; Be it ours to realize those ideas. Let us forget the distinctions of sex, despise the world’s prejudices, and only consider each other as Brother and Friend’ (88–89).17 When Matilda announces her lust for Ambrosio – ‘The Woman reigns in my bosom, and I am become a prey to the wildest of passions’ (89) – Ambrosio’s vision of divine homosocial intimacy and love is destroyed. He still thinks of her as masculine, as Rosario: ‘Amazement! – Matilda! – Can it be you who speak to me?’ (89) As an envoy and cipher of Satan who pursues Ambrosio, Matilda’s powers of persuasion, argument and rhetoric are portrayed as a threat to Ambrosio’s ability to reason and his autonomy over his feelings. Frequently, Matilda manipulates Ambrosio emotionally by encouraging his self-doubt and guilt. After she informs Ambrosio that demonic forces


have helped her, she challenges his claim to salvation in a barrage of questions: Are you God’s friend at present? Have you not broken your engagements with him, renounced his service, and abandoned yourself to the impulse of your passions? Are you not planning the destruction of innocence, the ruin of a Creature, whom He formed in the mould of Angels? If not of Dæmons, whose aid would you invoke to forward this laudable design? (269) Her use of imperatives and her rhetorical questions are like those used by some political orator. Trying to persuade him further, Ambrosio asks her to desist: ‘Oh! cease, Matilda! That scoffing tone, that bold and impious language is horrible in every mouth, but most so in a Woman’s’ (270). The contrast between Matilda’s ‘tone’ and ‘language’, and her sex disturbs Ambrosio profoundly. She is masculinized through her language because of how vocal argument is associated with the practice of political orators. The image of Ambrosio sermonizing in the Cathedral resonates in Matilda’s criticism. She mirrors a discursive activity that defines his sense of himself, his power and attractiveness to women. Matilda exchanges positions with Ambrosio in terms of ‘eloquence’, so that he becomes passive, like one of the cathedral crowd who reflects on the sermons he is given by Matilda: But a few days had past, since She appeared the mildest and softest of her sex, devoted to his will, and looking up to him as to a superior Being. Now She assumed a sort of courage and manliness in her manners and discourse but ill calculated to please him [ ] He found himself unable to cope with her in argument, and was unwillingly obliged to confess the superiority of her judgement [ ] But what She gained in the opinion of the Man, She lost with interest in the affection of the Lover. He regretted Rosario, the fond, the gentle, and submissive: He grieved, that Matilda preferred the virtues of his sex to those of her own [ ] He could not help blaming them as cruel and unfeminine.’ (231–232) [my emphasis] Ambrosio is repelled by the exchange in their position. He is attracted to the passive effeminacy of “Rosario” and revolts from the spectacle of the butch “Matilda”. Ambrosio’s observation of Matilda’s gender indicates how her behaviour challenges and perplexes his ideas of the qualities men and women should have. Matilda reverses those qualities, and the


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narrator observes that she consciously manipulates a silent language of desire through her looks when Ambrosio grows tired of her: ‘the soft melancholy of her countenance and voice uttered complaints far more touching than words could have conveyed’ (221–222). Ambrosio represents a kind of masculinity that is frequently represented as a liminal body, which crosses between the boundaries of masculinity and femininity. Marjorie Garber discusses how transvestitism exposes gender as constructed in order to uphold a patriarchal value system. In particular, she comments on ‘religious habits’ as examples of clothing which obscure the sexed definition of the body: ‘the case of ecclesiastical or religious dress is particularly fascinating because of the ways in which particular items of clothing have tended to cross over gender lines’.18 The monk’s garments do not emphasize the male form, but rather hide and disguise it in an amorphous mass of material, much as the cowl operates to conceal Rosario/Matilda as a woman. His clothing effaces his masculinity. This might explain the popular suspicion which surrounds him. As Lorenzo tells Antonia and Leonella: ‘He is reported to be so strict an observer of Chastity, that He knows not in what consists the difference of Man and Woman’ (17). Virility, honour and manly courage are intrinsically related to male dress in other novels in the Romantic period. Lydia and Kitty Bennett’s admiration for the soldiers stationed in Meryton in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1811): ‘They could talk of nothing but officers, and Mr Bingley’s large fortune, the mention of which gave animation to their mother, was worthless in their eyes when opposed to the regimentals of an ensign’ [my emphasis].19 Lydia and Catherine much prefer the clearly defined outline of the male physique in a military uniform to the overly polite and simpering clergyman Mr Collins in a smock: ‘It was next to impossible that their cousin should come in a scarlet coat, and it was some weeks since they had received pleasure from the society of a man in any other colour.’20 Unlike the cavaliers, Don Raymond and Lorenzo, Ambrosio does not display a sword on his hip, to excuse the pun. They represent the chivalrous archetypes of the Romance tradition, whereas Ambrosio stands for a kind of masculinity that was associated with same-sex desire, passivity, celibacy and even asexuality. However, unlike Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, Ambrosio does not lack sexual attractiveness. In fact, he evokes a certain kind of Mediterranean masculinity in his physical appearance that we find in the villains in Ann Radcliffe’s novels for example:


He was a man of noble port and commanding presence. His stature was lofty, and his features were uncommonly handsome. His nose was aquiline, his eyes large, black and sparkling, and his dark brows almost joined together. His complexion was of a deep but clear brown. (18) Ambrosio has a charismatic physicality that appeals to both sexes who are ‘irresistibly attracted’ to him. His appeal to both men and women reinforces his queerness. We are told that ‘Even Lorenzo could not resist the charm’ (19) of his sermon. ‘Charm’ plays on an association with witchcraft and a dangerous sexual femininity that may be linked to the spectacle of Ambrosio in a dress that either asexualizes him or feminizes him. Ambrosio represents the alternative to the heroic military leader or political statesman who draws crowds to listen to him, because his masculinity does not announce itself in the clothes he wears. Much of the evidence available about same-sex desire in the eighteenth century is focused upon the practices of bodies, namely the sodomite and the molly. What is often overlooked in historiographical studies of same-sex desire between men in the eighteenth century is how anti-Catholic sentiment is underpinned by homophobia, and how perhaps we should pay more attention to the representation or history of the ecclesiastical male, and his precarious position in English popular culture.21 One might trace the association between queer desire and anti-clericalism back to Chaucer’s description of the Pardoner and the Summoner in The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, where the narrator implies that they are lovers: ‘I trowe he were a gelding or a mare.’22 In the late eighteenth century, concomitant with the popularity of the Gothic, there was a growing enthusiasm and antiquarian interest in the history of the castles, abbeys and monasteries of Britain. The Antiquities of England and Wales (1773–1784) by the lexicographer and antiquarian, Francis Grose, is a good example.23 The interest in visiting and touring the ruins of the ‘Gothic’ past, or, indeed, newly commissioned Gothic follies and ruins, becomes an equivalent activity for the reader’s fearful wanderings through such buildings within Gothic writing. The accounts Grose provides are generally factual, but occasionally there are popular local narratives attached to particular buildings. These myths comprise part of a discourse of rumour and legend in the eighteenth century that consolidates a narrative of the ecclesiastic as a sexually transgressive figure. For example, in his account of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, Grose quotes from the historian Burnett on the reports of Henry’s emissaries to the monasteries: ‘ “the visitors


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went over England, and found, in many places, monstrous disorders, the sin of Sodom was found in many houses; great factions and barbarous cruelties were in others” ’.24 There is an awareness of the anticlerical impetus attached to these narratives. For instance, in his description of Wenlock Monastery in Shropshire, he comments: The common people have an absurd tradition of a subterraneous communication between this House and Bildewas Abbey; which has not the least foundation in truth, the nature of the ground rendering such an attempt impracticable; but, indeed, there is scarce an old Monastery in England but has some such story told of it, especially if it was a Convent of Men, and had a Nunnery in its neighbourhood. These reports were probably invented and propagated in order to exaggerate the dissolute lives of the Monks and Nuns; and thereby to reconcile the Multitude to the suppression of Religious Houses.25 However, Grose remains susceptible to the attractive power of superstitious narrative. His observations on Tintern Abbey indicate the imaginative appeal travelling to ruins held for visitors who might invent stories about lascivious monks or nuns: On the whole, tho’ this Monastery is undoubtedly light and elegant, it wants that gloomy solemnity so essential to religious ruins; those yawning vaults and dreary recesses which strike the Beholder with a religious awe, and make him almost shudder at entering them, calling into his mind all the Tales of the Nursery [ ] the whole is comprehended, nothing being left for the Spectator to guess or explore.26 Charles Churchill, satirical author of a poem called ‘The Times’, and a member of Sir Francis Dashwood’s elite circle, the Monks of Medmenham, implies that monasticism is linked to sodomy: ‘throw him to a punk, / Rather than trust his morals to a monk; / Monks we all know – we, who have / liv’d at home, / From fair report, and travellers, who / roam, / More feelingly’.27 What is significant here is the reputation Catholicism has gained from travellers’ observations abroad, so that countries such as France, Spain and Italy are seen as fostering licentious behaviour of which sodomy forms a part. It is no coincidence, then, that Lewis’s monk is not English but Spanish. This alignment of the persecution of Catholics and potential sodomitical bodies in fiction is supported historically:


The institutions of monasticism contributed to an atmosphere in which men saw other men (or boys) as the most suitable objects for their higher affections – not to mention, in many cases, their lower passions. Close relationships between ‘brothers’ were tolerated, even encouraged, as contributing to the spiritual education of novices and younger monks.28 The anti-clericalism of The Monk encourages us to read Ambrosio as queer by the suspicion that surrounds the nature of his sexuality. The Monk dramatizes the possibility of a close spiritual relationship reflecting ‘lower passions’ in its opening chapter with Ambrosio as a pedagogue and confidant of Rosario’s emotions. There is an endorsement of the link between same-sex desire and Catholicism in the metonym of the closet or the cloister, or the priest-hole. Our response to Ambrosio’s story is shaped by an omniscient narrator, in contrast to the subplot which Don Raymond narrates. We are allowed access to Ambrosio’s plotting the rape of Antonia in his ‘priest-hole’, which places us in a position of superiority to him, encouraging us to make a judgement on his narcissism, pride and hypocrisy: Ambrosio hastened to his Cell. He closed the door after him, and threw himself upon the bed in despair [ ] the shame of detection, and the fear of being publicly unmasked, rendered his bosom a scene of the most horrible confusion. He knew not what course to pursue. Debarred the presence of Antonia, He had no hopes of satisfying that passion, which was now become a part of his existence. He reflected, that his secret was in a Woman’s power. (264–265) At this point, Ambrosio’s predicament is comparable to the position of a queer whose bodily desires, mutatis mutandis, always contain the potential to be ‘publicly unmasked’. Nevertheless, despite the reader’s narrative superiority to Ambrosio, we are still left in a position of uncertainty as to all the facts, and an explanation of his desire. We never really know if Matilda is human or supernatural, and we only discover at the close of the novel that Antonia is Ambrosio’s sister. Therefore, the novel plays with a straightforward reading of the omniscient (Protestant?) narrator’s penetrating eye and his supposed knowledge of Ambrosio’s feelings. Desire is much more complicated than meets the eyes of the narrator, character or the reader. This blindness reflects how essential and natural ‘truths’ in The Monk are frequently questioned and exposed to be unstable. Our expectations


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and assumptions about gender, morality and the plot are played with until the very end. Throughout, there is an interrelationship between falsity and authenticity, where the authentic becomes reversed into the false and vice versa so that we start to question any ideas of truth and reality. This is indicated through how the correlation between gazing and looking, and interpretation are not always neatly aligned with one another. As indicated above, we can infer that for men to become the subject of the gaze, and consequently to feel that their masculinity is under pressure, is terrifying. This terror can be explained in that it suggests gender is an exchangeable state of being, and that the positions of masculinity and femininity are interchangeable. Thus, it is possible for a man to be the recipient of the gaze of a desiring male. First, it is necessary to discuss how the gaze is initially gendered as masculine, and then discuss how and where this is subverted. In The Castle of Otranto and Vathek, the gaze in Gothic writing is a priori gendered as the prerogative of the male, and implies power, authority and sexual desire for the female body. This continues with The Monk but the gaze is also shown to be unstable and subverted to a much more significant extent. In the cathedral, the male gaze is expressive of sexual desire. Ambrosio’s gaze upon his parishioners inspires a sublime ‘universal awe’, and his power is implied by how ‘few could sustain the glance of his eye, at once fiery and penetrating’. Nevertheless, Antonia returns the gaze and feels ‘a pleasure fluttering in her bosom which till then had been unknown to her’ (18). Antonia’s innocence at her sexual arousal perhaps explains why she can return the gaze when others are unable to. Despite returning the gaze, she is not gazing as a desiring woman; publicly the gaze is figured as the preserve of the desiring male. As Don Christoval implies to Lorenzo: ‘the Prioress of St Clare, the better to escape the gaze of such impure eyes as belong to yourself and your humble servant, thinks proper to bring her holy flock to confession in the Dusk’ (30). The male gaze is later understood to sexualize the ‘body’ of the convent as the Prioress refuses Lorenzo’s admission inside: ‘She was shocked at the very idea of a Man’s profane eye pervading the interior of her holy Mansion, and professed herself astonished that Lorenzo could think of such a thing’ (208). Later, we are told that Ambrosio is afraid that his gaze will betray his sexual desire for Matilda: ‘In spite of her beauty, He gazed upon every other female with more desire; But fearing that his hypocrisy should be made public, He confined his inclinations to his own breast’ (236). At confession Ambrosio finds an opportunity to gaze


upon female penitents without being seen: ‘the eyes of the luxurious Friar devoured their charms’ (239). In the cathedral in Madrid, ‘The Women came to show themselves, the men to see the women’ (7). Antonia is an exception, in that, apart from Ambrosio, she refuses to meet the gaze by remaining veiled. When she does uncover her veil the narrator comments on how looking involves a process of distortion where physical attributes can take on an opposite effect or shape: ‘The several parts of her face considered separately, many of them were far from handsome; but when examined together, the whole was adorable’ (11–12). This description indicates how in The Monk one interpretation can be turned, or cross over into its opposite. Raymond makes a similar observation about the face of Marguerite, the wife of the bandit Baptiste: ‘Her countenance had displeased me on the first moment of my examining it. Yet upon the whole her features were handsome unquestionably’ (100). Looks and expressions can also be misread. Raymond observes that Marguerite’s face ‘bore such visible marks of rancour and ill-will, as could not escape being noticed by the most inattentive Observer’ (100). He misinterprets her personality from her looks, and only learns the meaning of them when he finds out her husband is a murderer. The misinterpretation of another’s desire is effected through looks and the gaze. This occurs between Raymond and Donna Rodolpha when Rodolpha declares that Raymond has given her signs of his affection. This misinterpretation of desire, although comic, has its darker underside as Raymond indicates: The Baroness had placed those attentions to her own account, which I had merely paid her for the sake of Agnes. And the strength of her expressions, the looks which accompanied them, and my knowledge of her revengeful disposition made me tremble for myself and my Beloved. (135) Gothic writing’s showcasing of how the signifiers of desire, such as certain kinds of looks or gazing, can be misread is important for a queer reading because so often queer readings are sensitive to the slippages of intention and interpretation. When the novel starts to subvert the dominance of the gaze as a prerogative of masculinity, it is then that we might understand the novel as camp. Before looking at how and where this subversion occurs, it will be necessary to digress slightly into how I understand by camp. On a superficial examination, one possible explanation for describing the Gothic as camp is that The Monk treats Catholicism as a fetish and one that has


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been defined as a characteristic of camp.29 There is no serious attempt in the novel at verisimilitude of the structure of the Catholic Church, its ideology or rituals, or the lives of its saints. Instead, the paraphernalia of excess in Catholicism (its iconography especially) is treated as a background against which an excess of passion can be safely played out. Catholicism has often appealed to many writers who are either queer, or around whom suspicion circulates, and who have fashioned themselves as Catholic, like Beckford and Byron.30 Nevertheless, I would like to move away from this kind of reading of camp as a sensibility, or as a taste for the decorative and the frivolous. Camp can be a taste, and it is closely connected to a parodic and comic effect, but it runs a risk of losing its queer currency, while at the same time seeming to depend on reading the author’s sensibilities into the texts.31 Instead, I would like to suggest that the Gothic expresses an aesthetic of camp as queer, or what I would like to term ‘queer-camp’. In queer-camp, the idea of a true, stable and consistent gender identity is always questioned, and Gothic writing perhaps marks the beginning of this phenomenon, in the novel at least.32 One of the most important ways that The Monk is queer-camp is how the ‘truth’ of gender, desire and identity is always precarious and their constructions are put on show for the reader. Throughout the novel, there is a concern about the authenticity of the body. This is represented in the body’s misinterpretation and misrecognition, and the potential for meaning to be ‘crossed’ between individuals. The body is also shown to appropriate an entirely different and usually opposite meaning. One of the origins of the word camp is ‘to cross’.33 Where this happens most frequently is in the realm of the gaze, and perhaps not surprisingly in the supernatural. The supernatural works as a metaphor for exposing how naturalized behaviour, including sex/gender roles and desires, is socially constructed. This narrative about determining the authenticity of someone’s identity can be read as exemplifying an eighteenth-century preoccupation with verifying social and sexual identities to preserve the hegemony of male–female relations.34 Considering how we might think about ‘queer-camp’, the novel plays with those male–female bonds and structures by showing how (on the level of surfaces at least) there exists the possibility for the appropriation of characteristics by both sexes. It calls into question the existing structure of gender relations and this perhaps forms a part of the novel’s terror. The sartorial representations of the misinterpretation of the body’s authenticity and desire, and the ability for gender characteristics to be appropriated, mark the camp aesthetic of the novel, beyond its more obvious hyperbole, theatricality


and misogynistic humour. As Cleto argues, transvestitism is a mode of gender performativity that is inherent to the idea of camp which plays upon the possibility for misinterpretation.35 In terms of direct transvestitism, Matilda fulfills this role most clearly.36 However, I do not think we can invest this characterization with the political implications that camp possesses for some queer theorists who conceive of camping as a politically agentive act.37 It is never overtly expressed or implied that Matilda wants to subvert the order of gender relations. Nevertheless, Matilda gazes back at Ambrosio and controls the gaze, both of which acts define masculinity in the novel. The narrator describes how she looks at Ambrosio in terms that are implicitly sexualized: ‘her eyes flashed with a fire and wildness, which impressed the Monk at once with awe and horror’ (228). Ambrosio later compares the ‘timid innocence’ of Antonia’s eyes to the ‘wild luxurious fire’ of Matilda’s (209). Matilda also manipulates the gaze against Ambrosio, so that she becomes dominant in the power dynamic. She has a portrait painted of herself in secret that Ambrosio gazes upon and mistakes as a reverential image. When Matilda tells him she has a magic mirror in which she can make Antonia appear, Ambrosio disbelieves her and she tells him, ‘Be your own eyes the Judge’ (232). Surface reflections become realities and vice versa, so that it is difficult to ‘know’ who is real and who is imagined. She also conjures up the image of Lucifer as a beautiful angel that Ambrosio is mesmerized by, and implicitly attracted to: [ ] he beheld a figure more beautiful than fancy’s pencil ever drew. It was a youth seemingly scarce eighteen, the perfection of whose form and face was unrivalled. He was perfectly naked: a bright star sparkled upon his forehead, two crimson wings extended themselves from his shoulders, and his silken locks were confined by a band of many-coloured fires, which played round his head, formed themselves into a variety of figures, and shone with a brilliance far surpassing that of precious stones [ . ] His form shone with dazzling glory: he was surrounded by clouds of rose-coloured light, and, at the moment that he appeared, a refreshing air breathed perfumes through the cavern.38 The novel’s self-consciousness about interpretation makes it ‘queercamp’ in so far as it suggests that a knowledge of how men and women desire the opposite or same-sex is not delimited or circumscribed. It is also queer because it suggests that the binaries of masculine/feminine


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and the dead/the living are reversible. The concept of a fixed identity is disrupted in the novel. Ambrosio does not judge or interpret the vision of either the angel/demon or Antonia as an illusion. He is presented as a victim to his sensory perceptions, to his sensibility, in the manner that Ann Radcliffe’s heroines are victims of spectres that turn out to be solid living flesh, or wax. The novel implies that to look and to desire can sometimes be dangerous if the recipient of the look then, in turn, uses the gaze against its agent. Matilda poses herself knowing that he will be tempted to look at her while she sings: But though he indulged the sense of hearing, a single look convinced him, that he must not trust to that of sight. Ambrosio dared to look on her but once: that glance sufficed to convince him, how dangerous was the presence of this seducing object. He closed his eyes, but strove in vain to banish her from his thoughts. (71) When Ambrosio discovers that Matilda is ‘the exact resemblance of his admired Madona! [sic]’, he ‘doubted whether the object before him was mortal or divine’ (73). Theodore, Raymond’s page, relates a made-up story of how he is punished for looking upon a statue of the Madonna. Explaining why he wears an eye-patch to the nuns of St Clare, he describes a symbolic castration for indulging his desire: ‘I shall penetrate you with horror, reverend ladies, when I reveal my crime! At the moment when the monks were changing her shift, I ventured to open my left eye, and gave a little peep towards the Statue. That look was my last!’ (247). Sometimes men who look at the female body, or feminized bodies, such as the angel/demon’s suggests they are not always dominant. Ambrosio is almost blinded by the ‘dazzling’ epicene spirit, while Theodore fantasizes that he is blinded by the Madonna. Whether reading The Monk as camp stretches our understanding of camp’s historical applicability too far is a debatable point, but the argument that what is queer about camp is its performative nature does have a resonance for how Matilda functions. She embodies a performative identity, particularly through how she manipulates the iconographic figure of the Madonna, and this is one characteristic of camp: Camp thus presupposes a collective, ritual and performative existence, in which it is the object itself to be set on a stage, being, in the process of campification, subjected (by the theatricalisation of its ruinous modes of production) and transvested. The subject is, in that very same process, objectified into a prop, a piece of theatrical furniture, a pure


mask, dressing up with other intentions, or with an irreducible ambiguity of intentions.39 This kind of subject also fits in with how Ambrosio assumes the identity of the chaste preacher in front of his congregation: ‘The better to cloak his transgression, he redoubled his pretensions to the semblance of virtue’ (196). Only we are permitted to ‘see’ the theatricality of his performance, just as Matilda remains a presence whose intentions and motives are ambiguous and ‘irreducible’. There is a continual disruption for the facility to read and interpret the signs of male sexuality, by the transformation of what we believed to be authentic and true about another into the deceptive and false, and vice versa. As I have shown with how the gaze works, there is an overarching narrative in the novel around the artificiality of ‘truth’ being present in visible, tangible experience; this is frequently related to a language of desire. The belief that men occupy a dominant position over women in relation to desire is dislodged in The Monk. More often than not, men are left in doubt as to the reliability of their own experiences, with the implication that it is not always easy to distinguish men from women, or vice versa. This is especially present in the narratives of the dream experiences of characters. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick questions whether the terror caused by dreams in Gothic writing can be explained by repressed drives and desires surfacing into the dreamer’s consciousness. She argues that it is the retrospective discovery that the dream or vision (that which is apparently at the surface level) might be just as real or ‘deep’, that is disturbing: ‘the Gothic dream is, far more schematically than the place of live burial, simply a duplication of the surrounding reality. It is thrilling because supererogatory. To wake from a dream and find it true, that is the particular terror at which these episodes aim.’40 Although I would agree that in The Monk terror is intensified because the supernatural does turn out to be real and not illusory, terror is also shown to result from the isolation of witnessing what others are blind to. The novel dramatizes how men are solitary witnesses to bodies and behaviours that cannot be proved to be either authentic or false, or feminine or masculine. The language of desire that these instances of ‘witnessing’ are couched in suggests that we can read them as refracting a late eighteenth century need to monitor the body and its sexual desires and practices. ‘I can see it myself but no one else can’ is the cry of many a male Gothic subject. It may express fears about the invisibility of queer bodies and desires in the late eighteenth century because they cannot be approximated to any one gender/sex easily.


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This occurs predominantly with Ambrosio in the novel, who is an isolated witness to the gender-bending activities of Matilda; but, it also occurs with Raymond. Jerold E. Hogle has discussed how the novel is preoccupied with reversing the expectations of readers and character’s beliefs about objects they believe to be true and authentic, into fakes or ‘counterfeits’: there is no level in The Monk that is not a fake and a faking of what is fake already . . . all passionate desire in this book is really aroused, intensified, and answered by images more than objects or bodies, by signifiers (to use the Sausserean term) more often than signifieds or referents.41 I would argue further that desire is shown to be problematic by how in the gap between the signifier and its signified (i.e. between the language of the body and the body itself, or its gender and sex if one prefers) there exists a possibility for desire to be misdirected and mistaken. The correlation between masculinity and an active sexuality, and femininity to passivity, is reversed, even if it is not presented as a particularly emancipatory or positive reversal for women generally. The masculinity of the observing male is always undercut and threatened by images and/or bodies that destabilize the opposition of masculinity/femininity. Raymond’s elopement with Agnes/The Bleeding Nun is a prime example of this. Raymond’s narrative is, we remember, designed to strike fear into its male recipient, Lorenzo, to whom he is narrating the experience while trying to rescue Agnes from the convent. When Raymond elopes with Agnes in disguise as the Bleeding Nun from the castle of Lindenberg, no trace can be found of Agnes after the coach crashes. Raymond explains how his hosts at the inn believe him to be delusional because there is no evidence to verify his story: ‘No signs of the lady having appeared, they believed her to be a creature fabricated by my over-heated brain’ (139; ch. iv; v.ii). Agnes’s description of the nun’s sexuality as schizophrenic and anarchic is a terrifying and disruptive image to a patriarchal conception of women as caring wives and mothers. Her account of where the legend originates from also suggests it is a historical construct ‘tis the invention of much wiser heads than mine’ (123) that is also ‘handed down from father to son’ (123). It is not passed on from mother to daughter as an emancipatory symbol of female sexual rebellion. Narratives hostile to the transgressive female body, whose sexuality and desires are aggressive and violent, form a selfperpetuating, symbolic chain tied together by men. The ‘holy man’ at


the Castle of Lindenberg narrates her story of incestuous sexual desire to The Wandering Jew, who in turn narrates the story to Raymond who then narrates it to Lorenzo. In addition to the terrifying prospect of others discrediting his experience as merely delusional, the haunting in the bedroom positions Raymond as physically and emotionally powerless before a woman who imitates him: My blood was frozen in my veins. I would have called for aid, but the sound expired ere it could pass my lips. My nerves were bound up in impotence, and I remained in the same attitude inanimate as a Statue [ ] there was something petrifying in her regard. At length, in a low sepulchral voice, she pronounced the following words. Raymond! Raymond! Thou art mine! Raymond! Raymond! I am thine! In thy veins while blood shall roll, I am thine! Thou art mine! Mine thy body! Mine thy soul! Breathless with fear, I listened while She repeated my own expression. (140; ch. iv; v.ii) [emphasis added] It is the imitative act of the nun and her ritualistic performance, where she visits him each night to watch him silently, that can be described as camp. In the context of the genre of the Gothic, ‘Breathless’ connotes a position associated with femininity – silence. The male gaze is appropriated by the nun and Raymond’s powerlessness is connoted by his ‘impotence’, implying his emasculation. The nun also uses Raymond’s ‘own’ words against him. Raymond now occupies the feminized position of silence that occurs earlier with Donna Rodolpha, whom he gags when she threatens to out his plan. Gender positions have been reversed in the nun’s echo of his earlier declaration of love in pseudo-Faustian demonic terms. Raymond becomes physically weakened and has ‘frequent fainting fits’ (141). His sensibility begins to control his behaviour and he becomes ‘the prey of habitual melancholy’, suggesting he is like one of Ann Radcliffe’s heroines. This haunting also dramatizes the paranoid, persecuted male subject whose masculinity feels threatened by the appropriative act of the nun’s gaze. This episode can signify the fear experienced by the straight male at the


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gaze of a subject whose gender ambiguity and desire the rest of society is perhaps unable to readily perceive ‘The ghost was not even visible to any eye but mine’ (143). Describing the Gothic as camp may be a precarious move, because camp is notoriously tough territory to articulate, and because, if it is treated too seriously, the process of critical appreciation in itself might become camp. It may appear quirky to think of the supernatural in Gothic writing as a constituent of camp, because we tend to associate the supernatural with the emotions of fear and terror. Camp is often thought of, and experienced, as fun, providing us with a good laugh. It is usually thought to be about frivolity, style and superficiality, and not terror (although monstrosity has a part to play in camp in how the monstrous draws our attention to the surfaces of bodies). Nevertheless, camp as it is viewed and understood by some queer theorists can be perceived as culturally and politically subversive, whether intentional or otherwise. Its marginality is in a dialogical and provoking relation to the authorized, official and normative discourses of behaviour, particularly that of gender. I have suggested that we might dress up ‘camp’ once more to see it as ‘queer-camp’. Gothic writing is self-consciously aware of the potential for the misinterpretation of the body, deliberate or otherwise, and this points to a knowing look at forbidden desire in a period of silence and invisibility. This misinterpretation often occurs around the gaze, the voice, and as demonstrated with The Monk, disguise and transvestitism. The categories of masculinity and femininity are shown as unstable and this is one aspect of what is queer about the novel; there may well be other avenues of queerness to explore. The queercamp aesthetic also underlines the persistent ambiguity of whether The Monk is politically conservative or reactionary in its attitude to gender and heterodox desires.

5 Caleb Williams and the Queer Sublime

Caleb Williams can be read queerly, particularly if we consider how the sublime is a discursive presence in Romantic writing and is engaged with the subject of gender. Several readings of Caleb Williams consider the relationship between the two main characters of Falkland and Caleb to express a sublimated desire for one another.1 However, rather than focus on repression, I wish to argue that the novel shows us how homophobia can be effected through the sublime effect of the gaze, both by an individual and in the sense of the gaze as communal and diffused. The novel suggests that men feel afraid at the spectacle of the ambiguously gendered subject who gazes back and threatens their identity. The need to silence or contain the individual who continually doubts the reputation of another male can be historically contextualized within a fear of the accusation of sodomy. The novel illustrates the need to control the effects of gossip and rumour. Representations of the body and the exchange of gazes are central to perceiving how their relationship might be eroticized via the sublime. Although the novel can be considered in terms of different genres, such as the political novel, there is a case for defining Caleb Williams as Gothic writing.2 Despite the absence of the ‘machinery’ of earlier Gothic writing, for example the supernatural, the novel’s theme of irrational persecution evoking a sense of claustrophobia in the reader is typically Gothic. The novel also shows how the imagination produces terror, an idea found in Ann Radcliffe’s novels. Caleb Williams can be thought of as Gothic writing because it is concerned with the boundary between that which is visible and seemingly known and the invisible or suspected. Caleb’s defining trait is ‘curiosity’ and he is ‘a sort of natural philosopher’ (4). An almost monkish figure suffering from private, agonized doubts, Caleb is not too far removed from the 110

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Abbott Ambrosio in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). His monastic quality is especially marked when Falkland takes him into the local jail, where in his ‘cell’ Caleb withdraws in upon himself and transcends his bodily suffering and circumstances by imaginative leaps of memory and re-enactments of conversations and feelings in his head. He sees himself and predicts his reactions to situations. His survival through memory, meditation and prayer evokes the monastic life: ‘By degrees I quitted my own story, and employed myself with imaginary adventures’ (185–186). Only unlike Ambrosio, there is no explicit narrative of sexual fantasy, although his ‘mind glowed with enthusiasm’ (185). Caleb Williams is primarily Gothic in showing the claustrophobia both Caleb and Falkland experience when each feels that the other persecutes him. The strong suggestion of paranoia that characterizes both men points back to Beckford’s Vathek and forward to James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The claim to realism in the subtitle to Caleb Williams, ‘Things as They Are’, is undermined by the resonance of the supernaturalism of Gothic writing which manifests itself in metaphors and similes used by Caleb as opposed to any plot events. When Caleb tries to understand how Falkland seems to know all his movements and to anticipate them, he dismisses the possibility of a supernatural explanation. However, he repeatedly ascribes to Falkland the characteristics of the supernatural: ‘he cannot, like those invisible personages who are supposed from time to time to interfere in human affairs, ride in the whirlwind, shroud himself in clouds and impenetrable darkness, and scatter destruction upon the earth from his secret habitation’.3 The conflict between Falkland and Caleb has been described as ‘a kind of marriage distorted into a satanic bargain’.4 If their relationship is like a marriage, then it is also one in which the roles are reversible. Caleb and Falkland’s reversibility as either the persecutor or the persecuted hinges around Caleb’s desire to discover Falkland’s secret. When Falkland admits that he is the murderer of Tyrrel, Caleb is placed involuntarily within the closet that Falkland inhabits: ‘I was tormented with a secret of which I must never disburthen myself; and this consciousness was at my age a source of perpetual melancholy. I had made myself a prisoner, in the most intolerable sense of that term, for years’ (138). Caleb fears exposure which can signify as the fear of the unnameable being voiced that is central to how homophobia depends on suspicion. Falkland has to prevent Caleb from escaping in case anyone else discovers the truth about who murdered Tyrrel.


Caleb overhears Falkland’s lamentations in Falkland’s ‘closet’ (7) where the sound of Falkland’s voice ‘thrilled my very vitals’ (7). What is significant is how before Caleb suspects Falkland is a murderer, but knows he has a secret, Caleb tries to communicate his compassion by looking at him: ‘He seemed to have something of which he wished to disburthen him mind, but to want words in which to convey it. I looked at him with anxiety and affection’ (8). Here, doubt and suspicion function through the interpretation of the body and the gaze. It is the singularity of Falkland’s ‘manner’ that causes Caleb to suspect him. Caleb comments: ‘His countenance was habitually animated and expressive much beyond that of any other man I have seen. The curiosity, which, as I have said, constituted my ruling passion, stimulated me to make it my perpetual study’ (118). Caleb is convinced of Falkland’s guilt when he sees Falkland as a tortured, Wanderer-like figure among the wildest and most desolate districts that are to be found in South Britain. Mr. Falkland was sometimes seen climbing among the rocks, reclining motionless for hours together upon the edge of a precipice or lulled into a kind of nameless lethargy of despair by the dashing of the torrents. (124) It is among this wild, sublime scenery that Caleb’s suspicions are confirmed: ‘the suggestion would continually recurr [sic] to me, in spite of inclination, in spite of persuasion and in spite of evidence, Surely [sic] this man is a murderer!’ (125). Falkland’s demeanour of melancholy suggests that suspicion is potentially damaging because it escapes logic and it holds the possibility for misinterpretation. Caleb reaches his conclusions through the interpretation of Falkland’s body and its poses according to romantic archetypes informed by his reading. The description of Falkland above is typically posed. Caleb himself appears to recognize the irrationality of his conclusions. He implies that he should not submit so easily to an interpretation of Falkland’s looks when he baits Falkland in conversation with thinking that he might know Falkland’s secret: ‘These appearances I too frequently interpreted into grounds of suspicion’ (109). Falkland’s suspicions are also confirmed through the observation of looks that pass between Caleb and Mr Forrester, Falkland’s brother. When Mr Forrester arrives, Caleb implies that Falkland is jealous of the ‘intimacy’ between him and Forrester, and that his suspicion over


whether Caleb knows his secret or not is determined through observing them together: He was scarcely able to look at him without shuddering; an emotion which his guest perceived and pitied as the result of habit and disease rather than judgement. None of his actions passed unremarked; the most indifferent excited uneasiness and apprehension. The first overtures of intimacy between me and Mr. Forester probably gave birth to sentiments of jealousy in the mind of my master. (142) Robert J. Corber argues that there is no triangulating relation between Caleb and Falkland: ‘Because of their relatively overt homoeroticism, Caleb’s relations with his patron do not conform to the usual pattern of male homosocial bonding in the novel.’5 However, Caleb’s desire is not so openly visible and there are women who help to clarify this desire, particularly Caleb’s romantic encounter with Laura who consolidates a reading of his queer feelings for Falkland. When Caleb retreats to Wales once he is free, he meets Laura with whom he falls in love. After he discovers that Laura knows Falkland’s reputation, Caleb implies that she has moved into Falkland’s position by making him feel passive and paralysed: ‘The unexpectedness of the incident, took from me all precaution, and overwhelmed my faculties. The penetrating Laura observed my behaviour [ ] It seemed as if my faculties were, at least for the time, exhausted by the late preternatural intensity of their exertions’ (294). Caleb frequently refers to the ‘penetrating’ eyes and gaze of Falkland, and now Laura becomes a substitute for Falkland’s gaze. The penetrating eye works metonymically for the vigilant gaze of the public body who would perhaps perceive a secret where none existed. When Caleb accidentally loses his way and meets Mr Forrester in the copse after being forbidden to see him by Falkland, Caleb fears Falkland will misinterpret his physiognomy and looks to justify an accusation of Caleb’s disloyalty: ‘Such was the agony my appearance was calculated to inspire .The threats of Mr. Falkland still sounded in my ears, and I was in a transport of terror’ (150). Caleb represents the uncanny to Falkland. He terrifies Falkland because his vulnerability reminds Falkland of his own precarious position if his secret is exposed. Why does Falkland reveal his secret to Caleb? Especially as Caleb observes, ‘To Mr. Falkland disgrace was worse than death. The slightest breath of dishonour would have stung him to the very soul’ (96). One possible explanation may


be that Falkland fears that uncontrolled rumour is more damaging than for Caleb to know his secret. His confession to Caleb secures Falkland from suspicion. Confessing to a murder is an attempt to stem the flow of stories over which he has no control: Do not imagine that I am afraid of you! I wear an armour, against which all your weapons are impotent. I have dug a pit for you; and whichever way you move, backward or forward, to the right or to the left, it is ready to swallow you [ ] Begone, miscreant! Reptile! And cease to contend with unsurmountable power! (154) Falkland’s metaphor of the pit – an enclosed space – is like a closet. By telling him he murdered Tyrrel, he closes down the possibility that Caleb may spread rumours, which could spiral into all kinds of queer suspicions about his reputation. Falkland’s need to preserve his reputation also suggests that Falkland perhaps fears blackmail by Caleb. The philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, recognized how blackmail depends on a climate of secrecy in his essay, ‘Offences Against One’s Self: Paederasty’ (1785, unpublished).6 Bentham’s essay sets out a series of reforms for the severe penalties given to those convicted of sodomy by systematically enquiring into the truth and validity of the reasons most commonly given to defend the severity of the law. However, he struggles to criticize the argument that capital punishment needs to be retained for sodomy because there is a higher risk of false prosecution associated with it. The reason is that the accusation of sodomy was often used for blackmail or extortion. Of the first, he argues that there is a difficulty in disproving an accusation by physical evidence such as marks on the body or lost property: But when a filthiness of this sort is committed between two persons, both willing, no such circumstances need have been exhibited; no proof therefore of such circumstances will be required [ ] With regard to a bare proposal of this sort the danger is still greater: one man may charge it upon any other man without the least danger of being detected.7 The accusation and suspicion work on the invisibility of same-sex love. If we think about how Caleb is accused by Falkland of robbery, and that he then falls in and appears to sympathize with a band of robbers, the following observation by Bentham provides a context for how the novel


exposes the workings of homophobia in its dependence on the power of the unseen and unspoken: In England the severity of the punishment and what is supported by it, the moral antipathy to the offence, is frequently made use of as a means of extorting money. It is the most terrible weapon that a robber can take in hand; and a number of robberies [ ] are committed by this means. If a man has resolution and the incidental circumstances are favourable, he may stand the brunt and meet his accuser in the face of justice; but the danger to his reputation will at any rate be considerable [ ] Whether a man be thought to have actually been guilty of this practice or only to be disposed to it, his reputation suffers equal ruin.8 Falkland fears that Caleb’s desire to know his secret will ruin his reputation for honour by Caleb circulating it: ‘You set yourself as a spy upon my actions Do you think you shall watch my privacies with impunity? [ ] Begone, devil! rejoined he. Quit the room, or I will trample you into atoms’ (8). Caleb’s decision to make his private confessions public is like the proliferation of malicious gossip. As von Mücke points out, Falkland’s impenetrability is the catalyst: ‘instead of answering his questions about Falkland, it provokes his determination to spy on him. And instead of ensuring his discretion, it leads to Caleb’s retelling and publicizing of Falkland’s biography.’9 The text plays upon the aristocratic gentleman’s fear of being secretly observed and then blackmailed by one of his servants with an accusation of sodomy. Falkland’s threats to Caleb are therefore designed to cow him into a condition where he will not say anything about him. Yet Caleb’s silence, in his reaction to Falkland’s ‘unsurmountable power’, is also an inability to articulate his arousal at the sense of power Falkland wishes to impress upon Caleb. His narrative oscillates between defending his entitlement to liberty and the ‘many occasions’ on which Falkland renders him speechless. He implies that his silences have more to do with the effect of Falkland’s physical presence upon him. When he eloquently defends himself it is in his moments of isolation, such as in the prison scenes, or in his various disguises in London. When he is in Falkland’s presence, he is overpowered by him: Why was it that I was once more totally overcome by the imperious carriage of Mr. Falkland, and unable to utter a word? The reader will be presented with many occasions in the sequel in which


I wanted neither facility in the invention of expedients, nor fortitude in entering upon my justification. Persecution at length gave firmness to my character, and taught me the better part of manhood. But in the present instance I was irresolute, overawed and abashed. (154) Falkland’s ‘carriage’, meaning the ‘deportment’ or ‘bearing’ of the body which comprised the voice, gestures and movement, overawes him and makes him feel ashamed: ‘The part of my history I am now relating is that which I reflect upon with the least complacency’ (154). This shame could be linked to how Falkland makes him feel a sense of desire through impressing his power upon him, with impression suggesting a sense of contact, if not actual physical contact. Caleb’s anxiety and shame orginates from how the desire and shame he feels is obliquely sexualized, although he cannot recognize it as such. Caleb’s narrative, then, encodes a strong desire for Falkland. This desire is loose enough to be called ‘queer’ because it borders on the edges of sexual desire, but does not in itself suggest a sexuality that can be pinpointed. The potential to read this desire as sexualized is present in the ideas and language of the sublime which permeates Caleb’s narrative.10 The sublime is a principal discourse in the eighteenth century for the creation of a sense of subjectivity or identity. Following Michel Foucault’s observation that discourses are always part of a web or network of power relations, Bolla argues that there is a distinction between two different ‘kinds of discourse’: (1) a discourse ‘on’ something which is read in a highly specific way and is contextual and (2) a discourse ‘of’ something which can be found in a wide range of linguistic and behavioural possibilities, whose language ‘subsumes’ distinct discourses (Discourse, pp. 9–10). He argues that the discourse on the sublime is self-perpetuating and that ‘in doing so it becomes a selftransforming discourse’ (Discourse, p. 12). The discourse on the sublime became increasingly preoccupied with understanding the production of ‘excess’ by looking at various discourses of the sublime like rhetoric, oratory, gesture and reading practices. These invoke the concept of excess so frequently discussed in the discourse on the sublime (Discourse, p. 12). The excess of Caleb’s overwhelming feeling, and how he feels more for Falkland than he knows how to describe or understand, is something I will return to below. If the discourse on the sublime was such a predominant discourse for individuals to produce their identities within, then this discourse must,


in many ways, have reproduced and reinforced ideas about gender. One genre that contributes to a discourse of the sublime is Gothic writing. Read from a philosophical viewpoint, it is concerned with comprehending the ethics of excess, human limitations and the nature of terror. Bolla argues further: far from relinquishing the interconnections between the aesthetic and its neighbouring discourses, the British tradition insists that the affective is based in human experience and human nature, and that by necessity the aesthetic cannot, therefore, be understood as a separate realm. (Sublime, p. 4) If human experience and ‘nature’ are grounded in biological and social differences from a heteronormative standpoint, then how the aesthetic is formulated (both in its inherent qualities and its affects) is, therefore, also differentiated and gendered. Bolla comments on the process of reading as grounding the aesthetic in experience and the implications reading has for the reader’s gender: Here the transport of ‘masculine’ sublime affect, colours the ascription of gender labels in the reading activity. Thus a trope first isolated and analysed in the discourse on the sublime is taken into another discursive environment in which it begins to generate mutations at both surface level and within the figurative structure of the text. (Sublime, p. 7) In Caleb Williams, the discourse of the sublime is found in how Caleb reads and reacts to Falkland’s body in ways that position him as erotically aroused by watching Falkland. I referred earlier to Caleb feeling ‘overwhelmed’ by Falkland’s ‘carriage’ which suggests the sublime effect Falkland has upon him. But as a narrator, Caleb also produces a discourse of the sublime in his characterization of Falkland. When Caleb refers to the effect of Falkland’s voice upon him, we might compare how Godwin had described the Prime Minister William Pitt in The History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham in 1783.11 Implicit within Godwin’s description of Pitt’s powers of oratory in Parliament and his voice are tropes of the sublime which emphasize Pitt’s masculinity. His voice is like a torrent in its ‘rushing’ upon its subject and producing the corresponding sensation in the listener (Sublime, p. 278). Godwin described Pitt further:


His person was tall and dignified. His face was the face of an eagle. His piercing eye withered the nerves, and looked through the souls of his opponents. His countenance was stern, and the voice of thunder sat upon his lips [ ] His voice seemed scarcely more adapted, to energy, and to terror; than it did, to the melodious, the insinuating and the sportive.12 There are some similarities with Falkland: the penetrating look signals control; the eagle symbolizes regal magnificence. Caleb comments on Falkland’s voice as like the sound of thunder which silences him. Bolla describes Pitt’s self-productive excessiveness and how he became the model for future politicians: ‘It is a voice so powerful, and a myth of voice so productive that long after his death the myth continued, expanding in dimensions, rather than decreasing’ (Discourse, p. 143). Caleb’s unspeakable condition before Falkland as an example of the sublime inscribes both Caleb’s disenfranchised class position that denies him a right to freedom and justice, and Falkland’s need to assert his masculinity through his voice. The political reactionary, Tom Paine, indicates that various styles of political oratory could be evaluated according to prescribed gender models, dependent on the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. He makes a comparison between the Marquis de la Fayette, a French revolutionary who established the French National Guard, and the political writer Edmund Burke: ‘Few and short as they are, they lead on to a vast field of generous and manly thinking, and do not finish, like Mr. Burke’s periods, with music in the ear, and nothing in the heart.’13 Caleb frequently uses the affective terms of the sublime when confronted by Falkland’s voice, gaze and body; for example, ‘I thought with astonishment, even with rapture of the attention and kindness towards me I discovered in Mr. Falkland through all the roughness of his manner’ (121). John Dennis in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) implies that in the earliest discussion of the sublime, it came to be associated with masculinity and a possible sexualization of experience: ‘an invincible force, which commits a pleasing rape upon the very soul of the reader’ (Sublime, p. 37). Burke promoted the idea that the sublime and the beautiful are gendered. However, one must proceed cautiously in suggesting that the sublime and the beautiful are respective co-ordinates of the masculine and the feminine and are not reversible. A sublime affect can be experienced through contemplating or experiencing the beautiful and vice versa. For example, after describing the seamless contours of a dove as an example of beauty, Burke argues:


Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. (p. 105) [my emphasis] Burke invokes the affects of the sublime here in the human eye being unable to comprehend a changing phenomena in a coup d’oeil, in this case the woman’s body. There is a parallel here to how the gaze is described in Gothic writing. The male subject feels disorientated, unstable and even annihilated looking at the ‘deceitful maze’ of the woman’s body. This is similar to Caleb’s descriptions of looking at Falkland.14 Nevertheless, Burke imposes elsewhere the binary of gender to distinguish the sublime and beautiful from each other unequivocally: if beauty in our own species was annexed to use, men would be much more lovely than women; and strength and agility would be considered as the only beauties. But to call strength by the name of beauty, to have but one denomination for the qualities of a Venus and Hercules, so totally different in almost all respects, is surely a strange confusion of ideas, or abuse of words. (p. 96) The discourse on the sublime as it is expressed in Burke’s use of parallels in the natural environment and the Bible is transformed in Godwin’s novel in several respects. First, there are Caleb’s descriptions of Falkland. We are told Falkland cultivates obscurity, a principal quality of Burke’s sublime. Paradoxically, he is also omniscient, a quality associated with God. When Caleb first suspects Falkland of having committed the murder of Tyrrel, he comments: ‘Then I recollected the virtues of my master, almost too sublime for human nature’ (109). Caleb’s perception of Falkland’s sublimity depends on Falkland’s excessive anger. He frequently refers to Falkland in terms of scale, suggesting he is lofty, eminent and exalted, for example ‘ordinary cases formed no standard for the colossal intelligence of Mr. Falkland’ (254). This unconscious use of the imagery of scale enforces how the terms of distance, depth and height which Burke uses to characterize the sublime are also experienced in Caleb’s perception and emotional response to Falkland’s masculinity: ‘What is it that casts me at such an immense distance below you, as to


make every thing that relates to me wholly unworthy of consideration?’ (283). Caleb’s response to the sublimity of Falkland is, however, ironic. He tells us earlier that one of Tyrrel’s objections to Falkland is his size. Falkland is ‘an animal beneath contempt. Diminutive and dwarfish in his form, he wanted to set up a new standard of human nature adapted to his miserable condition’ (20). Tyrrel’s public attack on Falkland mobilizes how Falkland uses the sublime to make himself feel powerful against Caleb. Falkland is knocked to the ground by Tyrrel. He is literally beneath him and looked down upon. Compounded by a sense of inadequacy over his height, this incident functions to precipitate Falkland’s need to fashion his masculinity within a discourse of the sublime which asserts his power. In Caleb Williams, men model themselves on pre-existing representations of masculinity and heroism, in particular classical and chivalric heroes. Caleb tells us that Falkland reads French and Italian courtly romances, and that he models himself upon the heroism of the courtly knights: ‘he conceived that there was in the manners depicted by these celebrated poets, something to imitate, as well as something to avoid’ (10). The first inset narrative of Falkland’s courtship of an Italian noblewoman, Lucretia, against his rival the Marquis Pisani is designed to replicate these kinds of courtly narratives. Falkland’s enlarged sense of his own honour, a code of living he has taken up from reading romances, is used as a yardstick against Tyrrel and later Caleb. His self-importance over defending his honour and reputation becomes more obsessive the further he feels he loses control of his feelings. Alexander the Great provides a classical example of the statesman Falkland admires as a model of masculinity. Eighteenth-century theorists like Adam Smith and Lord Kames refer to Alexander as sublime. Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) explains Alexander’s status as a paragon for honour: We may believe of many men, that their talents are superior to those of Caesar and Alexander; and that in the same situations they would perform still greater actions. In the mean time, however, we do not behold them with that astonishment and admiration with which these two heroes have been regarded in all ages and nations. (Sublime, p. 246). The contemplation of Alexander leads to ‘astonishment’, a sublime affect. For Lord Kames, he exemplifies grandeur and the sublime:


yet every man must be sensible of a more constant and sweet elevation, when the history of his own species is the subject; he enjoys an elevation equal to that of the greatest hero, of an Alexander, or a Cæsar, of a Brutus, or an Epaminondas. (Sublime, p. 229) [my emphasis] Kames’s analysis of how the reader experiences an ‘elevation’ indicates how Alexander functions for Falkland and helps us to understand Falkland’s anxieties about his masculinity.15 When Falkland thinks about Alexander’s ‘loftiness’, he experiences the sense of ‘elevation’ Kames discusses. This leads him to think of his relationship to Caleb in terms of height and scale. He affirms repeatedly his own superiority in contrast to Caleb’s ‘base’ social position. When Caleb orchestrates a discussion on Alexander’s reputation for genocide as an oblique move to get Falkland to confess to Tyrrel’s murder, Falkland takes Caleb’s criticism as a personal attack. He models his masculinity after Alexander and interprets Caleb’s criticisms to refer to himself: ‘my own mind reproached me with the inhumanity of the allusion. Our confusion was mutual. The blood forsook at once the transparent complexion of Mr. Falkland, and then rushed back again with rapidity and fierceness’ (112). Caleb’s description of the rushing of Falkland’s blood suggests an erotic excitement at the prospect of his employer’s disorder. Falkland tries to scrutinize Caleb’s face, ‘He gave me a penetrating look as if he would see my very soul’ (113) while Caleb is unsure how to interpret Falkland’s ‘convulsive shuddering’ (113) and slamming of the door. Seeing into Caleb’s soul suggests that Falkland has a God-like quality, another important characteristic of how the sublime is used to silence and police the outsider figure. Caleb’s narrative articulates a metaphor of the ‘unspeakable’ relationship between the two of them. Falkland’s apotheosis, his references to having God-like qualities, is modelled upon Alexander. Falkland describes any criticism of his idol as ‘Accursed blasphemy’ (110), implying that his respect for Alexander’s masculinity approaches a religious idolatry. Falkland applauds Alexander’s belief that he was a god: ‘It was necessary to the realising his project that he should pass for a God. It was the only way by which he could get a firm hold upon the veneration of the stupid and bigoted Persians’ (112). It is also necessary for Falkland’s project of preserving his reputation that he should inspire Caleb with a sense of his own divine sublimity to silence his curiosity and to prevent Caleb’s persecution. To some degree, he achieves this because of Caleb’s veneration for him: ‘I had


always reverenced the sublime mind of Mr. Falkland’ (133). He later comments: ‘I have reverenced him; he was worthy of reverence; I have loved him; he was endowed with qualities that partook of the divine’ (320–321). Burke cites God as the pre-eminent example of the sublime, where an annihilation of the sense of self is the key affect: ‘In the scripture, wherever God is represented as appearing or speaking, every thing [sic] terrible in nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of the divine presence’ (pp. 63–64). Caleb feels humbled and overwhelmed by the force of Falkland’s intelligence: ‘Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime, and thy bosom burned with a godlike ambition’ (325). In the context of this aggrandizement, Falkland’s tirades to Caleb in terms of divine actions, such as threatening to trample him to atoms, are a defence against the fear that Caleb will voice his suspicions publicly. He wishes to awe him into silence by threatening him in terms that invoke Burkean obscurity: Why do you trifle with me? You little suspect the extent of my power. At this moment you are enclosed with the snares of my vengeance, unseen by you, and at the instant that you flatter yourself you are already beyond their reach, they will close upon you. You might as well think of escaping from the power of the omnipresent God, as from mine! If you could touch so much as my finger, you should expiate it in hours and months and years of a torment of which as yet you have not the remotest idea! (144) Falkland reverses the positions of persecutor/persecuted. He relies upon the sublime effects of obscurity; the comparison with God’s omnipresence works as a defence against his own sense of persecution by Caleb. This obsessive anxiety to assert a powerful masculinity through images of obscurity and height, where things cannot be always clearly seen, points up his fear of how others may misinterpret the signs and meanings of his body to gain some kind of advantage. Caleb’s speechlessness is the effect of Falkland’s sublime. He expresses a ‘love’ for Falkland he cannot describe that is particularly suggestive: ‘Do with me anything you will. Kill me if you please [ ] Sir I could die to serve you. I love you more than I can express’ (121). This does not necessarily mean that Caleb, as an orphan, is looking to find a fatherfigure in Falkland. Arguably, the source of his love is an unrecognized erotic attraction to Falkland in sublime terms. The thrill of trying to penetrate Falkland’s secret is more exciting than finding out what the


secret is. This occurs in the garden outside the courtroom where Falkland is judging a case of murder: I felt as if my animal system had undergone a total revolution. My blood boiled within me. I was conscious to a kind of rapture for which I could not account In the very tempest and hurricane of the passions, I seemed to enjoy the most soul-ravishing calm. I cannot better express the then state of my mind, than by saying, I was never so perfectly alive as at that moment [ ] I felt, what I had had no previous conception of, that it was possible to love a murderer [ ] Not one of them saw it in the light that I did Did it really contain such an extent of arguments and application, that nobody but I was discerning enough to see? (129–130) [my emphasis] The plethora of sublime terms and effects border on the experience of sexual desire. In describing his emotional reactions, there is an erotic dimension in his epiphany of the incongruity of loving a murderer. He should not, in fact, love Falkland. He experiences ‘rapture’ and ‘soulravishing’ calm simultaneously, both denoting a similarity to sexual pleasure in the experience of the sublime. In his retrospective narration, Caleb implicitly rewrites his own desire for Falkland, which situates him as feminized. His descriptions are infused with a tone of hesitancy: ‘Incident followed upon incident in a kind of breathless succession’ (131). He immediately describes Falkland as ‘breathless’ when Falkland discovers Caleb in the act of opening the trunk. Their characters become conjoined by ‘breathless’ – a word we can interpret to symbolize erotic desires that do not have a voice, that are unspeakable. When he reflects on the climatic courtroom scene with Falkland, Caleb’s fever can also be read as strongly suggestive of sexual desire: My mind was worked up to a state little short of frenzy. My body was in a burning fever with the agitation of my thoughts. When I laid my hand upon my bosom or my head, it seemed to scorch them with the fervency of its heat. I could not sit still for a moment. I panted with incessant desire that the dreadful crisis I had so eagerly invoked were come, and were over. (318) Earlier, Falkland causes Caleb’s loss of self-control and autonomy: ‘I felt deserted of my intellectual powers, palsied in mind and compelled to sit in speechless expectation of the misery to which I was destined’


(134). Caleb is rendered powerless and passive by Falkland and assumes a feminized position in relation to him in his narrative. Caleb is a masochist whose desires to be punished reflect how he feels a sense of annihilation in the presence of Falkland. As Mücke argues: ‘he not only wants to be the center of Falkland’s attention, but he also derives physical excitement and pleasure from Falkland’s threat to the protective layers surrounding him’.16 When he decides to accuse Falkland of murder after Gines discovers him in London, he justifies the tardiness of his accusation to his own ‘forebearance’ [sic] and his admiration of Falkland’s virtue and power of endurance: I thought myself allied to the army of martyrs and confessors; I applauded my fortitude and self-denial; and I pleased myself with the idea, that I had the power, though I hoped never to employ it, by an unrelenting display of all my resources to put an end at once to my sufferings and persecutions. (276–277) Caleb defers the option of suicide because of his erotic investment in the thrill of his persecution. He unconsciously enjoys the thrill of being an object of persecution by Falkland. Caleb’s masochistic response is characterized by a compulsive repetitiveness in the narrative not to escape Falkland. The very act of narrating is a form of repeating his suffering position when he reflects on Falkland: ‘How great were the resources of his mind, resources henceforth to be confederated for my destruction!’ (133). Falkland’s threat that he possesses ‘a power that shall grind you into atoms’ (284) is echoed later by Caleb when he describes how Falkland makes him feel ‘atomized’, and envisages himself in minute terms: ‘It was the jealousy of your own thoughts [ ] that led you to watch my motions, and conceive alarm from every particle of my conduct’ [my emphasis] (321). He refers to himself in the belittling terms of Falkland’s language. Caleb confuses the notion of a stabilized identity category. He can be, by turns, Emily, Falkland, a robber in disguise and an outlaw. In his ability to appropriate and imitate other positions, he represents a challenge to an essentialist idea of identity, ‘It was fortunate for me that my disguise was so complete, that the eye of Mr. Falkland itself could have scarcely penetrated it [ ] from my youth I had possessed a considerable facility in the art of imitation’ (238). This art of imitation and passing is present in Caleb’s speech and narration. Caleb appropriates Falkland’s language to characterize himself in the use of the word ‘base’. Falkland calls him a ‘base, artful wretch’ (118) when he feels Caleb has insinuated himself into his confidence. When


Caleb judges himself as responsible for Falkland’s death, he says: ‘henceforth I shall account myself base!’ (320). There is a frequent repetition of this term in the final chapter to refer to his sense of moral inferiority. Caleb comments, ‘I am myself the basest and odious of all mankind’ (323) and refers to ‘the baseness of my cruelty’ (325). This repletion indicates too how his sense of inferiority is linked to his class position. At the end of the novel, Caleb announces the dissolution of his identity ‘I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate; but I will finish them that thy story may be fully understood’ (326). When Falkland surprises Caleb with Forester, Caleb describes himself as ‘in a transport of terror’ and that ‘I suffered myself to be overcome’ (150). He then goes on to fantasize about his own murder by Falkland when he returns to Falkland’s House: I seemed as if conducting to one of those fortresses, famed in the history of despotism, from which the wretched victim is never known to come forth alive; and, when I entered my chamber, I felt as if I were entering a dungeon [ ] my death might be the event of a few hours. I was a victim at the shrine of conscious guilt that knew neither rest or satiety; I should be blotted from the catalogue of the living, and my fate remain eternally a secret. (151) This passage is noticeable for how Caleb describes his experience in terms similar to the Gothic persecution of Emily earlier. Falkland’s home now becomes like a sublime castle in one of Ann Radcliffe’s novels with Caleb pleasurably trapped within. I want to focus on how the novel plays out a dynamic of the gaze as marking out an initial erotic attraction and then a phobic exchange. Although psychoanalytical theories and readings of the gaze can be problematic for a queer reading, because they are rooted in notions of an essential sex-gender difference, they do have their use in understanding how desire and power is mediated through the body.17 Principally, looking between men upsets the idea that the subject and object of the gaze are always and forever gendered as masculine and feminine respectively. As Caleb informs us, it is Falkland who is first subjected to Caleb’s gaze: ‘I determined to place myself as a watch upon my patron’ (107). Caleb almost understands the voyeuristic yield of pleasure he gains by this: I found a strange sort of pleasure in it. To do what is forbidden always has its charms, because we have an indistinct apprehension


of something arbitrary and tyrannical in the prohibition [ ] That there was danger in the employment served to give an alluring pungency to the choice. I remembered the stern reprimand I had received, and his terrible looks; and the recollection gave a kind of tingling sensation [ ] the farther I advanced, the more the sensation was irresistible [ ] The more impenetrable Mr. Falkland was determined to be, the more uncontrollable was my curiosity. (107–108) [my emphasis] The arousal Caleb experiences in the act of looking is suggested by the way he describes his actions as a spy upon Falkland. Caleb describes how the refusal to be gazed upon fuels the desire of the gazer to continue. The power relationship is determined via who gazes and who refuses or challenges the gaze.18 However, neither Caleb nor Falkland wishes to be the object of each other’s gaze, because to gaze marks out the masculine. Only women should be looked at and they do not return the gaze directly. Mulvey argues with respect to film spectatorship: ‘According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the physical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like.’19 Caleb questions how Falkland can support being continually watched: ‘I often wondered that the forbearance and benignity of my master was not at length exhausted, and that he did not determine to thrust from him for ever so incessant an observer’ (122). Falkland’s response is to reverse the roles of the subject and object of the gaze, so that he becomes active, watching Caleb. When Caleb offers to hide himself so that ‘I may never see you more’ (120), Falkland strongly objects. He needs to have Caleb within his sight and watch his behaviour and expressions to determine if he has told anyone about his secret. But this reversal does not work according to Mulvey’s idea of a ‘reverse formation’; Caleb derives no erotic pleasure from being watched as opposed to watching.20 However, the exchange of looking and looks between Caleb and Falkland tells us that the look and its interpretation may be a way in which desire is conveyed between men in the late eighteenth century in the absence of any physical expression: he chanced to turn his eye to the part of the room where I was. It happened in this, as in some preceding instances; we exchanged a silent look by which we told volumes to each other. Mr. Falkland’s complexion turned from red to pale, and from pale to red. I perfectly understood his feelings, and would have willingly withdrawn myself


[ ] Mr. Falkland assumed a look of determined constancy, and even seemed to increase in self-possession much beyond what could have been expected from his first entrance. (126) The point of a mutual recognition through the gaze, of Falkland thinking that Caleb knows his secret, can be read as Falkland’s refusal to be an object of desire to Caleb. Falkland’s fear of being observed – ‘he dared not trust his eyes to glance towards the side of the room where I stood’ – is connected to how he fears his expressions will confirm Caleb’s doubts about him. Mücke convincingly interprets this spectacle as the beginning of the sexualization of Falkland’s body that Caleb’s gaze implies: Caleb’s indiscreet, voyeuristic gaze is not the lone source of the all-powerful sensation that immobilizes him. That sensation is irresistibly intensified when Caleb is caught in mid-gaze by the one whom he is powerfully invading [ ] if one were to pinpoint what triggers this sexualization, one would have to conclude that it is the moment of interruption, or loss of control, of a momentary intrusion from outside.21 When Falkland discloses his secret to Caleb, he shifts the power relation between them, so that he moves into the role of the persecutor and Caleb into the persecuted. Caleb now also represents the male body who is viewed suspiciously. The body and its gestures become the source of a self-imprisonment in their potential for misinterpretation: I was his prisoner: and what a prisoner! All my actions observed; all my gestures marked. I could move neither to the right nor the left, but the eye of my keeper was upon me. He watched me; and his vigilance was a sickness to my heart. (143) Thinking momentarily about how homophobia in the Romantic Age works predominantly on the fear of being watched and observed, and how this is reinforced by the public spectacle of punishing those convicted of sodomy, there is an interesting link to developments in the penal system that were taking place. Jeremy Bentham’s reformist enquiry surrounding same-sex desire links to his development of the Panopticon, an architectural design for a prison. James Thompson discusses the influence of Bentham’s idea, indicating how Godwin was acquainted with Gilbert Revely, the architect who designed the Panopticon for


Bentham.22 Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison examines how the use of the Panopticon transfers power from an individualized body, like that of the monarch, into a visible deployment of power in a public space: Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.23 Clearly, this mechanism of power also relies on the psychology of the individual subject to whom it is applied, where a kind of selfimprisonment takes place through the fear that one might always be observed or watched: He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power [ ] he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.24 The sublimity of a panoptic prison or institution can be compared to how Caleb and Falkland subject each other by turns to an inescapable eye: ‘The vigilance even of a public and systematical despotism is poor, compared with a vigilance which is thus goaded by the most anxious passions of the soul. Against this species of persecution I knew not how to invent a refuge’ (138) [my emphasis]. Thinking about the associations of the word ‘vigilance’ and its frequent use by Caleb in the novel, it suggests that to be the recipient of the gaze contains a degree of pain. To be ‘vigilant’ is to be watchful against danger or difficulty, especially at night, when one should be asleep. ‘Vigilance’ and ‘vigilant’ derive from the Latin ‘vigilare’ which means to keep awake. There is perhaps, then, an association of discomfort or pain in being kept awake (either through being vigilant or being subjected to vigilance) when one should be sleeping. There is also the connection to the noun ‘vigil’, an occasion for which prayers are said or sung for the dead, while watching over them. This link between watching and death is reinforced by Caleb’s use of this word in his narration, and death comes before an unspoken dishonour i.e. to be thought queer. As noted above, Falkland is characterized as being like a deity. In the preface to his third novel Fleetwood (1806), Godwin reveals the source


of this aspect of Falkland’s characterization: ‘I turned over the pages of a tremendous compilation entitled ‘God’s Revenge against Murder’, where the beam of the eye of Omniscience [sic] was represented as perpetually pursuing the guilty, and laying open his most hidden retreats to the light of day.’25 Caleb describes Falkland thus: ‘He gave me a penetrating look as if he would see my very soul [ ] his visage gradually assumed an expression as of supernatural barbarity’ (113). Falkland’s vigilance is directed towards Caleb, but he does not want to destroy him, despite all his threats. Falkland is dependent upon persecuting Caleb indefinitely to retain an idea that his masculinity depends on surviving the test of his honour or reputation. Caleb’s use of ‘vigilance’ suggests that death and dying is a substitute for a fulfilment of sexual desire. ‘Do with me anything you will. Kill me if you please [ ] Sir I could die to serve you’ (121). He later observes ‘it was the extremest folly that led me to unthinkingly to gain possession of it; [the secret] but I would have died a thousand deaths rather than betray it’ (321). If, as Bender argues, ‘Falkland and Caleb each employ the gaze as an instrument to waste away the body of the other’, this is most evident at the end of the novel where Caleb’s vision of Falkland suggests death.26 Reading the supernatural in Gothic writing to symbolize at one level the fear of invisible and tabooed sexual desires, the description of Falkland in supernatural terms reflects Caleb’s fear of Falkland’s penetrating eye: ‘His figure is ever in imagination before me. Waking or sleeping I still behold him. He seems mildly to expostulate with me’ (325). Caleb is always the object of Falkland’s look, even in his dreams. Significantly when Caleb confronts Falkland in the courtroom, Falkland can only give Caleb a ‘languid glance’, not the ‘penetrating’ look he is accustomed to and desires: I can conceive of no shock greater than that I received from the sight of Mr. Falkland [ ] It was now the appearance of a corpse. He was brought in in [sic] a chair unable to stand, fatigued and almost destroyed by the journey he had just taken. His visage was colourless; his limbs destitute of motion, almost of life. His head reclined upon his bosom, except that now and then he lifted it up and opened his eyes with a languid glance. (318–319) Falkland’s persecution is necessary to Caleb’s honour, to prove his masculinity through his endurance and sticking to his principles. Caleb now desires to substitute himself into Falkland’s place, to appropriate Falkland’s position as a murderer approaching death – ‘In thus acting


I have been a murderer, a cool, deliberate unfeeling murderer [ ] Death would be a kindness, compared to what I feel!’ (323) – feeling that he has betrayed his ideal of honour that he has appropriated from Falkland. Falkland’s speech indicates how Caleb and Falkland are now reversed in terms of the sublime. Falkland speaks of ‘the greatness and elevation of your mind’ while he has ‘spent a life of the basest cruelty’ (324). More importantly though, is that Falkland approves of Caleb’s self-defense as a ‘manly story’. But Caleb rejects this reversal in his retrospective narration: ‘I record the praises bestowed on me by Falkland, not because I deserve them, but because they serve to aggravate the baseness of my cruelty’ (325). If the problem in the novel is that ‘the narrator has become effeminized’, then this problem might extend to how Caleb’s passivity is performed to empower himself.27 Caleb is a sentimental heroine who also desires to be like Falkland, to preserve a masculine tradition of ‘honour’, to tell a ‘manly’ story and to appropriate Falkland’s language to stabilize his gender. But simultaneously, the discourses of the sublime and Sensibility that pervade his narrative style work to feminize him. The subtitle of the novel, ‘things as they are’, transforms itself into an ironic statement when we consider the paranoid psychology of Caleb’s narration, and evaluate the novel as a species of literary realism. The phrase also contains a defensive tone; one might suggest that this phrase works as a metaphor for the anxious need in the novel for a confirmation of both Caleb and Falkland’s suspicion of one another. As I have demonstrated, the need to counteract rumour, secrecy and gossip is linked to the idea of how even the suspicion of same-sex desire can destroy a man’s reputation and honour in the eighteenth century. As I argue in the following chapter on Byron, the rhetoric of the secret, the gaze and the unspeakable all work together to evoke the climate of suspicion about friendships and rivalries between men.

6 Penetrating Eye(s): Lara, The Giaour, The Vampyre

This chapter is divided into two parts: the first section looks at how Byron and writers like Polidori tap into a public climate of suspicion about his sexual desires for men, and how we can describe Byron as queer. In particular, The Vampyre (1819) by John William Polidori perpetuates queer and Gothic suspicions about Byron. However, The Vampyre can be read on its own terms as a narrative of paranoia and repressed sexual attraction to the figure of the queer vampire. The second part of the chapter then offers a queer reading of two of Byron’s ‘Oriental’ tales, The Giaour (1813) and Lara (1814). Both tales can be described as Gothic writing in the acknowledged influence of writers like Ann Radcliffe. They share similar characteristics in their suspicious narrators who gaze at secretive men who they think have something to hide. These poems suggest ways in which desire between men can be both communicated and suspected (but never confirmed) by those who watch them. Reading Byron’s poetry separately from his biographies is always a problematic task, not least because of the weight of a critical heritage that almost demands that we understand the poems to be determined by Bryon writing himself into them. This approach, however, would seem to work against reading Byron’s Gothic writing as expressing Byron’s own personal anxieties about his sexual desires and relationships.1 But then should we always read in terms of fear? There is evidence to suggest that it would be understandable if Byron was afraid others might read his desires for boys and men, but one could also argue that he recognized this public fear and paranoia about same-sex desire and manipulated it to his own advantage. This act of self-empowerment via a climate of repression is the defining quality of Byron’s queerness. As I have demonstrated in the opening chapter, a queer reading is attuned to 131


how biography constructs a narrative of suspicion that we can then find parallels and echoes of in Gothic writing. The issues involved in the discussion that circulates about Byron enable a queer reading of his poems without insisting on a dependency of an intentionalist approach that reads the life into the fiction or vice versa. Secrecy, the gaze and cross-dressing coalesce to work as discourses of signification that queer the poems, setting apart the question of whether or not Byron is himself queer. So, although I do not wish to dispense with the details of Byron’s biography entirely, my aim is to focus on how these three signifying social phenomena can mark out the invisibility and unspeakability of desire between men (and women) in the period. In his elegy ‘To Thyrza’ (1811), Byron uses a Greek woman’s name, ‘Thyrza’, to disguise what is an elegy to his Cambridge lover John Edlestone when Byron learned of Edlestone’s death after returning from his first trip to the Mediterranean. This poem is self-conscious about the ways in which men recognize desire through the signs of the body, especially the gaze: Ours too the glance none saw beside; The smile none else might understand; The whisper’d thought of hearts allied, The pressure of the thrilling hand; The kiss, so guiltless and refined That Love each warmer wish forebore; Those eyes proclaim’d so pure a mind, Even passion blush’d to plead for more.2 The exchanges of the ‘glance’ and the ‘smile’ are invisible to others who do not perceive their silent meanings. The suggestion of the secrecy of their love for one another in the ‘whisper’d thought’ is reinforced by how the poem plays on Byron feeling a secret guilt for desiring Edlestone’s love to be expressed sexually: ‘Even passion blush’d to plead for more.’ Whether or not Byron and Edlestone did sleep together is irrelevant. What is significant is how desire between men in the Romantic period is fantasized about, understood and even effected through the gaze. What also emerges from the representation of Byron’s love for Edlestone is how the reversal of gender is still important in the early nineteenth century for thinking about how relationships and friendships might be queer. Byron lived with a young prostitute in Brighton,

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Caroline Cameron, and dressed her in boy’s clothes with the excuse that he did not wish his mother to discover that he was living with a prostitute. Byron’s housemaid, Lucy, who probably became pregnant by him, also cross-dressed for him. Undoubtedly Lady Caroline Lamb realized the inherent erotic attraction of performing a boyish masculinity for Byron. Lamb impersonated pageboys for Byron, designing her own outfits and surprising him in his lodgings. She managed to deceive Byron’s friend, Robert Dallas, that she was a boy. After Byron broke off their affair, Lamb pursued him and secretly entered his apartments at Albany House in Piccadilly disguised as a page. To put a stop to her persistent attempts to win Byron back to her, Byron showed her some letters: ‘We can only surmise that these were the letters and confessions that confirmed her suspicions of his incest with Augusta and perhaps elaborated on what he had told her previously of his sodomy with boys.’3 Since their relationship was ‘sexually ambivalent’, it is possible that Byron titillated Caroline with coded hints and references to his sexual desire for young men in Greece and Albania without actually explicitly describing specific sexual relationships. It would seem inconsistent that Byron would ‘confess’ anything specific to Lamb considering his awareness of the need for secrecy and discretion. As McCarthy notes, no-one, not even his closest friend Hobhouse, knew about Byron’s behaviour between 1810 and 1811: ‘The implication is that Byron had made a kind of treaty with Hobhouse to leave him to his own devices, with no friendly witnesses to inhibit his behaviour’ (p. 124). Byron was clearly aware of the need for secrecy. Writing to John Hanson, Byron indicates his urgency to leave England: ‘I will never live in England if I can avoid it, why must remain a secret’ (McCarthy, p. 87). Matthews’ letters to Byron in Athens told him of the fate of the mollies convicted for sodomy in the Vere Street tavern in 1810 and the vociferous public reaction against them. Hobhouse warned Byron to be discreet about his sexual relationships. Byron records in his journal his anxiety at a party he attended where hints were dropped by James Wedderburn Webster about Webster’s brother-in-law, Lord Valentia, ‘a known homosexual’, and Byron’s reaction to Webster’s gossip that he knows a young page, a ‘Hyacinth’ for sale, ‘He made one cursed speech which put me into a fever [ ] & made Hodgson nearly sink into the earth’ (McCarthy, p. 146). The circumstances surrounding Byron’s divorce from Annabella Milbanke in 1816 indicate the terrifying effects that rumour and gossip could have upon an aristocratic male’s reputation in the early nineteenth century. Although Lady Byron did not deny the charges of sodomy and incest that she made against Byron, she did


not introduce them into court as part of her grounds for separation. This was partly because she was advised that these accusations would be difficult to prove, but perhaps also because she was aware that Byron would be completely ruined. However, the damage had already been done by Lamb. As Hobhouse indicates in his diary, Lamb: ‘accused B. [sic] of – poor fellow, the plot thickens against him’ (McCarthy, p. 267). The dash stands for sodomy. He brought starkly alarming news of what he had been hearing ‘in the streets that day’ (McCarthy, p. 267). Byron’s later description of his treatment suggests that although nothing had been officially alleged or proved against him, he was treated as an outcast: I was advised not to go to the theatres, lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament, lest I should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure my most intimate friend [Hobhouse] told me afterwards, that he was under apprehension of violence from the people who might be assembled at the door of the carriage.4 Hobhouse even expressed a concern that Byron might be assassinated though Byron dismissed this. Nevertheless, Byron’s ostracism and the attacks on his personal life when The Siege of Corinth (1816) and Parisina (1816) were published suggest that his reputation was blighted and his only refuge would be to leave England. Interestingly, rumour and its effects are conceptualized within imagery and models found in Gothic writing. Writing to Lady Byron on 25 March 1816, Byron describes the almost supernatural power of rumour: there are reports which once circulated not even falsehood – or their most admitted & acknowledged falsehood – can neutralize – which no contradiction can obliterate – nor conduct cancel [ ] are you calm in the contemplation of having (however undesignedly) raised up that which you never can allay? – & which but for you might never have arisen? – is it with perfect apathy you quietly look upon this resurrection of Infamy? (McCarthy, p. 269) [my emphasis] A medium raising the dead is invoked as a metaphor for how suspicion works. Annabella, Lady Byron, also reveals how Byron used Caleb Williams to describe his feelings of persecution. Writing to her lawyer, Lady Byron describes a conversation between Lady Caroline Lamb and Byron which Caroline Lamb has told her:


His own horror of it still appeared to be so great that he several times turned quite faint & sick in alluding to the subject – He concluded by threatening her in the most terrific manner, reminding her of Caleb Williams, and saying that now she knew his secret, he would persecute her like Falkland – he then endeavoured to regain her affection, whilst she sat filled with dread – and when he said ‘but you love me still’ – answered ‘yes’ from terror.5 Byron’s response to Lamb indicates how Gothic writing could resonate for male readers who experienced same-sex desire like Byron, but who were always living in the shadow of doubt and exposure which threatened to ruin their reputations. Caleb Williams symbolizes for Byron his fear that rumours will lead to exposure and ruin. The novel also reflects the masochistic–sadistic relationship between Lamb and Byron, with Lamb in the role as Caleb, always able to divulge more than she knows but enjoying the power over Byron and her repeated rejection. An awareness of the guilt of Byron’s narrators is read as a veiled confession of Byron’s own feelings about the relationships with his male lovers and his sister. Byron manipulates the rumours which were beginning to circulate from 1813 onwards by exploiting the reader’s interest in his ‘secret’ self through rhetorical tropes that are drawn from Gothic writing, particularly with poems like Parisina (1816) which present the reader with a narrative of incest set in fifteenth-century Italy, and was published in the week Byron’s divorce became official. Following the success of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Byron discovered the allure of guilt-ridden heroes with ‘secrets’ to be a particularly profitable investment. In the preface to The Corsair (1814), for instance, Byron remains shrewdly ambiguous as to how far readers might see himself in his misanthropic anti-heroes: ‘if I have deviated into the gloomy vanity of “drawing from self”, the pictures are probably like, since they are unfavourable; and if not, those who know me are undeceived, and those who do not, I have little interest in undeceiving’.6 With copies of The Giaour selling fast, Byron managed to profit from the Romantic period’s curiosity about non-heteronormative sexual desires that was safely removed to an interest in Eastern culture.7 One way we can see Byron as queer is in his defiance, particularly in his attempt to defy the communal power of gossip by manipulating the suspicions of the reading public. He tantalized them with the possibility that his guilt-ridden heroes and the coded references to incest in texts like Parisina and Manfred (1816) were semi-autobiographical portraits of himself. Psychobiographical readings of ‘guilt’ in Byron’s poetry become


problematic if Byron consciously manipulates a public desire to read the guilt of his literary heroes to be personally expressive. In Manfred (1816), Freud’s legacy has left its mark on a generation of readings of the poem. Frequently interpreted following Freud’s references to the poem in his analysis of the case of Dr Schreber, Manfred is often seen to represent Bryon’s unconscious guilt over an incestuous relationship with Augusta Leigh.8 The ‘secret’ may also be more on display than Freud gives Byron credit for, particularly if, as Elfenbein argues, the idea of sexuality is conceived in terms of a threatening possession: For Byron, it seems less that Manfred has a sexuality than that sexual desire and remorse haunt him as forces external to the self that threaten to possess it [ ] Byron can imagine what a post-Freudian interpretive framework finds untenable: a self that reaches a time after sexuality, as if sexuality could at last be shed if the ego worked hard enough.9 The next step forward in Elfenbein’s argument then is that we can read Manfred to represent a proto-queer figure. The shedding of sexuality in Manfred adds potency to understanding Byron’s individualist attitude to sexual desire as queer, in trying to reach beyond the idea of ‘sexuality’ as a defining and shackling form of identity. One contemporary reviewer of Manfred (1816), for instance, reads the figure of Astarte as a direct portrait of Augusta Leigh, and objects to the implication of incest as ‘painful’ and ‘offensive’ to the reader, and ‘not a thing to be at all brought before the imagination’.10 Pre-empting Freud by almost a century, Byron’s ‘guilty secret’ was more than clear to the German poet Goethe in his review of the poem in 1817: The character of Lord Byron’s life and poetry hardly permits a just and equitable appreciation. He has often enough confessed what it is that torments him. He has repeatedly portrayed it; and scarcely anyone feels compassion for this intolerable suffering, over which he is laboriously ruminating.11 Yet even Goethe refrains from naming this specifically as ‘incest’. Byron still plays with the reader’s state of indeterminate knowledge over his sexual desires; he refuses, through the figure of Manfred, to conform to any one single sexuality. This is most clear when Manfred reflects on his inherent self-destructiveness. The cause is a love which has been disappointed or frustrated as a source of an early death:


And some of wither’d, or of broken hearts; For this last is a malady which slays More than are number’d in the lists of Fate, Taking all shapes, and bearing many names. Look upon me! For even of all these things Have I partaken. (Act III, sc. I, ll. 145–150, 497) If ‘love’ or sexual desire bears many names and shapes, which (if at all) is Byron confessing to? Incest, same-sex desire, or adultery? The mystification and rumour perpetuated through and by Byron define him as queer in his resistance to being described according to any particular type of sexuality and to leaving these possibilities open.

Feeding the vampire: Polidori and The Vampyre John Polidori’s short story, The Vampyre, embodies queer Gothic because of how it represents the gaze between men as erotically and phobically charged. The Vampyre forms part of the web of rumour about Byron’s supposed sexual interests, but I wish to focus on the dynamics of male interaction on their own terms without becoming embroiled in the debate of how the story supports a reading of Polidori as a ‘sexual suspect’ in his relations with Byron.12 The Vampyre continues the signifying power of the gaze and unspeakability to read desire between men that I have discussed above, particularly in the reading of Caleb Williams. The tale has aroused critical interest specifically in the speculation of whether Polidori is modelling from life, using Byron. The Vampyre is one of the ghost stories written at the Villa Diodati which produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as well as Byron’s Augustus Darvell, a fragment of a novel, the ending of which bears a faint similarity to The Vampyre. Clearly, Henry Colburn, the editor of New Monthly Magazine, and other contemporaries, believed that the story, or at least its characterization, belonged to Byron despite Byron’s denial and Polidori’s later announcement that he was the author. As Baldick and Morrison point out: Whether or not the celebrated poet was willing to put his name to the piece, it was clearly ‘Byronic’ in conception, and could thus be greeted as a product of his genius, even as the greatest of his works – a critical view held by Goethe among others.13


Interestingly then, readers perceived the vampire of Polidori’s tale as a fictional self-portrait by Byron that developed the tradition of his darker Romantic heroes like Manfred. Twitchell views Byron’s social ostracism, his outsider status, as similar to that of the vampire ‘he was exiled from the drawing rooms, spat upon in the streets, and cast in the role of social pariah, almost a vampire among men’.14 The vampire as a symbol for perverse and pernicious sexual desire begins with this initial perception in the public imagination that the tale was by Byron. The Vampyre borrows from Caroline Lamb’s roman à clef, Glenarvon (1816), the name of ‘Ruthven’ for the mysterious stranger who pursues the character of Aubrey and his sister. Readers who were within Byron’s immediate social circle may have perceived that Polidori was deliberately using the name of Lamb’s character. Polidori obviously intended readers to draw a parallel between Caroline Lamb’s obsessive pursuit of Byron (as well as her famous episodes of dressing as pageboys to get into his company) and the character of Lady Mercer.15 Was Polidori aware of the suspicions of sodomy that circulated around Byron? We can read Aubrey’s attempts to prevent Ruthven’s access to his sister as displaced incestuous desire, but this same interruptive and shielding move also suggests that Aubrey desires Ruthven for himself. How far we might perceive Aubrey and the narrator succumbing to Ruthven’s allure? To what degree is Aubrey the victim of Ruthven? Polidori’s contribution to the mythology of the vampire is to make him aristocratic. The underlining of class is based on how homophobia in the eighteenth century is partially inscribed in the tensions between evolving middle-class values in opposition to an aristocratic ancien regime denigrated through its association with tabooed sexual desires. Recently critics have read the vampire as a symbol for the queer ‘other’, outside sexuality and heterosexist definitions of masculinity. There has been a critical interest in how the male vampire and his victims represent and expose the structure of homosociality.16 The Vampyre had just as much an important cultural influence and place in Romantic popular culture in the early nineteenth century as Dracula came to have for the twentieth century.17 The Vampyre re-enacts the scene of Falkland and Caleb’s pursuit of one another in Caleb Williams, where the characterization and the interaction between Aubrey and Ruthven reveal Aubrey’s own homophobic terror. The story contains the seeds of the capacity for the vampire to signify queer desire that are to be fully developed in the later Gothic writing of Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde.


The narrative is told in retrospect by Aubrey on his deathbed. Ruthven is characterized as a social oddity, ‘all wished to see him’. His aloofness and reticence mark him out as a misfit who exudes an aura of misery that aligns him with the Byronic hero: ‘He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein’ (3). In the tradition of the Gothic hero-villain, the narrator focuses on the power of his gaze to inspire an inexplicable fear: some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate, [sic] and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass. (3) Unlike Schedoni in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, the gaze is figured in terms of lethargy or inertia rather than penetration. The gaze remains fixed upon the surface, specifically the cheek and not the eye, like a weight that is oppressive upon the skin attempting to pass through it. Aubrey experiences this enfeebling effect of Ruthven’s gaze along with the ‘female hunters’. Aubrey also quickly dispels the possibility that Ruthven is sexually interested in women: ‘it was not that the female sex was indifferent to him: yet such was the apparent caution with which he spoke to the virtuous wife and innocent daughter, that few knew he ever addressed himself to females’ (3–4). Aubrey watches Ruthven obsessively, trying to solve the ‘impossibility of forming an idea of the character of a man entirely absorbed in himself’ (5). He apotheosizes Ruthven as a hero ‘allowing his imagination to picture every thing that flattered its propensity to extravagant ideas, he soon formed this object into the hero of a romance, and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him’ (5). His curiosity to penetrate Ruthven’s veil of secrecy fascinates and excites him ‘though Aubrey was near the object of his curiosity, he obtained no greater gratification from it than the constant excitement of vainly wishing to break that mystery’ (7). Aubrey’s unconscious erotic motives for Ruthven strengthen as he becomes more repressed which results in his hysteria. His exacerbated fear of Ruthven’s gaze re-enacts the paranoia of homophobia that constructs the gaze of another male to sexualize its object. After Aubrey’s guardians warn him that Ruthven is a gambling lothario who has ‘irresistible powers of seduction’ (7), and he sees Ruthven destroy the lives of families, he decides to leave him: ‘He


resolved to invent some plausible pretext for abandoning him altogether, purposing, in the meanwhile, to watch him more closely, and to let no slight circumstance pass by unnoticed’ (7). From this point the story begins to re-enact a narrative of escape and return – the contradiction between wishing to leave Ruthven’s presence and the desire to continue. Aubrey is a voyeur to Ruthven’s sexual conquests of young women: ‘Aubrey’s eye followed him in all his windings, and soon discovered that an assignation had been appointed’ (8). The ostensible explanation for Aubrey blocking Ruthven’s sexual escapades are Aubrey’s moral objections but the imposition of Aubrey’s body between Ruthven and his victims can signify a desire for Aubrey to be Ruthven’s victim. The most symbolic image of this is when Aubrey courts the Greek girl Ianthe who is then attacked by Ruthven in the woods. In the darkness of the hovel Aubrey saves Ianthe from Ruthven, putting himself in her place: he was lifted from his feet and hurled with enormous force against the ground: – his enemy threw himself upon him, and kneeling upon his breast, had placed his hands upon his throat, when the glare of many torches penetrating through the hole that gave light in the day, disturbed him. (12) The Vampyre sanctions an artistic space for one male to sit upon another because of the traditions associated with the vampire. Robert Mighall comments on how the myth of the vampire incorporates the classical Incubus–Succubus demon, which connotes sexual positions: ‘The scientific term for the popular “nightmare” was “Incubus”, because it, like the demon of that name would “sit” on the sufferer, causing a sensation of suffocation or strangulation.’18 The ‘sufferer’ was usually female. Polidori wrote a treatise on the causes and effects of somnambulism and he may have been aware of a medical treatise on the phenomenon of the ‘Night-Mare’ which describes the Incubus.19 John Waller, a surgeon in the Navy, describes himself as a victim of the experience, and attempts to rationalize it by human pathology. He explains the incubus as: the idea of some living Being [sic] having taken its position on the breast, inspiring terror, and impeding respiration and all voluntary motion. It is not very surprising that persons labouring under


this extraordinary affection, should ascribe it to the agency of some dæmon, or evil spirit.20 In witchcraft compendiums like Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Malifacarum (1487), the incubus is gendered male and the succubus female. Consider Henry Fuseli’s famous painting The Nightmare (1788) where the dwarfish demon who kneels upon the unconscious woman’s chest leering at the spectator is distinctly male. Aubrey’s experience is figured in terms of the symptoms of the ‘Night-Mare’ that allows this scene to be read as Aubrey’s unconscious desire for Ruthven. Aubrey’s intervention represents coitus interruptus when Ruthven is draining Ianthe’s blood away. The narrator tells us that ‘a voice cried “again baffled”, to which a loud laugh succeeded’ (12). Ruthven has been ‘baffled’ before by Aubrey in having his desire for blood restrained by him. Laughter implies that Ruthven is ridiculing Aubrey’s intervention because he knows that Aubrey secretly wants to be his victim. If, as Senf argues, ‘Polidori suggests an erotic attachment between vampire and victim’, this describes more accurately the reason for Aubrey’s decline into madness and death than his concern for the female victims and his sister who are comparatively absent.21 Ruthven’s gaze and smile inexplicably unsettle him: ‘he was surprised to meet his gaze fixed intently upon him with a smile of malicious exultation playing upon his lips; he knew not why, but this smile haunted him’ (13). After the attack Aubrey’s vigilance over Ruthven steadily increases, and his contradictory impulses of wanting to escape him and to watch him are reinforced even more strongly: He determined to fly scenes, every feature of which created such bitter associations in his mind. He proposed to Lord Ruthven, to whom he held himself bound by the tender care he had taken of him during his illness, that they should visit those parts of Greece neither had yet seen. (14) Aubrey is also an example of the isolated witness of the supernatural whom no-one else believes. As I have argued above, this convention of Gothic writing might work as a metaphor for how the queer body is both visible and invisible. Ruthven is distinguished as a monster who looks no different to those around him. When Ruthven dies after being shot by banditti, he commits Aubrey to an oath of silence on his deathbed about Aubrey’s knowledge of his crimes, and not to


speak of him for a year and a day. He positions Aubrey in a closet of unspeakability. When we return to the drawing rooms of London, we might consider Auerbach’s argument that the vampire’s lack of identification is central to how Romantic figurations of vampirism lack descriptions of physical monstrosity: Expertise had little relevance to Dracula’s ancestors in English prose. Weaving in and out of their human prey, mysteriously incorporating their nature into our own, they were not remote spectacles, but congenial fellow travellers who were scarcely separable from their victim or from us, their victim/reader.22 Like the queer, the vampire has the power to be ‘scarcely separable’ and to pass as socially and morally conventional. The act of passing in the sense of a conscious performativity of expected gendered behaviour renders the attempt to read queerness in the early years of the nineteenth century extremely difficult. If vampires can be found in any of the drawing or assembly rooms of Jane Austen’s London, how are we to recognize them? The fear they inspire is their ability to appropriate other identities, and to call into question the sexual desires of those they persecute. They are able to possess and communicate their desires secretly without a danger of discovery. The Vampyre’s queerness is also present in the implications of incest, although one might qualify this to say that in Romantic literature, generally, incest is not as an uncommon theme as one might think. The narrator tells us: ‘if she before, by her infantine caresses, had gained his affection, now that the woman began to appear, she was still more attaching as a companion’ (17). This has a distinctly sexual overtone. When Aubrey chaperones his sister to the drawing rooms, he encounters Ruthven again: ‘he attempted to pass and get near her when one, whom he requested to move, turned round, and revealed to him those features he most abhorred’ (18). The convention of the turn to face the supernatural is used to suggest both incestuous and same-sex desire. Ruthven interposes his body between Aubrey and his sister. Aubrey moves gradually closer to his sister in attempting to block her courtship and marriage to Ruthven. However, one can read this protection to signify Aubrey’s desire to prevent any female contact with Ruthven, because for Ruthven to touch his sister would establish a metaphorical sexual connection with Aubrey:


His oath startled him;– was he then to allow this monster to roam, bearing ruin upon his breath, amidst all he held dear, and not avert its progress? His very sister might have been touched by him. But even if he were to break his oath, and disclose his suspicions, who would believe him? (19) We might compare Aubrey’s situation with Victor’s pursuit of the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) where a monomaniacal pursuit of the monster suggests a repressed homoerotic attachment. ‘Touched’ might denote both madness and sexual contact. He later implores his sister not to touch Ruthven when he discovers him to be her fiancé: ‘Oh, do not touch him – if your love for me is aught, do not go near him!’ (20). On the one hand, this warning against touching exhibits a desire to possess his sister for himself. Yet we might also see it as the fear of sexual contagion by proxy that suggests a repressed desire. Miss Aubrey circumvents Aubrey’s desire for Ruthven by acting like a bodily conduit between them. Earlier the narrator notes that Aubrey resists going back into the drawing room assemblies: ‘Aubrey would rather have remained in the mansion of his fathers, and fed upon the melancholy which overpowered him’ (17) [my emphasis]. Richard Dyer’s argument that ‘if the vampire is an Other, he or she was also always a figure in whom one could find oneself’ usefully explains how Aubrey parallels Ruthven and initially sets him up as a hero-model in his mind.23 He wishes to hold onto the Romantic sensibility where the image of Ruthven becomes all pervasive to the point where Aubrey psychologically penetrates him. To his family, Aubrey appears demonically possessed. Aubrey becomes vampiric in turn. He feeds on the image of Ruthven and the terror he causes. Resigning himself to his ‘devouring thoughts’ in the drawing room, he resolves to ‘watch him closely, anxious to forewarn in spite of his oath, all whom Lord Ruthven approached with intimacy’ (19). His obsession increases: ‘Aubrey became almost distracted. If before his mind had been absorbed by one subject, how much more completely was it engrossed now that the certainty of the monster’s living again pressed upon his thoughts’ [my emphasis] (19). The sexual connotations of being engulfed, devoured and pressed upon signal his repressed desire for Ruthven; the figure of the Incubus again presses on his thoughts. Ruthven’s doubling of Aubrey is figured as a mirror image, when Aubrey opens the locket of his sister and sees Ruthven instead: ‘opening it, what was his surprise at beholding the features of the monster who had so long influenced his life. He seized the portrait in a paroxysm of rage,


and trampled it under foot’ (21). The image he sees is ‘a reflection’. A disavowal of his unconscious attraction to Ruthven and his desire to be watched and penetrated by his fangs. The queerness of Ruthven has its precedents in Romantic poetry. In The Vampyre (1810) by John Stagg, a man becomes the victim of his close friend who turns into a vampire.24 The narrator of the poem, Gertrude, watches her sleeping husband Herman and feels perplexed by seeing his ‘Griefs too distressful to be borne’ (l. 8) and the signs of his physical debility. Herman confesses to his wife that Sigismund, ‘my once dear friend’, is ‘now my persecutor foul’ who visits him in his bedroom: There, vested in infernal guise, (By means to me not understood,) Close to my side the goblin lies, And drinks away my vital blood! Sucks from my veins the streaming life, And drains the fountain of my heart! O Gertrude, Gertrude! Dearest wife! Unutterable is my smart. (ll. 69–76) The transformation of the former friend into a vampire who acts to disrupt his friend’s marriage represents the interruptive force of the vampire to blur the lines between friendship and erotic attachment. The narrator indicates that both Sigismund and Herman are a threat to patriarchy: ‘Next day in council ‘twas decree, [sic] / (Urg’d at the instance of the state,) / That shudd’ring nature should be freed / From pests like these ere ‘twas too late’ (ll. 133–136). Herman and Sigismund are both buried together in the ‘same selpuchre’, symbolizing their erotic union through death. In Coleridge’s poem Christabel (1816), the vampiric-like figure of Geraldine paralyses Christabel with her gaze: She nothing sees, no sight but one! The maid devoid of guile and sin, I know not how, in fearful wise So deeply had she drunken in That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, That all her features were resigned to this sole image in her mind, And, passively did imitate That look of dull and treacherous hate.25


Geraldine’s gaze seduces Christabel, but perhaps more tellingly for how we might read same-sex desire in other ways, Christabel imitates Getrude. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it may also be a discrete form of love under the guise of hero-worship or idolizing another. The Vampyre is queer because the story repeats many of the conventions of Gothic writing I explored earlier in relation to how homophobia is constructed through a discourse of the gaze where one looks, watches and reads others to see their ‘true’ or essential selves in a world of masquerades. I wish now to turn attention to how the gaze and suspicious narrative voices in Byron’s Gothic writing can be connected to fears of the queer body and its powers of (in)visibility.

Penetrating eye(s): Lara and The Giaour The Giaour (1813), the first in the series of Byron’s immensely successful ‘Eastern’ narrative poems contains tropes of Gothic writing.26 One such trope is its structure of a fragmented story of past events told from an incomplete manuscript; its characterization, settings and themes are all clearly in tune with the continuing interest in Gothic writing at the time. The story of The Giaour is concerned with the punishment of illicit sexual desire, specifically adultery. Through the fragments of the confessions of the monk Caloyer, and the earlier observations of an unidentified narrator, we learn that the wife of Hassan, Leila, commits adultery with a Venetian (the ‘Giaour’, meaning the Arabic for infidel). She is punished by Hassan who ties her in a sack and throws her into the sea. Hassan then seeks out the Giaour to avenge himself. They meet and the Giaour slays Hassan. The fragmentary confessions of the monk Caloyer suggest that he is the Giaour, repenting his adultery with Leila and his murder of Hassan. However, the relationship between the Giaour and Hassan points to something beyond the story of adultery to an unarticulated, intense relationship between them that leaves us with a sense of what can be queer about intense friendships or enmities between men.27 Byron praised William Beckford’s accuracy in depicting Oriental customs in Vathek, but the novel also appears to have influenced The Giaour with the idea of how Vathek’s look can cause immediate death. This image acts as an inspiration for how the gaze forms the figurative ground for exploring secrecy between men. The narrator introduces us to the Giaour, Caloyer, in a series of images drawn from the sublime which suggest Caloyer’s powerful masculinity. He comes ‘thundering’ on ‘blackest steed’, riding


by ‘meteor-like’ while the ‘foam that streaks the courser’s side / Seems gather’d from the ocean-tide’ (ll. 185–186, 173). He also suggests the possibility that he is ‘a demon of the night’ and that he possesses an ‘evil eye’. The narrator watches him secretly, acknowledging that to do so is dangerous ‘For well I ween unwelcome he / Whose glance is fix’d on those that flee’ (ll. 212–213, 174). Nevertheless he feels irresistibly compelled to watch him: ‘On-on he hasten’d, and he drew / My gaze of wonder as he flew’ (ll. 200–201, 174). Despite asserting that he loathes him as an infidel, the narrator questions who he is, why he looks in particular directions and what motivates his changing expressions: ‘O’er him who loves, or hates, or fears, / Such moment pours the grief of years: / What felt he [sic] then, at once opprest / By all that most distracts the breast?’ (ll. 265–268, 175–176). The questioning tone, the attempt to read a coherent identity and the Giaour’s motives are frustrated. There is a sense that the narrator enjoys a secret ‘thrill’ at watching the Giaour unobserved. Caloyer is partly inspired by the character of the monk Schedoni in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel The Italian (1797).28 Caloyer inspires a frozen terror in those who meet his gaze: Dark and unearthly is the scowl That glares beneath his dusky cowl: The flash of that dilating eye Reveals too much of times gone by; Though varying, indistinct its hue, Oft will his glance the gazer rue, For in it lurks that nameless spell, Which speaks, itself unspeakable, A spirit yet unquell’d and high. (ll. 831–840, 193) The eye of Caloyer is dilatory, a suggestively sexual description, as well as ‘indistinct’, emphasizing the unreadability of his past history and identity. The gaze embodies the paradox of how the eye ‘speaks’ but it is ‘itself unspeakable’, suggesting that the gaze or the look stands in for a larger cultural unspeakable, that is the queer body. The suggestion here is that the gaze communicates a meaning beyond speech and is terrifying to the gazer caught looking to decipher Caloyer’s secret. Like Schedoni, Caloyer represents an unidentifiable male body to the narrator-confessor. He is a figure of mystery to him and his expressions


and gaze indicate ‘some dark deed he will not name’. At the opening of the fragment, the narrator is asked to describe him presumably by another monk: ‘How name ye yon lone Caloyer?’, and he makes a comparison with his memory of the Giaour, although he cannot be certain: ‘It breathes the same dark spirit now, / As death were stamp’d upon his brow’ (ll. 796–797, 192). He describes how he is alienated due to his ‘faith’ and ‘race’, as he practises none of the conventional rituals of the monastery and no one can bear to look at him: ‘No scape the glance they scarce can brook’ (l. 845, 194). In a pertinent simile, he later compares the effect of Caloyer’s gaze upon him to that of a Gorgon: ‘As if the Gorgon there had bound / The sablest of the serpent-braid / That o’er her fearful forehead stray’d;’ (ll. 896–898, 195). Although this is used to emphasize his black hair, it recalls the myth of Perseus and Medusa, situating Caloyer in terms of a castrating gaze that turns its masculine object, the narrator, into stone, by literally petrifying him.29 This paralysing subordination under the unremitting gaze of another male encodes the fear that for men to hold the gaze between one another signals an exchange of desire or fear of desire. It also indicates that the ‘secretive’ individual is visually magnetic. The gaze cannot be averted, but is irresistibly attracted to its object against its will. The narrator expresses a sympathy with Caloyer because he is privileged in what he sees. When he comments: ‘Oft will his glance the gazer rue’, ‘rue’ is ambiguous. Either the observer will regret watching Caloyer as Caloyer’s gaze will provoke terror, or there will be a sense of unspoken recognition in Caloyer’s looks which he feels sympathy for. The narrator acts as a physiognomist, interpreting personality and identities from the face ‘But sadder still it were to trace / What once were feelings in that face’ (ll. 859–860, 194). He is able to perceive the subtleties of Caloyer’s expressions and looks which are invisible to others: And there are hues not always faded, Which speak a mind not all degraded [ ] The common crowd but see the gloom Of wayward deeds, and fitting doom: The close observer can espy A noble soul, and lineage high. (ll. 864–869, 194) A ‘close’ or ‘closeted’ observer of other men is able to perceive beyond the ‘common crowd’ to recognize an individual as complicated as himself.


As my readings in other chapters indicate, Gothic writing is distinctive for how looking and the gaze between men suggests how men may have communicated their desires secretly to each other. Characters and narrators are empowered to make distinctions, to penetrate through surfaces and veils which leads to speculation about secrets. At the end of the poem, after the reader has been presented with a fragment of Caloyer’s confession, the narrator’s reflections suggest how the structure of closeting and rumour works: He pass’d – nor of his name and race Hath left a token or a trace, Save what the father must not say Who shrived him on his dying day: This broken tale was all we knew Of her he loved, or him he slew. (ll. 1329–1334, 208) The confessor is now bound to secrecy by the confession, and the narrator is left to suspicion. The poem’s fragmented voices of the narrator and Caloyer, the missing information denoted by asteriks, suggests how suspicion works, in that the reader is left to fill in the gaps or interpret the points of unspeakability. Even Caloyer withholds information from the confessor: ‘They told me – ‘twas a hideous tale! I’d tell it, but my tongue would fail:’ (ll. 1308–1309, 207). The idea and effects of the unspeakable secret is more central to the tale than knowing the facts of any secret. As Ellen Brinks rightly argues, ‘The narrator’s refusal to bring together the pieces, to clarify the enigmatic events and inconsistencies reflects the more than constructed – and excluded – nature of certain sexual identities.’30 Lara also features a suspicious narrator who watches and observes the looks between men. The setting of Lara in a generalized medieval Europe and centering around Lara’s vast Gothic castle evokes Gothic novels like The Castle of Otranto. Lara’s mysterious disappearance and return years later, his servants’ suspicions about his past, Sir Ezzelin’s claim to disclose his ‘sins’, and Lara’s discovery of the pageboy Kaled’s real gender are all themes that make the poem Gothic. Lara shows how rumour and suspicion are circulated about the secret sins of aristocratic men and suggests that the secret ‘unspeakable sin’ can stand in for same-sex desire. At the opening of the poem when Lara returns to his castle, the narrator establishes himself as an observer, watching Lara’s behaviour. He notices


that there has been a change in him: ‘tis quickly seen, / Whate’er he be, ‘twas not what he had been’ (I, ll. 66–67, 318).31 Judging that Lara has ‘The stinging of a heart the world hath stung’ (I, l. 74, 318), he also suggests that there is something about Lara’s expressions which escapes understanding: ‘All these seeme’d his, and something more beneath / Than glance could well reveal, or accent breathe’ (I, ll. 77–79, 318). Lara refuses to open up to others who enquire about his travels, implying that he has some secret to conceal: ‘If still more prying such enquiry grew, / His brow fell darker, and his words more few’ (I, ll. 93–94, 319). The narrator concludes that Lara’s stern and remote behaviour is puzzling, ‘Twas strange’, and his past becomes the central aporia in the poem. The narrator positions himself to secretly observe Lara and interpret his looks. It is principally Lara’s eyes and the effects of his gaze that the narrator focuses upon: His eye was almost seal’d, but nor forsook Even in its trance the gladiator’s look, That oft awake his aspect could disclose, And now was fix’d in horrible repose. (I, ll. 221–224, 322) The ‘gladiator’s look’, similar to the Medusa’s gaze of Caloyer in The Giaour, suggests an image of death. Lara is also thought to be supernatural. The narrator is unable to explain the awe Lara arouses in those he looks upon, ‘None knew, nor how, nor why, but he entwined / Himself perforce around the hearer’s mind’ (I, ll. 371–372, 327) ‘Entwined’ and ‘wound’ in the following lines suggests the image of the serpent. Lara’s image almost possesses the narrator in a kind of demonic possession: You could not penetrate his soul, but found, Despite your wonder, to your own he wound; His presence haunted still; and from the breast He forced an unwilling interest. (I, ll. 377–380, 327) Lara’s impenetrability fuels gossip and rumours among his servants ‘His silence form’d a theme for others’ prate – / They guess’d – they gazed – they fain would know his fate’ (I, ll. 294–295, 325). Although Lara betrays no ‘corroding secrecy’ through his gaze, his tone of voice or


expressions to ‘common gazers’, the narrator perceives there is a secret which must not be told about Lara: His breast had buried both, Nor common gazers could discern the growth Of thoughts that mortal lips must leave half told; They choke the feeble words that would unfold. (I, ll. 285–288, 324) He suggests that Lara’s eyes convey a meaning which remains undefinable to others, but suggests to the narrator some sort of boundary has been crossed ‘some had seen / They scarce knew what, but more than should have been’ (I, ll. 141–142, 320). The narrator positions himself as sensitive to the subtle language of Lara’s body and its expressive meaning over and above the others who watch him. Lara is similar to The Castle of Otranto in its implication that the secret about Lara is an open secret amongst some of his servants and cannot be named amongst them: All was not well, they deem’d – but where the wrong? Some knew perchance – but ‘twere a tale too long; And such besides were too discretely wise, To more than hint their knowledge in surmise; But if they would – they could’ – around the board, Thus Lara’s vassals prattled of their lord. (I, ll. 149–154, 320) In the list of tasks that Lara asks his page Kaled to perform for him, one of the most important in terms of proving Kaled’s trust and fidelity is for him not to ‘mingle with the menial train’ (I, l. 568, 332). Like Manfred in The Castle of Otranto, Lara can represent the aristocratic male who fears exposure or extortion through the uncontrolled rumours that circulate among his servants and the ‘doubting’ of his identity and reputation. Arguably, the narrator also mirrors the gossips; he also represents the position of the gossiping subject who fosters rumours and doubts about Lara: And then, his rarely call’d attendants said, Through the night’s long hours would sound his hurried tread O’er the dark gallery, where his fathers frown’d


In rude but antique portraiture around: They heard, but whisper’d – ‘that must not be known – The sound of words less earthly than his own. ( I, ll. 136–140, 320) The last two lines contain an ambiguity as to who speaks the words ‘that must not be known’. ‘They heard, but whisper’d’ could refer to Lara’s servants who are eavesdropping on him in the gallery. Alternatively, it could refer to the ‘fathers’. There is the suggestion of a supernatural warning that Lara does not betray his secret by ‘less earthly’ means. The possibility that the words refer to a supernatural warning may remind us of the point when Manfred’s grandfather steps from his portrait in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and refuses him permission to enter the bedroom by slamming the door in his face. Reading Lara’s secret as a desire for his page Kaled is a possibility in this context, given the importance the poem places on the unspeakability of Lara’s desire. Any public knowledge that Lara was queer would compromise the family’s reputation for honour and chivalry which must be preserved. The narrator’s reflections about how historical reputations are established and secret histories are buried mark out the difference between the written historical record and the verbal or oral traditions that circulate about the past: He turn’d within his solitary hall, And his high shadow shot along the wall: There were the painted forms of other times, ‘Twas all they left of virtue or of crimes, Save vague tradition; and the gloomy vaults That hid their dust, their foibles and their faults; And half a column of the pompous page, That speeds the specious tale from age to age; Where history’s pen its praise or blame supplies, And lies like truth, and still most truly lies. (I, ll. 181–190, 321) Lara’s ‘shadow’ on the wall is like one of the portraits in that it signifies only a surface appearance while the narrator wishes to see the ‘real’ Lara. The ‘vague tradition’ is no more satisfying to the prying narrator than the ‘pompous page’ of history where only half the story is known.


The narrator views personal history as intentionally designed to mislead and deceive others – ‘the specious tale’ – and is skeptical about official accounts of reputations of prominent figures. His paradoxical observation in the last line suggests that what is taken to be true and authentic can turn out be false. Despite the narrator’s contemptuous distance from ‘The general rumour ignorantly loud, / The mystery dearest to the curious crowd’ (II, ll. 137–138, 339) he participates in the guessing game about Lara’s secret through his observation of the exchange of looks between Lara, Ezzelin and Kaled. Eager to discover Lara’s secret, at Otho’s festival, the narrator watches the effect of Sir Ezzelin gazing ‘unseen’ upon Lara: At length encountering meets the mutual gaze Of keen enquiry and mute amaze; On Lara’s glance emotion gathering grew, As if distrusting that the stranger threw; Along the stranger’s aspect, fix’d and stern, Flash’d more than thence the vulgar eye could learn. (I, ll. 409–414, 328) After Ezzelin asks if Lara remembers him, Lara appears not to recognize him: ‘With slow and searching glance upon his face / Grew Lara’s eyes, but nothing there could trace / They knew, or chose to know’ (I, ll. 443–445, 329). After interrupting and challenging Ezzelin to tell his ‘wondrous tale’ the following day before a joust, Lara leaves, smiling at Ezzelin. This prompts a series of questions by the narrator, ‘Could this mean peace? The calmness of the good? / Or guilt grown old in desperate hardihood?’ (I, ll. 504–505, 330). There is no safety in reading expressions or looks: ‘For man to trust to mortal look or speech; / From deeds, and deeds alone, may he discern / Truths which it wrings the unpractised heart to learn’ (I, ll. 507–509, 331). Nevertheless the narrator reveals himself to be an ‘unpractised’ heart by his agonized questioning over the significance of the exchange of looks between Lara, Ezzelin and Kaled. He arouses suspicion and doubt in the reader’s mind that the relationship between Lara and Kaled pushes the boundaries of homosocial bonding towards the lines of an erotic relationship, particularly because as we discover later, Kaled is a woman.32 The semiotics of the gaze and gender ambiguity in the poem produce an impression that the relationship between Kaled and Lara is queer.


In particular, Kaled’s ambiguous physicality atrracts our attention. He is ‘darkly delicate’ with a ‘light form’ while his black eyes have a ‘melancholy tinge’ to them and a ‘long low lashes’ fringe’. His hands also distinguish him from ‘vulgar toil’: ‘So femininely white it might bespeak / Another sex, when match’d with that smooth cheek, / But for his garb, and something in his gaze, / More wild and high than woman’s eye betrays’ (I, ll. 576–579, 333). The narrator scrutinizes his face and body and concludes that his blushes reveal ‘a hectic tint of secret care / That for a burning moment fever’d there;’ (I, ll. 534–535, 331) which is suggestively erotic. The narrator notices how Kaled shuns ‘brotherhood’ and watches Lara devotedly: ‘For hours on Lara he would fix his glance, / As all-forgotten in that watchful trance’ (I, ll. 544–545, 332). Kaled is oblivious to everything except Lara’s ‘pale aspect’ when he is dying: ‘the eye, though dim, / Held all the light that shone on earth for him’ (II, ll. 430–431, 347). When Lara and Kaled leave Otho’s hall, the narrator speculates on the changing expression of Kaled’s face: ‘The colour of young Kaled went and came, / The lip of ashes, and the cheek of flame’ (I, ll. 598–599, 333). He speculates on Kaled’s thoughts, ‘Whate’er might Kaled’s be, it was enow / To seal his lip, but agonise his brow’ (I, ll. 606– 607, 333) and notices that the smile Lara gives Ezzelin has a signifiance for Kaled which others are unable to perceive: He gazed on Ezzelin till Lara cast That sidelong smile upon the knight he past; When Kaled saw that smile his visage fell, As if on something recognised right well; His memory read in such a meaning more Than Lara’s aspect unto others wore. (I, ll. 608–613, 333–334) Unable to identify the significance of Kaled’s reaction, he can only register that it has a special meaning for Kaled. After Lara faints in the portrait gallery he prevents his servants from discovering the reason by communicating with Kaled in a foreign language. Kaled is the only person who is able to interpret what he utters: His page approach’d, and he alone appear’d To know the import of the words they heard; And, by the changes of his cheek and brow,


They were not such as Lara should avow, Nor he interpret. (II, ll. 235–239, 341) It is implied that his confession should have remained unspeakable. Later when Lara is on the point of dying, this foreign language metaphorizes the silent desire between the men. Language itself figures as a private form of exchange which those who cannot recognize the signs – who are not ‘in the know’ – cannot understand: They understood not, if distinctly heard; His dying tones are in that other tongue, To which some strange remembrance wildly clung. They spake of other scenes, but what – is known To Kaled, whom their meaning reach’d alone; And he replied, though faintly, to their sound, While gazed the rest in dumb amazement round. (II, ll. 442–449, 347) Frustrated in his attempts to translate or interpret Lara and Kaled’s bodies, the narrator speculates on their relationship along with the ‘common gazers’ he tries to distinguish himself from: But from his visage little could we guess, So unrepentant, dark, and passionless, Save that when struggling nearer to his last, Upon that page his eye was kindly cast. (II, ll. 462–465, 348) When Lara perceives the ‘truth’, and not ‘terror’ in Kaled’s ‘breast’, the narrator remarks: This Lara mark’d and laid his hand on his: It trembled not in such an hour as this; His lip was silent, scarcely beat his heart, His eye alone proclaim’d,’ We will not part! Thy band may perish, or thy friends may flee Farewell to life, but not adieu to thee! (II, ll. 354–359, 345)


The narrator interprets Lara’s gaze as expressing a love between them that is eternal. The ambiguity of ‘It trembled not in such an hour as this’, which refers to Lara’s touching Kaled’s hand, is reinforced by the context of ‘the thrilling hand’ in ‘To Thyrza’ where ‘thrilling’ has erotic overtones. It could be interpreted as meaning that Kaled’s body does not show any signs of terror; it only shows the ‘truth’ which we might read as love. As readers, we might infer that because of the physical intensity of the relationship between Kaled and Lara that their relationship of a master and his page is stretched beyond a working, homosocial relationship but nevertheless cannot be definitively described in terms of sexual attraction or desire. However, any queer signification is safely dissolved when we discover that Kaled is a woman: Oh! never yet beneath The breast of man such trusty love may breathe That trying moment hath at once reveal’d The secret long and yet but half conceal’d. (II, ll. 512–515, 349) Any initial perception that the relationship might express same-sex desire is impossible to erase.33 It is perhaps strengthened even further by this reversal of gender. Lara is queer Gothic writing because it shows that any taxonomies of reading character, personality and even sexual identity from the face and its expressions is overturned and disturbed.34 Concomitantly, the language of desire between men can be (needs to be) invisible to the regulatory practices of a heteronormative culture and not reducible to any kind of social identification or type: Why did she love him? Curious fool! – be still – [ ] To her he might be gentleness; the stern Have deeper thoughts than your dull eyes discern, And when they love, your smilers guess not how Beats the strong heart, though less the lips avow. (II, ll. 530–535, 350) The narrator’s admonition to the inquisitive reader includes himself in his reflection upon his misplaced confidence in his and the servants ‘dull eyes’. Lara’s parting implication is that desire between men is not always available for social visibility and punishment like the convicted sodomite in the pillory.


Whether we read this as an expression of Byron’s own experience of the invisibility of his same-sex desire depends upon the degree to which we want to read his poetry as biography. As I indicated in the first part of this chapter, this is complicated by the way in which Byron manipulates the idea of secrecy in his poetry, and by writings about him which exploit the rumours surrounding him. A queer reading of Bryon’s poetry is not necessarily dependent on whether we can determine if the rumours surrounding Byron are true or not. Rather, the ambiguity and complexity of reading or seeing Byron’s sexuality can be marshalled as a way to think about how sexual identity and desire is read in fiction. The discursive conditions of how same-sex desire might be expressed in canonical texts, other than in sodomitical terms, for instance in how the gaze communicates or prohibits intimacy and desire, how reversals of gender (not always in a literal sense of changing one’s clothes) mark queerness, need to be looked at furhter. The narrative tone of The Vampyre, Lara and The Giaour voice a suspicious (and fearful) position in relation to the suspects they closely watch, which echoes back to us how we cannot always see either what we want to see, or what is right in front of our eyes.

Conclusion

In Charles Maturin’s Gothic novel Fatal Revenge (1807) two men kiss one another in a scene that is both homoerotic and presented in the context of a story of a secret and forbidden love that infuses a queer dimension to their relationship: ‘Imagine me her for a moment,’ said Cyprian, sinking at Ippolito’s feet, and hiding his face – ‘Imagine me her; give me one kiss.’ ‘Enthusiastic boy.’ ‘Give me but one, and her spirit shall depart, pleased and absolved,’ ‘Visionary, you do what you will with me; I never kissed one of my own sex before; but do what you will with me;’ half blushing, half pouting, he offered his red lip, Cyprian touched it and fainted.1 Cyprian, a valet to the hero of the novel, Ippolito di Montorio, reads to Ippolito a series of fragmentary letters, supposedly written by a young woman who has poisoned herself because her lover is not interested in her anymore. The fragments, ‘a narrative of thoughts’, record her alternative moods of enthusiasm, hope and guilt at her desire for a man who is ‘indifferent’ and ‘unconscious’ to her love. She repines alone and invisible ‘no ear heard and no eye saw her sufferings’, 48. It is implied that Cyprian’s purpose in reading to Ippolito is to dissuade him from mixing in the company of Neapolitan courtesans, drinking companions and gamblers and to show him that ‘there are beings, who only live to feel, and who have died of feeling’ (48), in effect, to reform him ‘to love’. Cyprian reveals that Ippolito is the object of her hopeless, unrequited love. Unsurprisingly, it transpires at the end of the novel that Cyprian is in fact, Rosolia di Valozzi, a young girl who voluntarily becomes a nun and 157


then mysteriously disappeared without a trace. The novel plays with the reader’s suspicions that Cyprian might be a woman through a variety of hints the narrator drops about his effeminacy: ‘Not of a sex to inspire love, and still too female-like for the solid feelings of manly friendship, Cyprian hovered round his master, like his guardian sylph, with the officiousness of unwearied zeal, and the delight of communicated purity’ (p. 41). Nevertheless, there is the possibility that Cyprian’s act of reading to Ippolito, an act of ventriloquism in voicing Rosolia’s feelings as if they are his own, represents one way men may have communicated their desires for one another, via the recitations of the stories of unfulfilled or disappointed love between straight men and women which are then communally lamented or mourned. Despite the, by now, customary reversal of gender readers would expect in Gothic writing, this scene of a kiss between two men is still daring and unparalleled elsewhere as far as I know. But like in The Monk, desire between men is safely erased under the trope of sex reversal in Gothic writing. And the only other way out is death – Cyprian supposedly commits suicide after he discovers Ippolito is a murderer and leaves him (he reveals later he is Rosolia). The potential for Cyprian’s role-playing to express same-sex desire between men, particularly between a master and his valet, is strong, and is at once both confirmed and buried. How many other masters in Romantic writing ‘imagine’ the romantic sexual possibilities with their valets and servants and by what circuitous routes might we have to travel down before we can see them?2 There are other directions queer criticism of the Gothic could take. My analysis of Gothic writing is confined to novels and poems, but a queer reading could be extended in the direction of the popularity for Gothic dramas in which there is a renewed critical interest. In Joanna Baillie’s Gothic drama De Montfort, the gaze between men is implicitly linked to the fulfillment of an unrealized and dormant desire through death.3 When De Montfort was first read at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, it was believed to have been written by a male dramatist. Set in an undefined time in Germany, the play explores the implacable hatred of the aristocrat De Montfort for the bourgeois figure of Rezenvelt. When De Montfort arrives at the house of his former landlord, he is characterized as paranoid. His servants, Jerome and Manuel, comment on the ‘gloomy sterness in his eye’ and they are staged so as to whisper behind his back. Through a discussion with his servant Manuel, De Montfort gestures towards an unspeakable secret he possesses. When he is told that the Marquis Rezenvelt is staying nearby, he becomes frantic:

Conclusion

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He haunts me – stings me – like a devil haunts – He’ll make a raving maniack of me – Villian! The air wherein thou draws’t thy fulsome breath Is poison to me – Oceans shall divide. (Act I, sc. II, 244) The explanation for his secret suffering is his injured pride over his dishonour at losing a duel to Rezenvelt. Rezenvelt makes him feel a sense of dissolution, as well as a violent desire for his own death and Rezenvelt’s. This desire for death can be read as a displacement of the denial of erotic desires for another man.4 At a party given by his friend Count Freburg De Montfort’s self-composure is broken by the presence of Rezenvelt: Hell hath no greater torment for th’accurs’d Than this man’s presence gives Abhorred fiend! He hath a pleasure too, A damned pleasure in the pain he gives. Oh! the side glance of that detested eye! That conscious smile! That full insulting lip! It touches every nerve: it makes me mad. (Act I, sc. II, 249) In another context, Rezenvelt’s entrance into the room might be love at first sight. Rezenvelt’s physicality provokes De Montfort to madness. The possibility that this response in De Montfort might contain an erotic component is suggested by how Rezenvelt affects his sensibility, ‘It touches every nerve’. Death before dishonour is preferable to him: ‘To be annihilated; / What all men shrink from; to be dust, be nothing, / Were bliss to me, compar’d to what I am’ (263). Death is, in other words, a substitute for the erotic ‘bliss’ De Montfort feels in the presence of Rezenvelt; he admits after all that love and hate are very close: ‘I know resentment may to love be turn’d’. When De Montfort is left alone with the corpse of Rezenvelt, he feels compelled to tear off the monk’s cloak or to ‘unveil’ him like a Gothic heroine. When De Montfort imagines Rezenvelt’s body exchanging life for death, or in Bataille’s terms, continuity for discontinuity, the situation he describes has parallels with erotic experience: ‘How with convulsive life he heav’d beneath me / E’en with the death’s wound gor’d. O Horrid, horrid! / Methinks I feel him still’ (298).5 There is also the sense that Rezenvelt’s presence is like a ghost that no eye but De Montfort’s can see. De Montfort describes how the signs of


Rezenvelt’s ‘gibing malice’ are invisible to others but himself: ‘There is no living being on this earth / Who can conceive the malice of his soul’ (262). Paradoxically, he fears to be alone with Rezenvelt at Freburg’s house, and then is afraid that others will be watching them together: ‘Must all the world stare upon our meeting?’ (270). De Montfort draws back from Rezenvelt’s embrace when De Montfort condescends to be reconciled to him. De Montfort backs away believing Rezenvelt is mocking him with the reply, ‘I’ll take thy hand since I can have no more’ (274). What else is left for him to take? The implication that De Montfort reads in ‘more’ is perhaps that Rezenvelt wants all of his body. Describing Rezenvelt in sadistic, demonic terms, he believes that Freburg is ‘besotted’ and ‘bewitched’ by him. The name De Montfort (or demon, or strong demon in fact) takes on a significance, as Jane De Montfort describes him as ‘fiend-like’ and characterizes his feelings for Rezenvelt as similar to those of the experience of demonic possession: Some sprite accurst within thy bosom mates To work thy ruin. Strive with it, my brother! Strive bravely with it; drive it from thy breast: ‘Tis the degrader of a noble heart; Curse it, and bid it part. (Act II, sc. II, 261) The imagery of the demonic is used to convey De Montfort’s sense of the loss of self he experiences in Rezenvelt’s presence that might have an erotic basis. The final tableaux of the play where both their bodies are laid together in death, symbolizing a union unattainable in life, suggests that Rezenvelt is a haunting double. Rezenvelt’s status as a dopplegänger for De Montfort works in how he represents the feminized male who has triumphed over the honour of De Montfort and therefore doubted De Montfort’s masculinity. When Freburg implores De Montfort to ‘Open thy heart to me’, he rejects this personal intimacy, arguing that real men do not exchange confidences like this: Freberg, thou knows’t not man; not nature’s man, But only him who, in smooth studied works Of polished sages, shine deceitfully In all the splendid foppery of virtue. That man was never born whose secret soul

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With all its motley treasures of dark thoughts Foul fantasies, vain musings, and wild dreams Was ever open’d to another’s scan. (Act I, sc. II, 245) However he appears jealous of Rezenvelt’s social ease and homosocial bonding with Freburg. In a speech to Freburg, Rezenvelt genders social gaiety as feminized: What think you, Freburg, the same powerful Spell Of transformation reigns o’er all to-night? Or that De Montfort is a woman turn’d So widely from his native self to swerve As grace my gaiety with a smile of his. (Act II, sc. I, 256) One might read the source of De Montfort’s antagonism as his inability to endure an attraction to Freburg’s social affability that feminizes him, in addition to losing his sense of masculine pride in losing a duel to him. Rezenvelt’s observation of De Montfort’s smile as gendered also suggests how the signifiers of the body have the ability to be misrepresented with possible malicious intentions. De Montfort’s opening up of Freburg’s eyes to ‘nature’s man’ might be taken as an indicator for where we might read the presence of queer and non-normative desires elsewhere in other Romantic genres of fiction. In the ‘fantasies’, ‘musings’, ‘dreams’ and enthusiastic imaginings are perhaps to be found queer desires and love that seems perhaps just a little too intense or intimate to be adequately explained or accounted for by friendship or rivalry. Particularly in those places or configurations where we might think erotic desire between men is non-existent because the plot, characters or narrators seem so resolutely heterosexual or straight.6 And the opposition between ‘nature’s man’, and by definition the man who is refined, civilized or even dandiacal, is one that could bear fruit from further investigation, particularly in respect of the figure of the Romantic poet and his relationship to a wild, untamed nature where women or femininity are absent.7 The possibilities for queering literature in the Romantic Age have already been outlined but there is more work that specifically could be undertaken on the Gothic.8 One area of Gothic writing that holds


a particular promise is how the Gothic is preoccupied with futurity and death, particularly the investment it makes in the figure of the child. The central significance of the child to heteronormative political and religious ideologies about reproduction and procreation, and how queer subjectivities are pitted as objects of a death drive for a heteronormative culture, is brilliantly theorized by Lee Edelman. His theory offers a further turn by which to read the Gothic queerly, and its manifestations in other genres like the novel of Sensibility, detective fiction of ghost stories.9 In the Gothic, the child is perceived to be under threat from the queer or monstrous outsider in the context of producing children to maintain the heteronormative value structure. There is always a family inheritance or reputation that is in danger, symbolized effectively by the crumbling and twisted (or queered) castle and not always redeemed by the promise of futurity in the newborn child, or child that is discovered. Isabella is in danger from Manfred’s monomania for his reputation, Gulchenrouz from Vathek’s jealousy, Antonia from Ambrosio’s lust, Agnes’s child from the sadistic Prioress, Emily St Aubert from Montoni’s plots. Many of the victims in Gothic writing are children, or those who are described in child-like terms, and they have the greatest burden of responsibility to uphold family traditions thrust upon them. These outsider figures, those who embody the death drive or negation of futurity are usually foiled, punished or destroyed. Gothic writing then reinforces the bourgeois mode of the need to uphold and preserve the child against the dangers of the queer. To return to the scene of the kiss. As I outlined in Chapter 1, looking for evidence of same-sex attraction in lives or fiction does not matter so much as attempting to understand how attraction and desire are constructed and regulated between men. As I hope to have opened the reader’s eyes in the chapters above, we can see how Gothic writing participates in a number of discourses in the Romantic period (particularly monstrosity and the sublime) that serve to articulate the problem of queerness. One important discourse that I have drawn attention to is how the Gothic’s use of Sensibility’s fetishizing of body language is used to show how the signifiers of the body (or its writing if we like) always need interpretation with the result that the body’s meaning is never stabilized. This is especially true of the gaze. The gaze registers a power and a meaning which goes beyond any ritualized or iterated language(s) or codes of desire. Those scenes of the gaze, particularly with a penetrating stare, can, in themselves, be seen as a mode of behaviour that men may use to communicate their feelings of desire for one another. In a metaleptical way, it is also the mode that a repressive societal culture

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uses to look out for and to be vigilant against men who seem queer. But perhaps our own gaze as queer critics is misdirected. To look at how straight and heteronormative systems of values and ideals are established might tell us just as much as about what they exclude, deny or abject as looking for any oblique expressions of desire between men and women in the period. By selecting this scene of the kiss between Cyprian and Ippolito, I am not suggesting that a queer reading of the texts of the Romantic Age should be on the lookout for evidence of kisses between men. That would be to invoke the penetrating eye(s) of the biographer and critic seeking to find evidence to prove or disprove the existence of an author’s sexuality or his or her fictional creations. Perhaps it is time to sever a few heads that hopefully will not grow back. Like the image of Mercury cutting the head off the Argus on the book’s cover (the classical monster with a hundred eyes who kept watch over the sexual goings-on of Jupiter’s lovers), queer readers of literary history need to worry less about whether or not writers had physical relationships and to focus on how queerness gets expressed, silenced and buried. As I hope to have illustrated, a queer reading of texts in the period is more attuned to how the sexual and erotic desires, and affiliations require a subtler inscription and reading. If evidence is the grounds on which queer reading is judged to be effective for its teasing out the patterns of desire in previous literary-historical periods, then to some degree a queering of Gothic (or earlier periods of literary history) is doomed to the charge of not substantiating its claims with evidence. And this is probably why my own reading, focusing as it does on close, textual readings, is perhaps an unconscious defense against that anticipated criticism that there is no evidence to prove the Gothic is queer. But even if it could be proved that the Gothic is unqueer (which would be difficult), where would that leave us? We could still say that the Gothic has much to tell us about heteronormative values to do with the idealization of the family, gender and marriage that are always haunted by the exclusion of the queer. The homophobic, culturally-endorsed prohibition against the visible expression of affection between men finds itself inhabiting Gothic writing. The moral guardians of society take a horrid pleasure as spies and witnesses to the queer ghosts they find between the sheets.

Notes Introduction 1. The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, Metro Goldywn-Meyer, 1939). Jill Murphy, The Worst Witch (London: Allison and Busby, 1974). 2. By choosing the term ‘Gothic writing’ as opposed to ‘Gothic novel’ or ‘Gothic fiction’, I am following a definition of Gothic writing that is expansive enough to include a range of literary genres including drama and poetry. I have also subsumed beneath the term ‘Gothic writing’ the genre of ‘the Gothic tale’ to enable a reading of John Polidori’s The Vampyre. 3. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976). Other key examples of feminist criticism which stem from Moers’ work are: Coral Ann Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London: Athlone Press, 1978); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979); The Female Gothic, edited by Juliann Fleenor (Montreal: Eden Press, 1983); Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Chicago: Urbana Press, 1989); Eugenia C. De la Motte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Katharine Winter, Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Desire: Women and Power in Gothic Literature (London: Routledge, 1992). 4. Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 53. 5. Robert Miles, ‘Introduction’, Women’s Writing 1 (1994): 131–141, p. 131. 6. Miles, ‘Introduction’, p. 131. 7. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 34. 8. Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction, p. 3. 9. Emma J. Clery, Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (London: Northcote House Publishers, 2000). Clery comments: ‘ “Romantic Androgyny” is a term which has been introduced into critical discourse to describe the “colonisation of the feminine” by male poets intent on defining a new aesthetic, which broke with the formal and thematic conventions of the past. What a study of women’s Gothic reveals is that incursions were not one-way, and that women writers of Gothic were likewise engaged in polemical revision of literary practice, involving the transgression of gender expectations’, 6–7. Clery’s argument enables to take the argument one step further to perceive the potentially queer subtexts of both ‘female’ and ‘male’ Gothic in such ‘transgressions’. 10. See for example, Lowry Nelson Jnr. ‘Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel’ Yale Review 52 (1962–63), 236–255. As Robert Miles indicates, Moers derived the term ‘female Gothic’ from critics in the 1960s who described the writing 164

Notes

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

165

of Walpole, Lewis, Godwin, Scott, Maturin and Hogg as ‘male Gothic’, Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 7. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale, 1979), p. 85. Lauren Fitzgerald, ‘Female Gothic and the Institutionalization of Gothic Studies’ Gothic Studies 6/1 (2004): 8–18. Fitzgerald astutely points up how feminist criticism and its detractors replicate a Gothic plotline of a struggle for ownership in a rhetoric characterized by the language of breaking new ground or terrain. This claim for a critical ownership or heritage implies a structural reliance on an eighteenth-century capitalistic idea of the importance of property to identity. Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: the Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). Hoeverler observes that the pose of victimization is a cry for empowerment: ‘Gothic feminism is not about being equal to men; it is about being morally superior to men. It is about being a victim.’ Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘The Construction of the Female Gothic Posture: Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Gothic Feminism’ Gothic Studies 6/1 (2004): 30–44, p. 31. It is rare thought to find an empowered woman in Gothic writing by men. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). Susan Wolstenholme, Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 8. Both The Monk and The Italian were adapted for the stage by James Boaden. It is easy to see how the theatre was the popular precursor to the cinema and why Gothic narratives were successful on stage. The success of Gothic narratives on stage can be explained in part by the overlap between textual and performative conventions, which are in turn shared by theatrical and cinematic spectacle. Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Benshoff discusses the origins of horror in Gothic writing and comments ‘many also contained more obviously queer menaces, albeit in ways displaced through the gothic signifiers of death, decay and the double’, p. 18. See the essays in the recent issue of Gothic Studies 6/1 (2004) that include lesbian readings by Paulina Palmer and Ranita Chatterjee. For an account of the complicated historical alliance between feminism and queer theory’s aims and practices, see Feminism Meets Queer Theory edited by Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997). A number of studies have probed the question of how to define and understand same-sex desire between men in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Amongst others, Cameron McFarlane examines the historical changes in the concept of sodomy, focusing in particular on the fiction of Tobias Smollett, while George Haggerty has examined the male love relationships of Thomas Gray, Walpole and Beckford. Andrew Elfenbein has explored the origins of the concept of genius and ‘homosexuality’

166 Notes

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

in Beckford, the poet Cowper and artist Anne Damer, while Christopher Hobson has argued the case for William Blake’s liberal toleration of samesex desire. Cameron McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Christopher Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 43. As William B. Turner indicates, Foucault’s argument has been influential in historicizing gender and sexuality as constructed and variable throughout history. William B. Turner, A Genealogy of Queer Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), p. 29. Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ in The Penguin Freud Library Volume 7: On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works edited by Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1991). Freud classified ‘homosexuality’ or ‘inversion’ as one of the sexual aberrations, pp. 46–52. Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture 1700–1800 (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992). Norton also uses ‘lesbian’ in his readings of the novels of Ann Radcliffe in his biography. Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1998). Nevertheless, as Lee Edelman’s excellent analysis of the cultural symbolic anxiety around sodomy and men’s kissing indicates, sodomy and the rhetoric that surround it tell us a lot about how eighteenth-century homophobia depends upon the pressure to conform to rigid conventions of gender. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary Cultural Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979), p. 71 G. S. Rousseau, Perilous Enlightenment: Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 35. In the notes to his essay, ‘The pursuit of homosexuality’, Rousseau sets out a rubric of the terms: homoerotic, homosocial and sodomy, pp. 35–36. See Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing, edited by Ian McCormick (London: Routledge, 1997). McCormick, Secret Sexualities, p. 135. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 235–236. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 91. Paulina Palmer, Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (London and New York: Cassell, 1999), p. 8. Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 89. With the exception of Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg, Sedgwick does not provide any close textual analysis of the ‘links’ she formulates as existing between Gothic writing and ‘homosexuality’. She observes, however, that the novels Caleb Williams (1794), Frankenstein (1818), Melmoth

Notes

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

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the Wanderer (1820) and The Italian (1797) are distinctive for the themes of paranoia and persecution of men by other men, and could be read according to a Freudian reading of paranoia as a defining trait of homophobia. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 88. Sedgwick accounts for the time lapses in the systematic rooting out and exposure of sodomites and molly houses (by societies like The Reformation of Manners) by suggesting that homophobia works terroristically, functioning on surprise and working in a localized way. Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 3. Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. I, p. 43. George Chauncey, ‘The Invention of Heterosexuality’, in Sexuality, edited by Robert A. Nye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 199. Heterosexuality was coined after homosexuality, by the Victorian sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing in Psychopathia Sexualis. A recent issue of Gothic Studies, ‘Queering Gothic Films’, is devoted to how the idea of the family as a safe, natural, normal ideal is destabilized in early Gothic writing and can be applied to a variety of films. As Michael Eberle-Sinatra points up, queering is the process of encouraging readers ‘to think carefully about the assumptions with which they approach the sexuality of the characters found in these films and novels’. Michael EberleSinatra, ‘Exploring Gothic Sexuality’, Gothic Studies 7/2 (2005): 123–126, pp. 123–124. As Butler points out: ‘as expansive as the term “queer” is meant to be, it is used in ways that reinforce a set of overlapping divisions: in some contexts, the term appeals to a younger generation who want to resist the more institutionalized and reformist politics sometimes signaled by “lesbian and gay”; in some contexts, sometimes the same. It has marked a predominantly white movement that has not fully addressed the ways in which “queer” plays or fails to play within non-white communities; and whereas in some instances it has mobilized a lesbian activism, in others the term represents a false unity of women and men’ (p. 228). Butler notes that queer is a term of ‘affiliation’ that always implies a lack, never fully describing its adherents. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 228. I am not arguing that ‘queer’ should only be applied to men; it can of course refer to a desire between women. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 8. William B. Turner, A Genealogy of Queer Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), p. 35. Donald E. Hall offers an accessible explanation of what queer can mean. Donald E. Hall, Queer Theories (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 13. As Jeffrey Masten indicates, ‘in our study of the erotic and affective past, we have not sufficiently paid attention to etymology and the history of words (the history in words) [ ] to be more carefully attuned to the ways that etymologies, shorn of the association with “origin”, persist in a word and its surrounding discourse as a diachronic record of practice in the midst of language as a synchronic system’. Jeffrey Masten, ‘Toward a Queer Address:

168 Notes

45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship’ GLQ 10/3 (2004): 367–384, p. 374. Calvin Thomas notes the tension in the definitional elasticity of queer eroding the reference to a between men/between women association: ‘Though on one level queerness as elaborated by Sedgwick, Warner and others is complex, mobile and open enough of a mesh not to exclude some anti-normative, sympathetic, fantasizing, or masturbating straights, on another level it must also not displace, “almost simple” same-sex sexual object choice, lesbian and gay.’ I value ‘queer commentary’ in preference to ‘theory’ because theory invokes slightly schematic associations. Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality edited by Calvin Thomas (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000). I am indebted to Michael O’Rourke for pointing out to me that one way of queering for example, The Castle of Otranto, is to see the interaction of desire between the characters in terms of a spectrum of homoerotic-homosociallesbian-heteroerotic-incestuous. Laurent Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in Public’ in Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 173. One possible etymology is that ‘queer’ originates with the Indo-European root twer kw, mutating into the Latin torquere (to twist) with the English word probably being derived from the sixteenth-century German quer (meaning: cross, oblique, transverse and perverse). See Sedgwick, Tendencies, 4. Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 29. Bravmann outlines how recent critical and theoretical work on historiography has undermined its ‘scientific’ status and claims to objectivity. He argues that history must ‘just as readily be regarded and investigated as an aspect of the culture of heteronormativity against which queer subjects (ostensibly) align ourselves’, Bravmann, Queer Fictions, 25. I would argue that biography is a form of historiography, and I argue that certain biographies of Walpole, Beckford, Lewis and Byron are suffused with an unquestioned heteronormativity. Michael O’ Rourke and David Collings, ‘Introduction: Queer Romanticisms: Past, Present, and Future’ Romanticism on the Net 36–37 (November 2005– February 2006) As Rourke and Collings note, Romanticism is ‘protoqueer’. Many of the essays in the issue look at Gothic writing. Robert Tobin, Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 1. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 24–25. Jagosé, Queer Theory, p. 85. Butler comments: ‘The cultural associations of mind with masculinity and body with femininity are well documented within the field [sic] of psychoanalysis and feminism’, Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 12. She criticizes Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex for maintaining this gender hierarchy. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 17. Ibid.

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58. To some extent this derives from Butler’s argument that ‘Insofar as heterosexual gender norms produce inapproximable ideals, heterosexuality can be said to operate through the regulated production of hyperbolic versions of “man” and “woman” [ ] Such norms are continually haunted by their own inefficacy; hence, the anxiously repeated effort to install and augment their jurisdiction.’ Butler, Bodies the Matter, p. 237. 59. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 230–231. 60. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp” ’, in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 53–65, 56. 61. Sontag, ‘Notes’, p. 57. 62. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, edited by W.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 8. 63. Fabio Cleto, ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, in Camp, p. 24. 64. One might compare contemporary horror films where this aural convention is sometimes used in a self-conscious way by directors and has a camp effect by signalling its artifice as a convention. 65. The Lover’s Pacquet, Or, the Marriage-Miscellany: with the Newest Mode of Courtship; Containing the Mysteries and Different Sorts of Corporal Love (London: T. Reynolds, 1733), p. 31. I am indebted to Dr Clare Brant, King’s College, London, for this reference. 66. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, edited by Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 465. 67. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, p. 466. The narrator later describes a scene with Wadman and Shandy where it is suggested that the act of looking is forbidden and desired, p. 514. 68. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 107. 69. As Ellis Hanson asks: ‘ “Is the gaze the gays?” What could it mean for a man to engage the gaze of another man? In psychoanalytic terms, such a gaze would be a form of madness an embrace of narcissism and death. The gay male gaze is the gaze of the male vampire: he with whom one is forbidden to identify.’ Ellis Hanson, ‘Undead’ in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories edited by Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), p. 325. 70. Since the 1980s there have been numerous observations and readings of Frankenstein that have emphasized how the relationship between Victor and the monster/the narrator Walton/Victor’s friend Henry Clerval can be read as relations of repressed same-sex desire. Sedgwick first identifies Frankenstein as an example of ‘paranoid Gothic’ where male intimacy is approached through the erasure of the feminine and then repudiated through violence and death. For Sedgwick the novel is: ‘a residue of two potent male figures locked in an epistemologically indissoluble clench of will and desire – through these means, the paranoid Gothic powerfully signified, at the very moment of the crystallization of the modern, capitalism-marked oedipal family, the inextricability from that formation of a strangling double bind in male homosocial constitution’. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University

170 Notes Press, 1985), p. 116; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 187. 71. Daffron argues: ‘Walton and Frankenstein come close to forming an erotic relation outside the traditional family. But they ultimately fail not only because of Frankenstein’s homophobia but also because Shelley is reluctant to name a relation between two men that might intensify the misogyny that she elsewhere critiques’ (418). Frankenstein represents Warner’s concept of ‘repronarrativity’ because it suggests that the only way Victor can experience fulfillment and a sense of self is via the act of creation, even if it is not exactly a child he creates. Daffron also reads the relations between Victor, Henry and Walton in terms of a late eighteenth-century discourse about sympathy, in particular the ideas of the German physiognomist Johann Casper Lavater. Lavater suggests that physical resemblances, or the doubling of characteristics between individuals, are a founding factor in creating a feeling of a sympathetic relation. Daffron argues this provokes anxiety in the Romantic age because the idea of male subjectivity is predicated on a distinctive sense of self that distances itself that men are (homo)genous and perhaps too intimate with each other. To some extent the fear of the double, and even twins, is analogous to the fear of the clone that achieved visibility in the gay culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Complementing Daffron’s analysis, James Holt McGavran argues that we can read Victor’s relationship with the monster not as necessarily a parent–child metaphor but as ‘both his ideal male lover and his own re-created self – a self at least partially liberated from heterosexual stereotypes of desire’ (61). Eric Daffron, ‘Male Bonding: Sympathy and Shelley’s Frankenstein’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21 (1999): 415–435. James Holt McGavran, ‘ “Insurmountable Barriers to Our Union”: Homosocial Male Bonding, Homosexual Panic, and Death on the Ice in Frankenstein’, European Romantic Review 11/1 (2001): 46–67. 72. Sedgwick first identified the conventions of the closet and the unspeakable in Gothic. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (London: Methuen, 1986). 73. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 3. Butler draws a comparison between speech acts and how she sees gender as performative in the sense of its repeatability and ‘citationality’: ‘every “act” is an echo or citational chain, and it is its citationality that constitutes its performative force’, Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 282, note 5.

1

Reading the Gaze: A Culture of Vigilance 1. For reasons of space, I have chosen not to include a discussion of Byron, principally because the corpus of writing on the relation between Byron’s personality and life, and his poetry is so vast and complicated. 2. The Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, edited by Wilmarth S. Lewis, 48 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1937–1983), Vol. 12, p. 230. Further citations are cited by volume and page number in parentheses. 3. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 14 Table Talk, edited by Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer, 14 vols (London: Routledge, 1990), 280–281, p. 281.

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4. Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay, Literary Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1923). Macaulay describes Walpole in terms that suggest he is an eighteenth-century Oscar Wilde: ‘Serious business was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business’, p. 251. 5. Timothy Mowl, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (London: John Murray, 1996), p. 4. Further references to all biographies, unless otherwise cited, are indicated by the author’s surname and page number in parentheses. 6. Mowl also examines the denial of the noted Walpole scholar, Wilmarth S. Lewis, the editor of Walpole’s correspondence, that the letters cannot be used as evidence to prove Walpole was ‘homosexual’. He suggests that Lewis remained silent over certain letters which Mowl argues can be offered as evidence to support his theory that Walpole was ‘homosexual’: ‘I am sure Lewis never wrote that definitive study [a biography] because he knew too much about his literary hero and did not like or wish to pass on all he knew.’ Mowl adds to the suspicion surrounding Walpole by suggesting that Lewis secretly knew about Walpole’s sexual desires for men but refused to discuss them. Mowl, Horace Walpole, p. 4. 7. Raymond Bentham, ‘Horace Walpole’s Forbidden Passion’ in Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures, edited by Martin Dubermann (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), p. 279. 8. Bentham, Queer Representations. George E. Haggerty quotes an illustrated, unpublished poem by Walpole, ‘The Judgement of Solomon’, which (like The Castle of Otranto) deconstructs ‘the prerogatives of masculine power’ and points to an interest in male virility. George. E. Haggerty, ‘Walpoliana’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 34 (2001): 227–249, p. 243. 9. Betsy P. Harfst attempts to read the ‘metaphors and symbols’ to reveal the unspoken passions of Walpole. Betsy Harfst, Horace Walpole and the Unconscious: An Experiment in Freudian Analysis (New York: Arno Press, 1980), p. 2. 10. George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 155. 11. Haggerty, Men in Love, p. 156. Haggerty comments: ‘in our need to impose a homo/hetero binary that Walpole everywhere defies; and in our demands for “proof” of sexual desire, we are distorting the remarkably simple and notably unqueer fact of these erotic feelings: this is the love that dared to speak its name’, pp. 159–160. 12. Haggerty, Men in Love, p. 154. 13. William Guthrie, A Reply to the Counter Address being a Vindication of a Pamphlet Entitled Address to the Public on the Late Dismission of a General Officer (London: W. Nicholl, 1764). Further references are cited in parentheses. 14. Mowl questions Walpole’s dating of the composition of the novel and Walpole’s implicit denial that it had no connection with Guthrie’s attack as being ‘suspect’: ‘under the shock of Guthrie’s ‘outing’, he was, if not quite mad, generally distraught and the first result of this distraction was the writing of Otranto’, Mowl, The Great Outsider, p. 182. Jill Campbell argues that reading Guthrie’s pamphlet into the novel and suggesting that the novel could not have been written before the pamphlet was published produces a circular argument. Jill Campbell, ‘ “I am No Giant”: Horace Walpole, Heterosexual Incest, and Love among Men’, Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation, 39 (1998): 238–260, p. 258, note 11.

172 Notes 15. Brian Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 169. Guy Chapman suggests that Loughborough used Courtenay’s tutor, Taylor, to spy on Beckford. Guy Chapman, Beckford (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), p. 183. 16. Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (London: William Heinemann, 1910), p. 4. 17. From her entry for 3rd January 1791, in Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (later Piozzi) 1776–1809, 2 vols, edited by Katharine C. Balderston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), II, p. 799. 18. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1997). A similar argument can be made with Byron. 19. J.W. Oliver, The Life of William Beckford (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 68–69. 20. Fothergill, Beckford, p. 166. 21. Timothy Mowl, William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (London: John Murray, 1998), p. 3. 22. George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Haggerty argues: ‘Beckford played a crucial role in the popular evocation of a sexual identity distinct from the various sodomitical roles that were current at the time. Beckford’s unique blend of erotic desire and almost sickly sensibility make paederasty newly available as an explanatory label for male sexuality’, p. 140. 23. Haggerty, Men in Love, p. 138. 24. From Rome 1st July 1782, in Haggerty, Men in Love, pp. 147–148. 25. Haggerty, Men in Love, p. 149. 26. Haggerty, Men in Love, p. 145. 27. Haggerty, Men in Love, p. 144. 28. From a letter to D’Orsini Rosenberg dated December 1781, in Haggerty, Men in Love, pp. 145–146. 29. Rictor Norton, ‘Madge Culls, 1781’, Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, 26 February 2002. . 30. Norton, ‘Madge Culls’. 31. Louis F. Peck dismisses the accusation made by Gothic bibliophile, Montague Summers, in 1938, that Lewis was ‘homosexual’. Peck accuses Summers of being ‘fanciful’ in suggesting that Lewis secretly desired William Kelly, a young man Lewis patronized for several years. Peck implies that Summers’ evaluation of Lewis’s relationship with Kelly is paranoid because his assertion is purely imaginary. Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew Lewis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 65. 32. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You’, in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 6. 33. D.L. MacDonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), pp. 72–76. 34. Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, edited by Judith Terry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 199.

Notes

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35. Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1998), p. 334. 36. Sedgwick, Novel Gazing, p. 17.

2

Guessing the Mould: Or, The Castle of Otranto? 1. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, edited by Frederick S. Frank (Peterborough, Ontario: Oxford: Broadview Press Ltd, 2003). Further references are indicated in parentheses. 2. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Penguin Freud Library: Volume 14, Art and Literature, edited by Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 340. 3. Netta Murray Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes: Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 97. 4. According to the searchable database of the trials held at London’s criminal court, The Old Bailey, from The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, there are 91 trials for extortion for the period 1674–1834. At least of a third of the indictments involve sodomy or sodomitical intent by the defendant to extort money from the plaintiff. www.oldbaileyonline.org (accessed 12/12/2005). 5. There is one other case in the Old Bailey records that involves a servant extorting money from his employer. In 1827, John Morton was a servant and a travelling companion in the house of a gentleman botanist, Richard Salisbury. According to the cross-examination, Salisbury seems to have regarded Morton more as a friend than an employee, although he never introduced Morton socially as such: ‘when we were alone this familiarity took place’. Morton could also mimic and imitate others. According to Salisbury, at the Duke of Dorset’s estate where he was convalescing after a riding accident, Morton helped to nurse him. Morton was found guilty but with a plea of mercy ‘on account of the debased character exhibited by the prosecutor’. It is perhaps possible then that there was some basis for Morton’s accusation. 6. Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes. Goldsmith’s study details the intricacies and complexities of the case of Edward Walpole that I do not have space to account for here. I am indebted to Goldsmith for pointing out that Horace Walpole remained silent about appearing at the trial of his brother, Edward Walpole. 7. In Anecdotes of Painting in England (1760) Horace Walpole described James Worsdale as possessing a talent for ‘excellent mimicry’ and a ‘facetious spirit’, Goldsmith, Worst of Crimes, p. 182. 8. Goldsmith notes that Edward Walpole was not married, but that he kept a mistress by whom he had three children. He preferred the company of women to men, and he had one close male friend, Lord Boyne. Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes, p. 193. 9. Love Letters Between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr Wilson, edited by Michael Kimmel (New York and London: Haworth Press, 1990). Kimmel comments: ‘the danger of exposure hovers above each encounter, and results in a series of intrigues to avoid detection and incidences of both “baiting” and “bashing” when young Mr Wilson is accosted on the streets wearing women’s clothing’, p. 7. Further references will be cited in parentheses.

174 Notes 10. G.S. Rousseau, ‘An Introduction to the Love Letters: Circumstances of Publication, Context and Cultural Commentary’, in Kimmel, Love Letters, p. 78. 11. The Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, edited by Wilmarth S. Lewis, 48 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1937–1983). From a letter to Buchan, 12 May 1783, XV, 178–182, pp. 180–181. 12. The nobleman’s paranoia and suspicion about Wilson’s lack of correspondence to him expresses itself in misogynistic terms: ‘dost thou viley descend to the low subtleties of the inferiour [sic] Sex, who, to enhance their price, play at fast and loose, insult and idly triumph over the Sot, that does more idly suffer such a Drab to gain the ascendant’, Kimmel, Love Letters, p. 22. 13. The mollies were groups of men that were identified in London throughout the eighteenth century in a series of raids on houses or taverns where they would meet in secret to socialize, drink and to have sex. They were characterized as effeminate because they would imitate and mimic women’s behaviour and speech, and sometimes dress up as women. See Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830 (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992). 14. Kimmel, Love Letters, p. 18. 15. By using ‘hyperbolic’ I mean to invoke the idea of hyperbole, where there is a sense that the masculinities and femininities in Walpole’s novel, indeed in much Gothic writing, are extravagantly exaggerated or overstated in their presentation. I am undecided as to whether this is a point of intentionality for a comic effect; the effect is certainly often what we might call camp. The accumulated impression that men act hysterically in the Gothic also problematizes masculinity. As Elaine Showalter points out, hysteria is traditionally used to characterize femininity, however she deconstructs hysteria as exclusively feminine. As Showalter points out: ‘By the eighteenth century blaming the nerves or the brain for hysterical symptoms also made it possible to recognize that men too might be sufferers, even though women still predominated as patients since they had fewer outlets for nervous energy.’ Although I am using ‘hysterical’ in a looser sense than how it came to be used in late nineteenth-century psychiatric discourse, I mean to suggest that men be described as hysterical in Gothic writing because of how their bodies (re)act involuntarily to events beyond their control. For example, Manfred is often left breathless or speechless. He is an ‘agony’ at the sight of Theodore when he sees him in armour. The attendant loss of control and reason that Manfred experiences while trying to assert his masculinity provides part of the comic effect. Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) p. 16. 16. Hoeveler discusses Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre and Mary Shelley: ‘But what exactly is it that female Gothic writers are parodying when they poke at, mock and gently deride the excessive and hyperbolic behaviours of their extravagant heroines? I would claim that what is at stake in the parodies of the gothics [ ] is an attempt to inflate the importance of the issues explored in women’s literature under the cover of deflating the excesses of such literature’, Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), pp. 124–125.

Notes

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17. G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 329. 18. William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 93. 19. Both Ian McCormick and Rictor Norton have uncovered a wealth of primary material that indicates the degree of paranoia and suspicion that surrounded effeminacy. Many eighteenth-century trials and extracts from the British press are unified by their consistent attack on effeminacy or the perceived effeminacy of the subjects convicted. What emerges is how a fear and hatred of same-sex desire is concomitant with misogyny, where masculinity and femininity are perceived hierarchically, with men and masculinity as superior. Predictably, many of the guardians of public morality turn the argument around, so that queer men are misogynistic in preferring the company of their own sex to that of women. There is little criticism of masculine-defined men who love men, perhaps because they escape the suspicious signifier of effeminacy. See Ian McCormick, Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing (London: Routledge, 1997) and Rictor Norton, Homosexuality in Eighteenth Century England: A Sourcebook http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/. 20. ‘The man of feeling’ as a character-type in eighteenth-century fiction probably begins with Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), is satirized in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), and becomes almost a theoretical model in the character of Harley, in Henry MacKenzie’s novel, The Man of Feeling (1771). The act of Manfred crying is particularly unusual for eighteenth-century fiction and it draws attention to how he manipulates the feelings of others. 21. Raymond Bentham, ‘Horace Walpole’s Forbidden Passion’, in Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures, edited by Martin Dubermann (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997). 22. Day, Circles of Fear and Desire, p. 95. 23. Frederick S. Frank, ‘Proto-Gothicism: The Infernal Iconography of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto’, Orbis Literarum, 41 (1986): 199–212, p. 206. 24. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth Century Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 4. 25. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, p. 64. 26. Robert Miles, ‘The Eye of Power: Ideal Presence and Gothic Romance’, Gothic Studies, 1/1 (1999): 10–31. 27. Miles, ‘Eye of Power’, p. 20. 28. If the ‘eighteenth century discursive practices’ which Miles refers to form part of the eighteenth-century’s attempt to civilize its citizens through refinement and education, for example through architecture, antiquarianism, art history and the fine arts, then both Walpole and Beckford contribute to this culture of politeness. As well as building and furnishing Strawberry Hill, a pseudo-medieval Gothic villa at Twickenham, Walpole also wrote a history of English art, Anecdotes of Painting in England (1760). Beckford built the neo-Gothic Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, wrote Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780), contributed to landscape gardening, and, like Walpole, collected precious furniture, painting and antiques.

176 Notes 29. The phantasmagoria was an animated slide show that was popular around the 1790s and reached it apogee in the international stage performances of Etienne Gaspard Robertson. As Martin Myrone and Mervyn Head indicate: ‘The Phantasmagoria shows were based around a series of projections of supernatural, shocking or comical figures, accompanied by aural effects, ingenious lighting, music and commentary. By combining and moving slides figures were animated, magnified and shrunk to surprising effect.’ Martin Myrone and Mervyn Head, The Phantasmagoria in Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 146.

3

Vathek and the Monstrous Queer 1. See for instance Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature Of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1988). 2. Tales from the Thousand and One Nights translated with an introduction by N.J. Dalwood (London: Penguin, 1973). Frederick S. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek: the problem of genre resolved’, in Kenneth W. Graham, Vathek and the Escape from Time: Bicentennary Revaluations (New York: AMS Press, 1990). Frank argues that the novel is Gothic writing because of the pattern of the demonic quest, Vathek as hero-villain and the motifs of enclosed spaces and a malign, Manichean universe. He argues ‘Beckford uses his own Gothic novel to confront the moral ambiguities of an inexplicable universe’. Graham, Vathek and the Escape from Time, p. 158. 3. An important and ground-breaking exception to this critical trend is Andrew Elfenbein’s chapter on the novel in Romantic Genius: The Pre-history of a Homosexual Role (New York, Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1999). Elfenbein’s argument that gender fluctuates and that representations do not fit neatly into moulds but leave gaps and can never be ‘fully analyzed’ implies that same-sex desire is more queer than homosexual in the period, p. 10. 4. Adam Roberts and Eric Robertson, ‘The Giaour’s Sabre: A Reading of Beckford’s Vathek’, Studies in Romanticism, 35 (1996): 199–211, p. 201. 5. As indicated in Chapter one, extensive rumours circulated from the mid1780s onwards that Beckford had a relationship with his cousin, William Courtenay, 3rd Viscount of Powderham Castle (later 9th Earl of Devon) when Courtenay was 13. R. B. Gill argues that we should not underestimate the complexity of Beckford and reading his work: ‘ we need interpretation imposed on the discrete items of Beckford’s life in order to understand them in relationship with each other. Yet, equally clearly, there is no justification for believing that whatever interpretation we may impose is historically verifiable truth.’ Gill astutely recognizes that there are any number of permutatory readings we could perform in relation to differing (and complexly related) aspects of Beckford’s life. Each reading of Vathek ‘delineates’ the horizons of each individual critic. R. B. Gill, ‘The Author in the Novel: Creating Beckford’ in Vathek Eighteenth Century Fiction 15/2 (2003): 241–254, pp. 248–249. 6. Roberts and Robertson, ‘Giaour’s Sabre’, p. 199. 7. Roberts and Robertson, ‘Giaour’s Sabre’, p. 211.

Notes

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8. William Beckford, Vathek and Other Stories: A William Beckford Reader, edited by Malcolm Jack (London: Penguin, 1995). Further references will be indicated in parentheses. 9. Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1999) p. 15. 10. Marie Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993). 11. Huet, Monstrous Imagination, p. 4. 12. There was, for instance, a short-lived journal called The Monstrous Magazine established to ‘investigate, affirm or confute all instances of the monstrous, either in Literature or Life’. In an essay on ‘Women and Cuckolds’ as examples of monstrosity, an unidentified writer narrates the legend of St Dunstan and his temptation by the Devil as a woman. Dunstan decapitates his lover and the Devil transposes their heads. Narratives of transgendering or hermaphroditism therefore constitute one site of the monstrous in the eighteenth-century’s imagination. Unfortunately, the periodical only ran for one issue. The Monstrous Magazine. Containing whatever tends to extort amazement in art or nature, fact or fiction; occasionally interspersed with the Impossible. Faithfully copied from the Journals of the Monstrous Society, and published by their Secretary, Paracelsus Bombastus (Dublin: T. Ewing, 1770), pp. 14–16. 13. Perhaps the most famous example of an individual who imitated and simulated femininity when Beckford was writing was the Chevalier/Chevalière d’Eon, or Charles d’Eon Beaumont, a soldier, diplomat and spy in the courts of Imperial Russia and Britain. When rumours circulated that he was female, Louis XVI ordered him to masquerade permanently in wigs, petticoats and lead paint. Admired as an intelligent woman with a passionate admiration for Joan of Arc, d’Eon was always male. Merchants in London speculated an estimated £60,000 on his/her sex. To one observer, who scrutinized her/him at a dinner party, his/her masquerade was perhaps not always convincing: ‘I have not been any less assiduous, My Lord, in gazing upon this astonishing maiden one must admit that she has even more of an air of a man since she has begun dressing as a woman. Indeed, can one believe that an individual of the female sex shaves, has a beard, has the stature and muscles of Hercules, who can ascend and descend a stagecoach without help Moreover, the sound of her voice: its external tone belies her clothes; one is tempted to think that it is a masquerade.’ The London public’s desire to gaze upon d’Eon forced him into hiding. Gary Kates, Monsieur D’Eon is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2001) pp. 38–39. 14. Judith Halberstam, Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 2. Halberstam looks at how anti-Semitism is encoded in Gothic writing via monstrosity, as well as the moral dimension of monstrosity: ‘in the Gothic, crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form – the monster that announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption’, p. 1. 15. Ian McCormick, Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 121.

178 Notes 16. The Gentleman’s Magazine, 30th May 1752 in McCormick, Secret Sexualities, p. 114. There was a frequent call for those convicted of sodomy to be punished by burning, following the account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire in the Old Testament. The idea of purification of the soul through burning of the body is clearly connected to a belief in separating what are seen as distinct and indivisible elements, like male and female. 17. McCormick, Secret Sexualities, p. 143. 18. That those with physical disabilities are put on show, along with the religious ascetics, suggests the narrator represents them as freakish. Their monstrous potential is implied in the suggestion that some are satyrs and thus halfhuman, half-animal: ‘Nor were there wanting others in abundance of humpbacks; wenny necks; and even horns of an exquisite polish’, p. 64. 19. The shape-shifting aspect of the Indian’s monstrosity characterizes both his associations with a tradition of the demonic as the grotesque, for example the combination of human or animalistic features, or codes of gender. The latter has been a defining feature of one strand of demonic theory stretching as far back as James the First’s treatise on witchcraft, Daemonologie (1597). As Ilkka Mäyrä summarizes: ‘ the power of the grotesque is embedded on its ability to evoke contradictory emotional responses, and to build a new ordering principle to incorporate this tension (an “anti-norm”). Personal identity, the stability of our unchanging environment, the inviolate nature of the human body, and the separation of the human and nonhuman realms are transgressed and violated in this tradition.’ Ilkka Mäyrä, Demonic Texts and Textual Demons: The Demonic Tradition, the Self and Popular Fiction (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 1999), pp. 49–50. 20. Richard Dyer, ‘Don’t Look Now: The Male Pin-Up’, in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 269. 21. Dyer, Sexual Subject, p. 269. 22. It was a common belief in the eighteenth century that if young boys were educated at home and not at a public school then they would grow up to be effeminate. The novelist Thomas Day explores such a theme in The History of Sandford and Merton (1788). Beckford was privately educated at home at Fonthill Splendens, his father’s estate in Wiltshire. 23. Peter Hyland argues: ‘a closer examination shows him to be a somewhat ambivalent figure; the best that can be said for him is that he is innocent rather than good’. R.B. Gill, by contrast, views Gulchenrouz as a subversive force in the text that challenges orthodox sexuality: ‘Gulchenrouz’s pretty effeminacy, his ambivalent sexuality, his pampered indulgence of the senses, and the “many little freedoms” he has taken with his cousin Nouronihar are indeed beyond the pale of bourgeois morality [ ] Gulchenrouz is the only positive model in the novel.’ Peter Hyland, ‘Vathek, Heaven and Hell’, Research Studies, 50:2 (1982), 99–105, p. 102 and R.B. Gill, ‘The Enlightened Occultist: Beckford’s Presence in Vathek’, in Graham, Vathek and the Escape from Time, p. 135. 24. The four stories that make up the ‘episodes’ of Vathek were never published despite the fact that Beckford intended them to be a part of the novel. Risking the criticism that I am therefore following an intentionalist argument, I have decided to include them. Their Gothic potential is implicit in

Notes

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

179

the characterizations of the darker sides of the human personality, while the queer sexual desires that emerge are present in the narratives of incest and transvestism. As Malcolm Jack argues: ‘The Episodes are passionate, frightening stories. Like Vathek, they pursue the theme of damnation and retribution; the analysis of evil contained in them is starker and more direct; the subject matter, including necrophilia and incest, as well as homosexuality, put them well beyond the pale until modern times.’ All page references are to The Episodes of Vathek, edited by Malcolm Jack (London: Dedalus, 1994), pp. 11–12. As George Haggerty observes: ‘Firouz’s last act of villainy is his revelation of himself as a woman: no treachery in the story seems greater than this.’ George Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 151. Jack argues: ‘Indeed the only moral as well as significantly masculine figure in the story is the much-wronged Princess Rondabah who nevertheless lives to see her enemies vanquished.’ We are told that a malevolent Dive tells Firouzkah that Rondabah has “just ascended the throne of Kharezme; the hour of her triumph is that of your despair!”. The ascending image corresponds to that of Gulchenrouz’ going up to heaven, but a heaven characterized by an absence of femininity. Jack, ‘Episodes’, pp. 12–13. Rictor Norton, ‘The Macaroni Club: Homosexual Scandals in 1772’, Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, 19 December 2004, updated 11 June 2005, http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/macaroni.htm. Norton, ‘The Macaroni Club’. Although I disagree with his normative use of terms like ‘failed’, ‘deviant’ and ‘homosexuality’, Philip Carter’s study of sensibility and effeminacy does concede that the effeminate body did sometimes provoke suspicion about the sexualities and desires of effeminate men. Carter disagrees with the argument that men of feeling were ‘a representation of false manhood, pushed by overt sentimentalism into a world populated by fops and cross-dressers’, p. 101. In his discussion of foppish behaviour in Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama, he argues: ‘certain representations did equate foppery and male homosexuality’, p. 139. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (London: Longman, 2001). Norton gives an account of how Garrick’s sexuality was the subject of speculation due to his friendship with the dramatist Isaac Bickerstaffe who fled to France under suspicion of attempted sodomy after approaching a sentinel in St James’s Park. William Kenrick’s play Love in the Suds: A Town Eclogue. Being the Lamentation of Roscius for the Loss of his Nyky (1772) satirized Garrick and Bickerstaffe as lovers, prompting Garrick to sue Kenrick and several newspapers in the 1770s for libel. Norton, ‘The Macaroni Club’. Carter, Polite Society, p. 152. James Fordyce, Addresses to Young Men, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Dublin: John Exshaw, 1777), II, p. 128. Fordyce, Sermons, II, pp. 130–131. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches on the History of Man, 4 vols (Edinburgh and London: W. Creech, W. Strachan & T. Cadell, 1788), II, p. 64. Kames, Six Sketches on the History of Man (Philadelphia: R. Bell & R. Aitken, 1774), I, p. 203.

180 Notes 35. Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 126–176. Within the eighteenth century one definition of luxury is that which is above and beyond necessity and is not characterized by the spirit of progress. 36. Berry, The Idea of Luxury, pp. 137–138. 37. James Fordyce, Addresses to Young Men, II, pp. 115–116. 38. Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Pre-history of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 53. 39. Randall Craig, ‘Vathek: The Inversion of Romance’, in Graham, Vathek and the Escape from Time, p. 120. 40. Halberstam, Gothic Horror, p. 36.

4

Camping in the Monastery: The Monk

1. Matthew Lewis, The Monk edited by Howard Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). All references will be to this edition and cited in parentheses. As indicated in the introduction, I have preferred to keep to a narrower definition of queer than others may allow for, focusing on where gender and desire are disruptive. It is possible, for instance, to read the dynamics of incest in The Monk as an oblique map of same-sex desire. Ambrosio’s search for the ideal feminine woman that results in the murder of his sister and mother can be read according to Sedgwick’s theory of ‘homosexual panic’. His pathological and violent response to female sexuality suggests we can read him as experiencing an internalized homophobia prompted by an initial attraction to Rosario/Matilda. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 89–90. 2. Although I disagree with her use of ‘homosexual’, Clara Tuite helpfully contextualizes the historical context of reading same-sex desire in the novel. Clara Tuite, ‘Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, The Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution and The Monk’, Romanticism on The Net, 8 (1997), (accessed 24/5/1999). 3. Tuite, ‘Cloistered Closets’. 4. See Arthur N. Gilbert, ‘Sexual Deviance and Disaster during the Napoleonic Wars’, Albion 9 (1977): 98–113. 5. Stephen Blakemore, ‘Matthew Lewis’s Black Mass: Sexual, Religious Inversion in The Monk’, Studies in the Novel 30 (1998): 521–539, p. 523. 6. John Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’, in John Milton: A Critical Edition of The Major Works, eds Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Book IV, ll. 696–700, p. 438. 7. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 116. 8. Tuite, ‘Cloistered Closets’. 9. We can also read the ‘heterosexual’ subplot of Agnes and Raymond in this way. For instance, the Prioress’s sadism might be read as a repressed form of lesbian desire for Agnes, particularly if we read the novel alongside Denis Diderot’s The Nun published in Britain in 1797. 10. Tuite, ‘Cloistered Closets’.

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11. Matthew Lewis, The Castle Spectre, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1990), p. 67. 12. Elsewhere, there are similar acerbic generalizations about the garrulity of women, which might be seen as the fear that women’s speech masculinizes them by announcing their presence, rather than a preferred absence by men. The narrator later comments on Antonia: ‘She was wise enough to hold her tongue. As this is the only instance of a Woman’s ever having done so, it was judged worthy to be recorded here’ (p. 34). 13. As D.L. MacDonald argues, ‘The subplot presents male homophobia in double drag, as female heterophobia’. D.L. MacDonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 79. 14. Joseph Andriano, Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 33. 15. Peter Grudin, ‘The Monk: Matilda and the Rhetoric of Deceit’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 5 (1975): 136–146, p. 141. 16. For a reading of whiteness as connoting the wish for the absence of the feminine in popular cultural images of women, see Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997). 17. Matilda’s idea of a union of souls perhaps derives from a Platonic idea of a divine heavenly love between two men as superior to a ‘heterosexual’ relationship. Among the discussions on same-sex desire in Plato’s The Symposium, Diotima’s views on same-sex love, quoted by Socrates, are most relevant in this context. As Gregory Woods summarizes: Throughout this part of the discussion, the implication is that physical creativity is clearly inferior to the spiritual; and, therefore, that male–male love is superior to male–female love. This latter point applies, in the first place, because male–male friendships are being contrasted with male–female reproductive sexual relationships; however, the same point appears to apply even if like is being compared with like, and the two males do have a physical relationship: for, given the institutionalised misogyny of Greek society […] the understanding is that men have a greater capacity for spirituality – even in their physicalities – than any woman has. Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 23. 18. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 212. The cross-dressing in the novel needs to be understood within a tradition of anti-Catholic ideology that focused upon, for example, the elaborately decorated robes of many in the Papal court of the Vatican: ‘The Monk’s notorious deployment of gender travesty in a religious context provided not only titillating shock value but also a “reading” of Catholicism as hypocritical and erotic, something to be unmasked’, p. 218. 19. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, edited by Tony Tanner (London: Penguin, repr. 1985), p. 75. The soldier’s uniforms arouse female admiration, in

182 Notes

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

particular the scarlet coat that hints at sexual desire. Mrs Bennett reminisces: ‘I remember the time when I liked a red coat myself very well – and indeed so I do still at my heart [ ] I thought Colonel Forster looked very becoming the other night at Sir William’s in his regimentals’, p. 76. Pride and Prejudice, pp. 108–109. The connection between monks, monasticism and same-sex desire remains relatively unexplored territory in the eighteenth century at least. Rumours of Satanism and sodomy proliferated about the infamous Monks of Medmenham, or the hell-fire club of Sir Francis Dashwood (at West Wycombe House in Buckinghamshire), which included several prominent public figures like the MP John Wilkes. These rumours often implied that unnatural sexual orgies took place at their meetings. Dashwood and his ‘inner circle’ clearly saw dressing up as an escape from their more public straighter roles. See Donald McCormick, The Hell Fire Club: The Story of the Amorous Knights of Wycombe (London: Jarrolds, 1958). Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), l. 691, p. 34. ‘Mare’ is glossed as ‘homosexual’ in the narrator’s observation on the Pardonner. There is also a strong association between the demonic and physical ugliness in both these clerics. Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wales, 4 vols (London: Hooper and Wigstead, 1773–1784), Vol. III, [no page]. Grose gives a detailed history of the founding of the monasteries and the various denominations of monks. Lewis imagines the Priory of St Clare being joined to the Abbey of monks. This would be unlikely because, as Abbott, Ambrosio would have discretionary powers over the Prioress which he clearly does not possess as Agnes’s fate shows. Grose, Antiquities, Vol. I, p. 57. Grose, ‘Wenlock Monastery’, Antiquities, Vol. III, [no page]. Anti-clerical propaganda like The French Convert: A True Relation of the Happy Conversion of a Noble French Lady from the Errors and Superstitions of Popery, to the Reformed Religion is useful to show the similarities between anti-clerical texts and The Monk. First published in 1699, and reprinted several times throughout the eighteenth century, it claims to be a translation from a French manuscript. The story describes the attempted rape and murder of a French noblewoman, Deidama. While her husband goes to war, she is left alone in their castle in Brittany under the care of her husband’s steward and Antonio, ‘a friar of the order of St Francis’. Antonio has ‘lustful desires’ for Deidama and is characterized as demonic: ‘But now Antonio the chaplain, however he had appeared like a saint to his master, began to shew himself a devil to his mistress; and too plainly shewed his cloven foot’ (p. 19). Discovering that the steward also desires Deidama, Antonio imprisons her. Taking her to a vast forest, Antonio and the steward rape her. After escaping and disclosing the plot to her husband, she is convinced of the necessity of changing her religion from the ‘corrupt’ practices of Catholicism to Protestantism, and Antonio commits suicide. This popular text provides an example of how Gothic writing forms part of a late eighteenth-century Protestant cultural discourse in which monks and nuns are figured as both sexually deviant and demonic. The French Convert: A True Relation of the Happy Conversion of a Noble French Lady,

Notes

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

183

from the Errors and Superstitions of Popery, to the Reformed Religion (London: J. Wren and Hodges, 1785). On Protestantism and Gothic, see Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1998). Grose, ‘Tintern Abbey’, Antiquities, Vol. II, [no page]. In his account of witches, Grose notes the androgyny of the devil in accounts of the sabbaths of witches: ‘sometimes the Devil, to oblige a male Witch or Wizard, of which there are some few, puts on the shape of a woman’, Francis Grose, A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (London: S. Hooper, 1790), p. 20. Charles Churchill, ‘The Times’, in Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing, ed. Ian McCormick (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 171. Woods, History of Gay Literature, p. 43. Robert Miles has described the Gothic as camp: ‘the work of all three [Walpole, Beckford and Lewis] displays a recurrent interest in theatricality, with “camp”, pastiche, role-playing, excess, and androgyny – in other words, with self-dramatising self-fashioning’. Robert Miles, “Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis”, in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell’s Publishing, 2000), p. 45. In her essay, ‘Notes on Camp’, Susan Sontag first identifies the Gothic as camp: ‘The dividing line seems to fall in the eighteenth century; there the origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth). But the relation to nature was quite different then. In the eighteenth century, people of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or attempted to remake it into something artificial (Versailles). They also indefatigably patronized the past. Today’s Camp taste effaces nature, or else contradicts it outright. And the relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental.’ Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 56–57. Hanson observes, ‘Matthew G. Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, and Charles Maturin may have been expert at eroticizing Catholicism for English readers, even representing it as a paranoid and insidious social force, but the literary phenomenon of a priest who buggers boys against their will was decidedly French.” Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 303–304. There is not space to do so here, but one could examine camp and the parodies of Gothic. However, parody is differentiated from camp in that it deliberately intends its effects to be that of laughter. But Gothic writing does not intend to ridicule Shakespeare by borrowing his plots, even if the effect sometimes verges towards the burlesque. Darryll Grantley argues, ‘what emerges is a powerful sense of the provisionality of all appearances as an attestation of identity, a provisionality which allows for dramatic playfulness in the process of self-representation’. Darryll Grantley, ‘ “What means this shew?” Theatricalism, Camp and Subversion in Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta’, Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), p. 224. As Cleto argues, one way we can understand camp is in the idea of crossing over into something and appropriation: ‘camp works by contradiction, by crossing statements and their possibility of being’, Camp, p. 29. I would

184 Notes

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

5

like to suggest that ‘queer-camp’ follows Cleto’s close tracing of how camp and queer are connected through etymologies that suggest the idea of crossing (12), and how various versions and understandings of camp are pitted against one another. I follow Cleto’s idea that ‘[ ] framing camp as queer suggests to deconstruct, to question, puzzle and cross these binary oppositions’, p. 23. The originating binary opposition that camp deconstructs in the late eighteenth century is that of gender. See Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing, edited by Ian McCormick (London: Routledge, 1997) and Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th Century England (Swafham: The Gay Men’s Press, 1985). As Cleto argues, ‘The two modes [of naïve and deliberate camp] see their common cipher in transvestism (sartorial and psychological), for camp is ‘the love of [ ] things-being-what-they-are-not’, and the ‘triumph of the epicene style’, of the ‘convertibility of “man” and “woman”, “person” and “thing” ’ ’ Cleto, Camp, p. 24. See William D. Brewer, ‘Transgendering in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk’, Gothic Studies 6/2 (2004): 192–207. Meyer attempts to reclaim camp as a specifically gay cultural discourse, but as Cleto points out, he merely reverses Sontag’s binary of ‘naive’ and ‘deliberate’ camp. Meyer’s definition of ‘queer’ is in fact a gay, white, middle class, twentieth-century male, not an identity that all queer theorists would agree defines queer. See Moe Meyer, The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) and Cleto, ‘Queering the Camp’, p. 17. William Blake’s painting, Satan in his Original Glory: ‘Thou Was Perfect Till Iniquity was Found in Thee’ (1805), ten years after The Monk, visualizes this description of androgynous beauty. Cleto, Camp, p. 25. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 28. Jerrold Hogle comments on how Rosario/Matilda is an example of counterfeiting that closes down the homoerotic overtones of desire: ‘As Walpole does in thus tracing and erasing his own sexual preference from his book, Lewis both acts out and conceals that kind of desire, flirting with but finally resisting any “coming out” in the monk’s pursuit of counterfeits that definitely turn out to be leads worthy of social and superhuman punishment.’ Jerrold Hogle, ‘Ghosts of the Counterfeit – and the Closet – in The Monk’, Romanticism on the Net 8 (November 1997) http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1997/v/n8/005770ar.html [no page].

Caleb Williams and the Queer Sublime 1. See, for example, Alex Gold Jr, ‘It’s Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, Texas Studies in English Literature and Language 19 (1977): 135–160; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Robert J. Corber, ‘Representing the “Unspeakable”: William Godwin and the Politics of Homophobia’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 85–101;

Notes

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

185

Eric Daffron, ‘ “Magnetical Sympathy”: Strategies of Power and Resistance in Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, Criticism 37 (1995): 213–231; Dorothea von Mücke, ‘ “To Love a Murderer”: Fantasy, Sexuality and the Political Novel: The Case of Caleb Williams’, in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited by Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996). Critics who have read Caleb Williams as Gothic writing include: Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), Chapter 4; Monica Fludernik, ‘William Godwin’s Caleb Williams: The Tarnishing of the Sublime’, English Literary History 68 (2001): 857–896; Kenneth W. Graham, ‘The Gothic Unity of Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, Papers on Language and Literature 20 (1984): 47–59; George E. Haggerty, ‘ “The End of History”: Identity and Dissolution in Apocalyptic Gothic’, The Eighteenth Century 41 (2000): 225–246; Caleb Williams, edited by Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000); David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Volume One: The Gothic Tradition (London and New York: Longman, 1980); Betty Rizzo, ‘The Gothic Caleb Williams’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 305 (1992): 1387–1389. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, edited by David McCracken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 296. Further references will be cited in parentheses in the text. Graham, ‘Gothic Unity’, p. 54. He argues that ‘Godwin appears to have learned from Ann Radcliffe’s example that the Gothic romance need not rely on supernatural events; it does not need even a pseudo-medieval setting. What is essential is terror, a frightened uncertainty enwrapped in the threat of violence’, p. 58. Corber, ‘Representing the “Unspeakable” ’, p. 92. Corber defines the usual pattern as triangulated desire, where a female character mediates the desire between two male characters. Jeremy Bentham, ‘Offences Against One’s Self: Paederasty’, edited by Louis Crompton, (accessed 17/6/2003). For a full evaluation of the circumstances and rhetoric of Bentham’s unpublished pamphlet, see Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th Century England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1985), pp. 45–53. Bentham, ‘Offences’. Ibid. Mücke, ‘ “To Love a Murderer” ’, p. 328. Among other writers, the politician and writer, Edmund Burke, popularized many of the ideas of the sublime in his work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Ashfield and Bolla describe how an understanding of the earliest-known classical authority on the sublime, Longinus, is crucial to understanding how eighteenth-century theorists approached the subject. ‘Astonishment’, ‘Enthusiasm’, ‘Ravishment’ and ‘Transport’ are the key affective responses by which readers respond to poetry as sublime. As Bolla asks, how far might ‘transport’ and ‘ravishment’ connote ‘a sexual as well as an aesthetic experience?’.

186 Notes

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful edited with an introduction by Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 5 and The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, edited by Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Further references to the above texts will be indicated in the text in parentheses. William Godwin, The History of the Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (London: G. Kearsley, 1783). Ibid., p. 297. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, edited by Mark Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 96. The sense of assimilation and annihilation that Caleb feels, and Falkland promises to deliver by trampling him to atoms, further marks Caleb’s position as feminized. Anne K. Mellor observes that there is an overwhelming movement towards the possession and effacement of femininity [or in this case effeminacy] in Romantic literary culture: ‘Since the object of romantic or erotic love is not the recognition or appreciation of the beloved woman as an independent other but rather the assimilation of the female into the male (or the annihilation of any Other that threatens masculine selfhood), the woman must finally be enslaved or destroyed, must disappear or die.’ Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 26. Nancy A. Mace argues that ‘ the allusions help to establish and define hidden relationships that exist between characters in the novel’. However, there is no explicit mention of Alexander’s reputed desire and love for his generals. Nancy A. Mace, ‘Hercules and Alexander: Classical Allusion in Caleb Williams’, English Language Notes 25 (1988): 39–44, p. 44. Michael Lambert notes that ‘Alexander’s attitude to same-sex relations seems typical of the Greek mores of his age, but his passionately enduring love for Hephaestion undeniably surpassed his infatuation with Roxanne [his wife] and his desire for the young Persian eunuch Bagoas’, in Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopaedia, edited by George Haggerty (New York, London: Garland, 2000) p. 45. Mücke, ‘ “To Love a Murderer” ’, p. 318. Renata Satecl and Slavoj Žižek describe how Jacques Lacan revises Freud’s developmental theory of sexuality to include the gaze and the voice as objects of desire: ‘Love is a lure, a mirage, whose function is to obfuscate the irreducible, constitutive “out-of-joint” of the relationship between the sexes. The famous Freudian “partial objects” – leftovers of a prephallic jouissance, that is, of a jouissance not yet “sublated” in, mediated by, the paternal metaphor – give body to the elusive obstacle that prevents the fulfillment of sexual relationship. Lacan added to Freud’s list of partial objects (breasts, faeces, phallus) two other objects: voice and gaze. It is therefore by no means accidental that gaze and voice are love objects par excellence – not in the sense that we fall in love with a voice or a gaze, but rather in the sense that they are a medium, a catalyst that sets off love.’ The exchange of the gaze is the catalyst for Caleb and Falkland to take up their desiring positions

Notes

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

6

187

(incorporating love and hatred) that I wish to explore. I prefer positions to a subject/object ratio because positions suggest a degree of flexibility and movement rather than a developmental framework derived from psychoanalysis. Positions are reversible and this reflects the interchange of power between Caleb and Falkland. Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, edited by Renata Satecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 2–3. ‘Is gaze not the medium of control (in the guise of the inspecting gaze) as well as of the fascination that entices the other into submission (in the guise of the subject’s gaze bewitched by the spectacle of power)?’, Satecl and Žižek, Gaze and Voice, p. 3. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 63. Mulvey argues: ‘There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at’; Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p. 59. Mücke, ‘ “To Love a Murderer” ’, p. 325. James Thompson, ‘Surveillance in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams’, in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, edited by Kenneth W. Graham (New York: AMS Press, 1989), p. 180. One might compare Thompson’s argument with John Bender, ‘Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams’, in Vision and Textuality, edited by Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 256–281. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 201. Foucault examines how the development of a panoptic principle highlights a cultural shift from the prison as a single dungeon cell with bodily punishments, to a ‘non-corporal’ punishment system aimed at reforming the individual through structures of discipline that include the subject internalizing the idea of surveillance. Foucault, Birth of the Prison, pp. 202–203. William Godwin, Fleetwood, Or the New Man of Feeling (London: Richard Bentley, 1832), p. xii. Bender, ‘Impersonal Violence’, p. 272. Peter Melvile Logan, ‘Narrating Hysteria: Caleb Williams and the Cultural History of the Nerves’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 29 (1996): 206–221, p. 213. Logan situates the novel within contemporary medical opinion on the symptoms of hysteria such as talkativeness and uncontrollable bodily reactions which were gendered as feminine responses. He argues that ‘This inscribable body is always gendered female’ retaining its impressions and that Caleb’s assumed sympathetic audience he invokes genders him as ‘feminine’, p. 209.

Penetrating Eye(s): Lara, The Giaour, The Vampyre 1. Byron’s poetry is frequently viewed as semi-autobiographical, expressing a deeply personal and political vision of society and other cultures. Andrew Elfenbein investigates the connections between Bryon’s persona, his poetry

188 Notes

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

and the nature of his influence upon writers of the Victorian period. Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). George Gordon Byron, ‘To Thyrza’, in Selected Poems, edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning (London: Penguin, 1996), ll. 29–36, p. 55. Fiona McCarthy has recently had access to the archives of Byron’s publisher, John Murray, and to letters that have never been seen or published before. She has rewritten Byron’s biography paying specific attention to Byron’s queerness. Disappointingly, the biography remains caught up in a heterosexual/homosexual terminological quandary and she nowhere describes Byron as queer. Further references will be cited within the text. Fiona McCarthy, Bryon: Life and Legend (London: John Murray, 2002), p. 221. Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (Swafham, England: Gay Men’s Press, 1985), p. 228. Crompton offers an excellent contextualization of ‘Georgian Homophobia’ and of the textual massacres, evasions and changes of gender pronouns that occurred in the translations and teaching of Greek and Latin poetry during the period. Doris Langley Moore, The Late Lord Byron: Posthumous Dramas (London: John Murray, 1961), p. 244. Langley suggests that readers should question the truth of any of Lady Caroline Lamb’s revelations to Lady Byron, because of her duplicity towards her. Langley is particularly vehement against Lamb’s ingratiating attitude to Lady Byron, and blackening Byron’s reputation while remaining infatuated with him. She argues that it is a ‘doubtful supposition’ that Lamb’s revelations were about same-sex practices. George Gordon Byron, ‘The Corsair’, in Selected Poems, p. 249. As Jeffrey L. Schneider argues following Edward Said’s argument, the popularity of Oriental literature and its influence of the Romantic movement were due partly to its safe removal of ‘sexual excesses’ where ‘readers expected to find tales of a different kind of sexuality’. Jeffrey L. Schneider, ‘Secret Sins of the Orient: Creating a (Homo) Textual Context for Reading Byron’s The Giaour’ College English 65/1 (2002): 81–95, p. 82. Sigmund Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’ in The Penguin Freud Library Volume 9: Case Histories II, edited by Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 131–223. Analysing Schreber’s accusation that his physician, Dr Fleschig, attempts to ‘commit soul murder upon him’, Freud draws attention to how Schreber refers to Manfred as an example of what he means by ‘soul murder’. Unable to discover the existence of such a phrase in Manfred, or the idea of the Faustian bargain which it might imply, Freud concludes that: ‘the essence and the secret of the whole work lies in – an incestuous relation between a brother and a sister’ (p. 179). Andrew Elfenbein carefully deconstructs Freud’s analysis of Schreber’s memoirs in relation to Schreber’s and Freud’s differing understandings of Manfred. He argues that Freud misreads Schreber’s understanding of ‘soul murder’ and argues that Freud’s conclusion that Manfred is about incest is not linked to his theory of Schreber’s ‘homosexuality’ as paranoid projection. He concludes that: ‘The incest that Freud discovers in Byron proves useless for his analysis because he cannot show it to be a projection of Schreber’s narcissistic ego. Indeed, he cannot

Notes

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

189

show it to be of any relevance to Schreber at all’, Andrew Elfenbein, ‘Paranoid Poetics: Bryon, Schreber, Freud’, Romanticism on the Net 23 (August 2001), http://users.ox.ac.uk/∼scat0385/23elfenbein.html. Elfenbein, ‘Paranoid Poetics’. See the review by Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review, XXVIII (1817), in The Critical Heritage: Lord Byron, edited by Andrew Rutherford (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 117. ‘Goethe on Manfred (1817)’, in Critical Heritage, p. 119. Following Kristina Straub’s terminology, Mair Rigby describes Polidori as ‘sexually suspect’. Rigby analyses how the narrator’s observation that Augustus Darvell (in Bryon’s story fragment) suffers from a ‘cureless disquiet’ is connected to the idea of the unspeakable as a discourse of silence inscribing prohibited desire between men. Rigby anticipates my argument: ‘In Western culture the sexual boundaries of male identity have been phobically constituted by a refusal to be penetrated by another man, and male same-sex desire has been commonly understood in terms of the gaze.’ Mair Rigby, ‘ “Prey to some cureless disquiet”: Polidori’s Queer Vampire at the Margins of Romanticism’, Romanticism on the Net 36–37 (November 2004–February 2005) . The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, edited by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. x. Further references to the text will be cited in parentheses. For a full account of the history of the tale’s publication, see The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold, edited by D.L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). Twitchell, The Living Dead, p. 104. Patricia L. Skarder argues that Polidori drew upon Byron’s Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage and imagery from The Giaour for the characterization of Lord Ruthven. She notes that Byron read Glenarvon to Polidori while at Villa Diodati. See Patricia L. Skarder, ‘Vampirism and Plagiarism: Byron’s Influence and Polidori’s Practice’, Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989): 249–267, p. 250. See, for example, Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 82. Kim Newman traces the origins of the nineteenth-century vampire back to Ruthven: ‘the true ancestor of most Draculas is Dr John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven [ ] Before the arrival of Dracula at the end of the century, Ruthven was the epitome of vampirism, appearing in as dizzying a variety of stage and novel adaptations as Dracula has in twentieth-century movies’. Kim Newman, ‘Bloodlines’, Sight and Sound 3 (1993): 12–13, p. 10. Robert Mighall, ‘ “A pestilence which walketh in darkness”: Diagnosing the Victorian Vampire’, in Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, edited by Glennis Byron and David Punter (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 113. Mighall discusses masturbation in the early nineteenth century and historicizes vampire narratives by suggesting textual parallels with treatises on onanism, especially the idea that masturbation is a personified demon. D.L. MacDonald, Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of ‘The Vampyre’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 35–36. John Waller, A Treatise on the Incubus, or Night-Mare, Disturbed Sleep, Terrific Dreams and Nocturnal

190 Notes

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Visions. With the Means of Removing these Distressing Complaints (London: E. Cox and Son, 1816). Waller, A Treatise on the Incubus, pp. 9–10. Cf. also ‘It is by no means an uncommon thing for the person labouring under the Night-Mare to see, or at least to imagine that he sees, some figure, either human, or otherwise, standing by him, threatening him, or deriding, or oppressing him’ (p. 27). When Aubrey is convalescing, he is initially horrified that Ruthven becomes ‘his constant attendant’ (p. 13). Carol A. Senf, ‘Polidori’s The Vampyre: Combining the Gothic with Realism’, North Dakota Quarterly 56 (1988): 197–208, p. 200. Senf argues that the attack on Ianthe is: ‘apparently a crime of simple hunger. There is no evidence of erotic attachment and certainly no evidence of seduction’ (p. 201). In fact, it is Aubrey who is seduced by Ruthven as he feels compelled to watch Ruthven while he desires to escape him. Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, p. 65. Richard Dyer, ‘Dracula and Desire’, Sight and Sound 3 (1993): 9–12, p. 10. John Stagg, The Vampyre

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