Varieties of Female Gothic

Clara Reeve appropriated central themes from a long tradition of English classical republicanism in a wide variety of fiction published over a long career. Quite conscious of the role enjoined on her by her politics, Reeve strove to create fiction that was consistently innovative formally, and that relentlessly addressed what Reeve saw as the major public issues of the last three decades of the eighteenth century – an age of revolution. Furthermore, she wrote the first comprehensive defence of her chosen mode of public instruction – the novel, or romance, including Gothic romance. In this ideological and cultural work, which she would have seen as ‘patriotic’ in the sense of ‘for the public interest’, she was also conscious of the social and cultural limits placed on her as a woman. She responded as other women writers of her time did, by turning such limits into opportunities and advantages. In particular, she practised and defended the literary discourse at that time powerfully, and usually negatively, associated with women as readers and writers – romance. She did all this while having to support herself from her writing. One of her novels, The Old English Baron (1778), first published as The Champion of Virtue (1777), remained a popular classic for a century, and her work of literary history, The Progress of Romance (1785), was the most comprehensive such work by a woman in English until the Victorian age. She was also an ambitious and experimental poet; she practised the prose romance as political allegory for the times; she developed the theory and practice of historical fiction, for adults and children, as an education in national identity; and she developed the novel of upper middle-class domestic life and realism in order to educate her readers as citizens of a modern state and world power.

The Gothic chapbooks represented by the selection in this volume formed part of a revolution in popular print and popular culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Alongside their rich and diverse oral culture, the lower classes or common people had a cheap print culture of their own since the beginning of printing, and before that, probably a cheap manuscript culture. This body of material changed little for about 400 years when, in the late eighteenth century and over the next 100 years, it was first challenged, then marginalised, and eventually replaced by a different kind of popular print, of kinds that continue to the present, and that have also been transmuted for film, television and other media. The literature that I call ‘street Gothic’ was part of that long revolution, and it, too, is still with us, in different forms. This introduction to the selection offered here briefly surveys the elements of historic street literature, then describes similarities and differences between the historic street literature and the new cheap print, of which street Gothic formed a part, and finally comments briefly on the selections, their provenance and their context.

Charlotte Dacre has been seen in her time and since as one of a group of women Romantic writers who made their subject the erotic. In Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen’s Age, Ann H. Jones declares that ‘Charlotte Dacre’s style was always to be fevered and sexual relationships were to be of paramount importance in all she wrote’, and she cites Dacre’s contemporary Sarah Green’s inclusion of Dacre among ‘the most licentious writers of romance of the time’. Compared to erotic fiction today, Dacre’s The Libertine (4 vols, 1807) may not seem very sensual, since it never describes sexual activity directly and refers to it very obliquely. Like M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), The Libertine is ‘erotic’ in the sense that it represents desire, specifically in terms of sexual desire. The sexual here, however, as in The Monk and elsewhere in Romantic literature, is a figure for the passions and desire as generalised and paradoxical attributes of individual subjectivity, and a supposed part of human nature. The erotic is a paradoxical or ambiguous attribute of self because it has two contradictory aspects. On the one hand, it is the force impelling individual self-realisation across a diverse range of activity, from self-fashioning to imperial power, from artistic self-expression to capitalist accumulation, from commercialised consumption to participation in the fashion system, from acquisition of social status to career success, and even political power. On the other hand, as was demonstrated daily in contemporary history and current events, in scandal sheets and romans-à-clef, in newspaper lists of bankrupts, in accounts of the rise and fall of governments, and in biographies of Revolutionaries, the erotic could destroy not only oneself, but also family, party, nation and empire.

The Scottish Chiefs was one of the most widely read and influential texts produced during the Romantic period. It was republished at many places on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century and translated into several languages. In the twentieth century it was adapted for different reading publics and audiences, including illustrated and abridged editions for young readers, a comic-book version and the 1995 Oscar-winning Mel Gibson film, Braveheart. Its appeal can be explained by its innovative combining of history with the female Gothic, following the example of Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron, for a particular historical moment – a moment with consequences down to the present. This moment was the crisis of Britain’s global and imperial struggle against Napoleon and the emergence of a liberal Romantic ideology that would provide the foundation for modern constitutional states through the nineteenth century and beyond. The Scottish Chiefs combined elements of the national tale, historiography, historic popular literature, a narrative structure of deliverance modelled on the Bible, and the commercialised fictional form of the Gothic to create a new fictional genre – what was then called the ‘historical romance’. This literary form linked national identity and destiny to the individual and the family, as these were being redefined and made central elements in middle-class culture. The Scottish Chiefs opened the way for the historical novel, as practised by Walter Scott and a host of followers, that would be and continues to be the vehicle for promoting an ‘imagined community’ united by a supposedly national history, identity and destiny.

The Scottish Chiefs was one of the most widely read and influential texts produced during the Romantic period. It was republished at many places on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century and translated into several languages. In the twentieth century it was adapted for different reading publics and audiences, including illustrated and abridged editions for young readers, a comic-book version and the 1995 Oscar-winning Mel Gibson film, Braveheart. Its appeal can be explained by its innovative combining of history with the female Gothic, following the example of Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron, for a particular historical moment – a moment with consequences down to the present. This moment was the crisis of Britain’s global and imperial struggle against Napoleon and the emergence of a liberal Romantic ideology that would provide the foundation for modern constitutional states through the nineteenth century and beyond. The Scottish Chiefs combined elements of the national tale, historiography, historic popular literature, a narrative structure of deliverance modelled on the Bible, and the commercialised fictional form of the Gothic to create a new fictional genre – what was then called the ‘historical romance’. This literary form linked national identity and destiny to the individual and the family, as these were being redefined and made central elements in middle-class culture. The Scottish Chiefs opened the way for the historical novel, as practised by Walter Scott and a host of followers, that would be and continues to be the vehicle for promoting an ‘imagined community’ united by a supposedly national history, identity and destiny.

John Drew, in his comprehensive examination of ‘India and the Romantic Imagination’, describes Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (3 vols, 1811) as ‘oriental Gothic’. Here I will argue that a more apt definition would be ‘Orientalist Gothic’, and that, as such, Owenson’s novel, like the others in this set, addresses particular as well as general issues in the literature, culture and politics of its time. Some idea of the location of The Missionary in its historical moment can be gathered from the fact that negotiations between its author and publisher were managed by a leading politician and concluded in his coach. The politician was Castlereagh, momentarily out of office over failures in British campaigns against Napoleon, but soon to return to office as foreign secretary the year after The Missionary was published. At that moment Sydney Owenson (1776–1859) was already famous, for four related reasons. She was personally attractive, with a number of socially well-placed admirers. She had developed a public identity as the female embodiment of a liberal Romantic idea of Ireland. This role she performed for the titled and powerful of Ireland and England in the drawing rooms of their country mansions and town houses, and particularly the Dublin and London houses of her patrons, the Marquis and Marchioness of Abercorn. Lastly, she also embodied this role in fiction as the author of a series of successful novels in the new genre of the ‘national tale’, or story dealing with a region’s or nation’s culture, history and identity through familiar plots of love and courtship. This introduction will first describe Sydney Owenson’s social formation as a promoter of liberal Romantic nationalism, then relate her work to the aristocratic reform movement within the governmental and imperial administration of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and to the Romantic Orientalism that was part of it. It will then go on to survey the development of her fiction up to The Missionary, and consider The Missionary, in particular, as an example of Orientalist Gothic.