Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era

¹ Resisting earlier tendencies to reduce the connections between Gothic and Romantic writing to easy notions of historical confluence, influence, cause and effect, more recent critical attention has sought to address the relationship between them in more sophisticated terms. For instance, that first-generation romantics, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge, exploited the conventions of Gothic writing even as they jettisoned them is a paradox that has been explored to great effect by Michael Gamer in Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (2000). While, in David Punter's estimation, later Romantic poets such as Keats readily appropriated the "white Gothic" of medieval nostalgia so ardently defended by antiquarians such as Richard Hurd (Literature of Terror 103), Fred Botting has argued that, with the rise of Romanticism, Gothic in the work Blake and Shelley took an internal, subjective turn, at once displacing the Gothic's earlier concerns with power, evil and oppression onto a number of contemporary political scenarios (Gothic 92). For Steven Bruhm in Gothic Bodies, Gothic represents the defiant return of the corporeal pain repressed by the transcendent yearnings of the Romantic imagination, while most recently for Punter and Byron in The Gothic (2004), Romanticism and the Gothic are perceived as being implicated in a two-way process of exchange, a line of mutual influencing, shaping and re-shaping that runs incessantly from the political implications of Blakean Gothic, through the psychological spectres of Coleridge, politically once again in the work of the young Shelley, and most ambivalently in the relations to the aristocratic past in Byron (13-19). For an account of the Gothic's role in the broader Romantic "invention" of the literary, see Fred Botting and Dale Townshend, "General Introduction" in Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Volume I.
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² In Chapter 16 of his Essai sur L'origine des langues, for instance, Rousseau is keen to emphasise the many points of difference between vision and hearing, colour and sound, the eye and the ear. His tract seems directed against those aesthetic tracts which had argued for the striking points of similarity between the two perceptual fields: "There is no sort of absurdity that has not been put forward during discussions about the physical causes which relate to the Fine Arts. Parallels have been found between sound and light, and these have instantly been seized upon, without reference to experience or reason. The search for a system has bedevilled everything. When we are unable to paint with the ears we decide to sing with the eyes. I have seen that famous keyboard on which they claim to make music with colours. Failure to recognise that colours owe their effect to permanence and sounds to successiveness shows a total misunderstanding of the workings of nature" (le Huray and Day 100).
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³ In Wordsworth's poetry, the celebrated spots of time are nothing if not the creative projections out of, and into, an internal subjective screen. For an account of other aspects of Wordsworth's visual aesthetic, see, most notably, William Galperin's The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism, Harold Bloom's "Visionary Cinema of Romantic Poetry," Kenneth Johnston's "The Idiom of Vision," L.J. Swingle's "Wordsworth's 'Picture of the Mind'" and portions of Frank D. McConnell's The Confessional Imagination.
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⁴ As Miles argues, it is the Associative Paradigm that lies at the heart of the late eighteenth-century Gothic subject, effectively rendering the hygienic self vulnerable to the threat of desire in and through the interminable chains of metonymic links and associations to which it subscribes. Although, with the possible exception of Hartley, associational theory received little formal philosophical representation, it was nonetheless one of the implications of Hobbesian and Lockean empiricism, and frequently resorted to in the late eighteenth-century as a means of accounting for, and understanding, the organisation of human knowledge. As Miles points out, Associational theory was generally widely accepted as the basis for much eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, and beyond that, as a plausible model even for the functioning of human consciousness (Gothic Writing 52).
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⁵ See Castle's essay entitled "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie."
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⁶ See Geoffrey Hartman's seminal reading of Wordsworth's "soundscapes" in Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814. Consult, too, Mary Jacobus's article "Apostrophe and Lyric Voice in The Prelude," Jeffrey C. Robinson's "The Power of Sound: 'The Unremitting Voice of Nightly Streams'", John Hollander in "Wordsworth and the Music of Sound," David P. Haney's "'Rents and openings in the ideal world': Eye and Ear in Wordsworth" J. Douglas Kneale's Monumental Writing: Aspects of Rhetoric in Wordsworth's Poetry, and Michael Privateer's Romantic Voices: Identity and Ideology in British Poetry, 1789-1850.
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⁷ Kenneth R. Johnston, in fact, reads Romantic poetry in general as often involving a hasty passage from sight to the powers of imaginative Vision in the article "The Idiom of Vision." As such, however, Wordsworthian Vision for Johnston is never entirely without its relations to that which is simply visual or visible, and vise versa: "Wordsworth's vigilance against the tyranny of the bodily eye does not mean that the visual aspects of his visions can be separated from something in them conceived to be 'truly' visionary; such a separation was for him the ultimate tyranny, or trauma" (10).
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⁸ See Jill Rubenstein's article, "Sound and Silence in Coleridge's Conversation Poems."
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⁹ See James Watt's argument regarding the heterogeneity of Gothic in Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832.
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¹⁰ See Robert Miles's "Note on the Text" in his Penguin edition of The Italian, pages xxxvii-xxxviii.
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¹¹ For an account of the relationship between Ann Radcliffe and Mathew Lewis, particularly as this pertains to the distinctions between male and female Gothic, see Kari J. Winter's article "Sexual/Textual Politics of Terror: Writing and Rewriting the Gothic Genre in the 1790s"; Robert C. Platzner in "'Gothic Versus Romantic': A Rejoinder"; Robert Miles's essay "Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis"; Syndy M. Conger in "Sensibility Restored: Radcliffe's Answer to Lewis's The Monk"; and Rictor Norton in Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840.
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¹² Again, see the broad range of contemporary reviews of The Italian included in the appendix to Robert Miles's Penguin edition of Radcliffe's text, pages 492-502.
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¹³ As Lord Kames at one point in Elements of Criticism argues, music may never conceivably serve as the vehicle of undesirable passions: "Where the same person is both the actor and the singer, as in an opera, there is a separate reason why music should not be associated with the sentiments of any disagreeable passion, nor the description of any disagreeable object; which is, that such association is altogether unnatural: the pain, for example, that a man feels who is agitated with malice or unjust revenge, disqualifies him for relishing music or any thing that is pleasing; and therefore to represent such a man, contrary to nature, expressing his sentiments in a song, cannot be agreeable to any audience of taste" (ie Huray and Day 79).
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