Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
David Sigler
University of Idaho

Some ten years ago, Diane Long Hoeveler suggested in Gothic Feminism that a wave of Foucauldian studies, attuned to the broad discursive and institutional transformations underway at the end of the eighteenth century, might be poised to supplement a tradition of psychoanalytic studies of the Gothic (53). Dale Townshend’s monograph, The Orders of Gothic, courageously takes up this challenge, and, like Hoeveler’s study, it refuses to discard psychoanalytic insights just because Foucauldian ones prove illuminating. The Orders of Gothic offers a compelling combination of Lacanian and Foucauldian approaches, while grappling with an enormous range of Gothic writing to deliver fascinating reinterpretations of signal texts. The study is clearly written and accessible—even, I suspect, for readers mildly allergic to the specialized vocabularies of Lacan and Foucault—and for the most part it maintains the integrity of its diverse theoretical investments. It marks a significant and welcome contribution to the current critical conversation on the Gothic.

The chapters are organized around topics such as incest, vision, torture, and paternity; each considers several Gothic texts under a thematic cover, a strategy enabling Townshend to return to texts discussed in previous chapters armed with insights gained along the way. Still, it is within the earlier chapters that The Orders of Gothic makes its most significant contributions to the field. Over the first three chapters Townshend ushers carefully historicized close readings into a genuinely fresh theoretical paradigm, building the argument adroitly. Admirably, the analysis stems from close and extended engagement with specific texts: I was surprised to find that the close readings, embedding these texts in contested cultural, economic and intellectual contexts, are as much examples of new historicist scholarship as of Lacanian or Foucauldian. Townshend proves to be a responsible and convincing historicist, and, except in an analysis of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, which is psychoanalytic from the start, the Lacanian apparatus is basically superadded. But the addition is compelling and necessary, as the historicized readings illustrate how the Gothic produced the individuated subject of psychoanalysis in a peculiarly Lacanian way. To this, Townshend always appends a Foucauldian layer of meta-explanation, as for him the subjects of psychoanalysis and the Gothic are aligned in a way that Foucault can help us understand: building on the foundation laid by the last chapter of Foucault’s The Order of Things, here the literary emergence of a subject of the unconscious demarcates the very transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus Townshend ultimately reads the Gothic as a symptom of the bourgeois form of liberal modernity emerging at the end of the British eighteenth century. As Townshend is well aware, this is an argument already familiar to readers of Emma Clery, Robert Miles, Jerrold Hogle, and indeed Hoeveler. But Townshend takes a significant next step in claiming that Gothic literary conventions, generating nostalgia for a fading aristocracy within a decidedly modern rubric of disciplinary and supervisory power, were uniquely poised to confer legitimacy, continuity, and lineage on this nascent liberal modernity. The Gothic, in Townshend’s view, did not make readers choose between old discourses (like alliance, bloody punishment, and darkness) and new ones (like sexuality, bloodless discipline, and visibility). Instead, it reaffirmed the continuing presence of these old systems even as it was describing and stabilizing a new discursive regime (88). This argument thus recalls Foucault’s commentary on panopticism, modernity, and Radcliffe in “The Eye of Power,” which Townshend discusses here very productively at several stages of the argument.

Townshend’s main theoretical achievement—a considerable one—is the nesting of Lacanian psychoanalysis into Foucauldian historicism. Lacan and Foucault have been treated as incommensurate in Lacanian books like Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire or James Penny’s The World of Perversion. David Halperin, coming at this issue from the Foucauldian side in Saint Foucault, describes Foucault as the only genuine alternative to psychoanalysis (121). Sharply breaking with these assumptions, The Orders of Gothic reminds us that the psychoanalytic version of subjectivity is the product of the very shift that Foucault narrates, and that psychoanalytic reading is necessary to the extent that it can account for the traumatic remainder of enjoyment that necessarily attends such broad cultural shifts. For Townshend, the relation between Lacan and Foucault cuts both ways: Lacan is a necessary supplement to Foucault because “Historicity thus inscribes in man the trace of the Other to which he finds it difficult, if not impossible, to be reconciled,” even while “Foucault’s genealogy of vision shows Lacan’s gaze of the Other to be, at once, both highly historical and deeply enmeshed in the disciplinary power structures of modernity” (39, 304). The Gothic is a privileged site of this collision, since for Townshend it “deals in the remainder” (14). This assumption proves convincing over the course of the study, even if it tends to give Foucault the upper hand over the Gothic and Lacan: in most cases, the latter two terms are shown to be compatible with Foucault’s genealogies and archaeologies of power and knowledge.
Read more…

Reviewed by
David M. Baulch
University of West Florida

A book entitled Erotic Mary Robinson or Erotic Byron would not be all that surprising. By contrast, Anya Taylor’s Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce is immediately unsettling—and interesting—precisely because tradition has constructed Samuel Taylor Coleridge as one of the least erotic beings imaginable. Canonizing Coleridge alongside “Dry Bob” Southey, Byron’s Don Juan set the terms for reception, contrasting the success of Coleridge’s metaphysical interests with the failure of young Juan’s attempts to sublimate erotic attachments through abstruse contemplations. Slightly less than two centuries of subsequent critical treatment have done little to challenge the orthodoxy of Byron’s irreverence. While Anthony John Harding’s Coleridge and the Idea of Love: Aspects of Relationship in Coleridge’s Thought and Writing (1974) accords a centrality to love in its broadest possible sense as a moral/relational metaphysic, and Raimonda Modiano’s Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (1985) recognizes love as an important element in Coleridge’s complex and shifting engagements with aesthetic theory, Anya Taylor’s remarkable book asserts that Coleridge, throughout his life, was positively sexy and charmingly flirtatious. In short, Erotic Coleridge argues that the vicissitudes of Coleridge’s life, the complexities of his thought, and the protean character of his literary achievement need to be seen alongside his consistent interest in women.

While in its arrangement Erotic Coleridge is a chronological survey of Coleridge’s erotic attachments, it would not be accurate to call the book simply a biography of Coleridge’s love life. Erotic Coleridge makes significant strides in the reassessment of Coleridge’s accomplishment as a poet in the light of J.C.C. Mays’s discovery of numerous unknown Coleridge poems now available in the multipart Poetical Works (six books which collectively constitute volume 16 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge). For Erotic Coleridge, the significance of Coleridge’s suddenly expanded twenty-first century canon is that “[t]he large array of poems to and about women crowd out the famous manly poems like ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Fears in Solitude,’ and change the focus and reassess the meaning of well-known poems toward womanly themes” (3). So not only does Taylor find the twenty-first century Coleridge turned into a poet who produced more work focused on women than had previously been known to exist, she argues that his most well-known productions must be reassessed in light of these new discoveries.

Chapter 2 presents the pre-1794 Coleridge as an energetically flirtatious writer of verses to and about women. The period immediately before his ill-fated marriage is fertile ground for Erotic Coleridge, which presents some of the first critical readings of poems which have only recently come to light. Coleridge’s poems to Fanny Nesbitt in 1793 are characterized by their witty and frankly physical representations of the female body such as the line: “No lovelier maid e’er heav’d the bosom’s snow.” Coleridge’s engagement to Sara Fricker in 1794 did not monopolize his poetic celebrations of the female body: in that same year Coleridge also produced flirtatious verses for the singers/actresses Ann and Eliza Brunton from Bristol (among others). Most significantly, in late 1794 Coleridge experienced an emerging love with Mary Evans. Taylor argues that the 1798 poem “Lewti; or The Circassian Love-Chant” was initially inspired by his love for Mary Evans four years earlier, an argument which develops into an exploration of the epistolary exchange in which Evans implored Coleridge to give up his preparations for the pantisocracy experiment. Although Coleridge ultimately lost Mary Evans to a West Indian slaver, she became paradigmatic of “the intellectual and ethical agreement … that Coleridge would look for in future relationships” (18).

Moving away from the standard narratives that see Coleridge’s potential for greatness marred by habitual weaknesses for alcohol, opium, and plagiarism, Erotic Coleridge finds a man whose defining moment of weakness was in submitting to Robert Southey’s pressure to marry Sara Fricker. Far from trading one constitutional weakness for another, Erotic Coleridge sees Coleridge’s marriage to Sara Fricker as a compensatory sacrifice engineered by Robert Southey. Southey’s initial interest in Sara suddenly gave way to a quick marriage to Sara’s less spirited sister Edith, while the “obligations and guilt” Southey felt at abandoning Sara were assuaged by his substitution of Coleridge as Sara’s matrimonial partner. Contending that “[b]y persistent pressure Southey made Coleridge feel that he was obligated to Sara Fricker,” Taylor argues that Southey “was passing on his own obligations and guilt to the bewildered and reluctant Coleridge” (22). Insofar as Southey “was the man whom Sara Fricker admired and hoped to marry,” Sara’s subsequent and often justifiable disappointments with Coleridge were only compounded by having Southey in her presence at Greta Hall (31). Through Southey’s bullying, Coleridge’s hasty marriage was “nearly the death of Coleridge’s Soul” (23). For Taylor, Coleridge’s unfortunate marriage and its lifelong consequences constitute the central issue that shaped his poetry and the variety of odd domestic situations that marked his daily life. Not some footnote to a sudden need to find a wife for the quickly abandoned pantisocracy project, Coleridge’s marriage is the defining moment through which Erotic Coleridge effectively reads his subsequent views on women, love, divorce laws, and poetry.
Read more…