Theology, Horror and Fiction

A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century

Jonathan Greenaway

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501351792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Longlisted for the 2022 International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize Surpassing scholarly discourse surrounding the emergent secularism of the 19th century, Theology, Horror and Fiction argues that the Victorian Gothic is a genre fascinated with the immaterial. Through close readings of popular Gothic novels across the 19th century – Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray, among others – Jonathan Greenaway demonstrates that to understand and read Gothic novels is to be drawn into the discourses of theology. Despite the differences in time, place and context that informed the writers of these stories, the Gothic novel is irreducibly fascinated with religious and theological ideas, and this angle has been often overlooked in broader scholarly investigations into the intersections between literature and religion. Combining historical theological awareness with interventions into contemporary theology, particularly around imaginative apologetics and theology and the arts, Jonathan Greenaway offers the beginnings of a modern theology of the Gothic.

1

Monstrosity and the problem of evil

A theologico-literary understanding of personhood in Frankenstein and Paradise Lost

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) has become deeply embedded in the textual canon of the Gothic,¹ yet for a text that deals so closely with the ‘theological consequences of creation’² criticism on the theological elements of the text is distinctly lacking. Criticism generally falls into two separate spheres: the assessment of the creature in a social or political context or the assessment of the creature as an embodiment of concerns around gender or the body.³ This section will build on the work covered in the introduction and argue for the necessity of a theological understanding of Shelley’s text. Through a theologically inflected reading of the novel, the link between ontological status, morality and aesthetics can be decentred and the vital role of community and mutual recognition in the formation of subjectivity re-emphasized. Shelley’s representation of Victor Frankenstein and his creature serves to present a supremely practical theology of personhood and being, and shows that, for all of the Romantic-era interest in the transcendent and poetic potential of creativity, that creativity alone can have disastrous consequences. In short, while the Romantics may have co-opted Milton, they fatally misunderstood the vision of creativity he espoused.⁴ The figure of the monster is thus only superficially monstrous, as Shelley presents Frankenstein’s creature as, like us all, seeking a connection to that which brought us into being; or, to put this another way, seeking a theology. It is this aspect that must be understood to grasp the significance of the Gothic’s theological underpinnings and further the critical understanding of the link between theological belief, tradition and other, more ‘numinous’ Gothic writings.⁵

The opening of Frankenstein (1818) quotes from Paradise Lost, using as the novel’s epigraph: ‘Did I request thee, Maker, To mold Me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?’⁶ Quite deliberately, this epigraph and the monster’s own speech and thought are linked, as the monster repeatedly echoes Miltonic and biblical language: ‘I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel whom thy drivest from joy for no misdeed.’⁷ Typically, criticism has given rather less attention to Milton’s text as a theological influence, with some critics even going so far as to claim, quite erroneously, that in Frankenstein ‘the universe is emptied of God and of theistic assumptions of “good” and “evil”’.⁸ This argument seems, at best, untenable, as the sheer depth of theological language that recurs throughout the novel is impossible to ignore. The theo-linguistic register of the novel culminates with ‘the rationalist [Victor] who . . . ends up execrating his Creature as a fiend and a devil’.⁹ When this is coupled with the influence and connection to Milton, such a critical claim for a lack of theology is rendered naïve and untenable, as Frankenstein repeatedly shows itself to be a profoundly theologically influenced text. Shelley goes so far as to link Frankenstein’s monster to a theological tradition that extends as far back as the book of Job, namely the theodicy question of the purpose and justice of a creator.¹⁰ As philosopher and theologian David Brown points out throughout his work Tradition and Imagination (1999), theological orthodoxy has always been creatively re-imagined outside of the confines of doctrine in response to the changes in circumstance brought about through the progress of history.¹¹ This re-imagining takes place in a variety of ways across shifting historical contexts – less a rejection of theological concerns than an ongoing and constant retelling of these concerns brought about through new stimuli.¹²

Shelley’s novel functions as a creative re-imagining of a well-established theological position that finds imaginative expression within Gothic writing. Since the equation of the Good with notions of self-identity and sameness in early Western philosophy, ‘the experience of evil has often been linked with notions of exteriority’.¹³ Frankenstein’s response to his creature certainly seems to fit this model. After working himself to nervous and physical exhaustion, Frankenstein succeeds, and yet immediately the ‘beauty of the dream vanished’ and he himself is unable to ‘endure the aspect of the being I had created’.¹⁴ Rather than attempt to reduce the other to the level of metaphor or elide all difference, theology offers new way of thinking through the ethical implications of the Other in its understanding of personhood. Furthermore, through an awareness of the historical development of both the Gothic and theological traditions, there must also be an acceptance of the possibility of imaginative revelation as historical contexts shift and theological truths are articulated in fresh ways. This twin movement of both traditional canonicity and imaginative reinterpretation can be understood as expressing the ‘capacity of the Christian faith for renewal, reform and even revolution’.¹⁵ If, as Kevin J Vanhoozer has argued, ‘the Bible is God’s instrument for doing revelatory and redemptive things with words in the context of the church’¹⁶ then the numinous literature of the Gothic can be seen as doing theologically revelatory things in the context of the wider cultural world.

However, received theological revelation is never static. It is always mediated through various textual forms and thus always subject to a degree of interpretation.¹⁷ One of the issues at stake within Frankenstein is the mediation of competing texts and the worrying status that the act of creation (whether that be literary or otherwise) takes on because of this. The novel is a complex palimpsest of texts exhibiting a multiplicity of characters and distinctive voices. That said, critics such as Newman argue that

We are more apt to be struck by the similarities in the way the Monster and Frankenstein express themselves, since they both use the same kind of heightened language, and since both speak with an eloquence more expressive of a shared Romantic ethos. . . . The novel fails to provide significant differences in tone, diction and sentence structure that alone can serve, in a written text, to represent individual human voices.¹⁸

Yet, what this misses is the ways in which Shelley uses specifically theological language to clearly delineate the relationship between the creature and Victor (seen most sharply in their first conversations on the mountainside in chapter two of Volume two and discussed in greater detail here).¹⁹ Even if the question of who may be using that language is complicated by the framing narrative structure, the separation of story from character shapes the combination of different forms (letters, diaries, journals and even personal testimony) into ‘a text, divested of its originating voice’.²⁰ Here this disparate collection of texts becomes the means by which the essentially symbolic story can be transmitted. Like scripture, the text works to destabilize the idea of any kind of singular narrative authority, shifting the reader’s conception of authority from a singular source to a collection of texts that must necessarily be interpreted. Given the emergence of the novel form in the eighteenth century and the accompanying debates about ‘realism’, Frankenstein is tied not only to the issue of the epistemology of novel writing²¹ but also to a deeply held theological concern, namely the tension between theological certainty and theological expression, which out of necessity must always be riven by metaphor and analogy. Literature, specifically non-realist forms such as the Gothic, ‘reaches out towards mystery, towards a reality that is our final concern but which eludes empirical investigation and bursts rational concepts’.²² This holds true even if, as with Frankenstein, the ostensible format, in this case the epistolary or testimony narrative, is one that lends itself to empirical understanding. Victor’s testimony ‘reaches out’ beyond the verisimilitude of testimony narratives through the novel’s content. Frankenstein – as a text heavily influenced by theology – participates within a tradition of ‘searching for something of ultimate concern’, framing this search by ‘taking as [its] theme the telling of a sto ry’.²³ The framing device in the form of a series of conversations between Walton and Frankenstein ensures that the character of Frankenstein can only make sense of his life in the act of narration – his existence can only be understood in retrospect. As Walton articulates it, ‘strange and harrowing must be his story, frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course and wrecked it – thus!’²⁴ It is through the telling that the events contained within the text may become coherent to Victor and some kind of meaning drawn from it. Victor himself seems to recognize this as he refers throughout the novel to a sense of predestination at work. Even towards the end of his life, he frames his struggle in retrospect as one that is ordained by spiritual forces: ‘you may give up your purpose, but mine is assigned to me by heaven.’²⁵ Through framing his own narrative through the older, wider narrative of the preordination of the world, it ‘gives him a pattern by which he can find himself in what would otherwise be a meaningless end to his journey’.²⁶ Thus, the displacement of the narrative voice of the text is not simply a result of the multiplicity of forms that it covers (such as diary entries, letters and journals) or a problem of hermeneutics but ties the novel into a tradition of theological quests whereby it is through a larger narrative, through a grander ‘story’ that sense can be made of one’s existence.²⁷ To phrase things more theologically, the textual creation of the novel is one of multiplicity rather than any univocity of being, all of which are incorporated into and pointing towards a larger the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Gothic and religion and theology
• 1 Monstrosity and the problem of evil: A theologico-literary understanding of personhood in Frankenstein and Paradise Lost
• 2 ‘Sinners in the hands of an angry God’: Gothic revelation and monstrous theology in the Gothic’s Calvinist legacy
• 3 Gothic writing and political theology: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre as theological texts
• 4 ‘Through a glass darkly’ : Reading the Victorian ghost story theologically
• 5 The limitations of materialism: Fin-de-siècle Gothic, sin and subjectivity and the insufficiency of degeneration
• Conclusion: Through the Gothic castle, back to theology
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright