Queering Contemporary Gothic Narrative 1970-2012

Paulina Palmer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137303554
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the development of queer Gothic fiction, contextualizing it with reference to representations of queer sexualities and genders in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic, as well as the sexual-political perspectives generated by the 1970s lesbian and gay liberation movements and the development of queer theory in the 1990s. The book examines the roles that Gothic motifs and narrative strategies play in depicting aspects of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex experience in contemporary Gothic fiction. Gothic motifs discussed include spectrality, the haunted house, the vampire, doppelganger and monster. Regional Gothic and the contribution that Gothic tropes make to queer historical fiction and historiography receive attention, as does the AIDS narrative. Female Gothic and feminist perspectives are also explored. Writers discussed include Peter Ackroyd, Vincent Brome, Jim Grimsley, Alan Hollinghurst, Randall Kenan, Meg Kingston, Michelle Paver, Susan Swan, Louise Tondeur, Sarah Waters, Kathleen Winter and Jeanette Winterson.

© The Author(s) 2016

Paulina PalmerQueering Contemporary Gothic Narrative 1970-2012Palgrave Gothic10.1057/978-1-137-30355-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Queering Contemporary Gothic

Paulina Palmer¹

(1)

University of Warwick and Birkbeck College, London, United Kingdom

End Abstract

Queering Contemporary Gothic

Alice Nutter, the protagonist of Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate that is a contemporary work of queer Gothic discussed in this study that re-casts events relating to the witch trials that took place in Lancashire in 1612, is portrayed living near Pendle Forest. The location is regarded by the locals as a haunted place where the spirits of the dead allegedly roam and men are transformed into hares. Alice is represented as queer both in terms of her sexuality and the role of social outsider to which the community relegates her. Though born in Pendle, on the death of her husband she moved to London where she assisted Dr Dee, astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, in his experiments to create the elixir of life. While acquiring from him an interest in scientific discourses, associated in the period with magic, she fell in love with Elizabeth Southern, another of his assistants, and lived with her for several years. When the relationship with Elizabeth Southern ended she became involved in an illicit romantic relationship with the Roman Catholic Christopher Southworth. In refusing to re-marry after her husband’s death and expressing what today we would call her ‘bisexuality’, Alice challenges both heterosexual conventions and the view, implicit in the twentieth-century concept of identity categories, that the individual’s sexuality is defined in terms of the gender of his partner.¹ In attempting to protect a group of vagrant women who are accused of witchcraft, she lays herself open to a similar charge. Her decision to shelter Southworth, who is accused of being involved in the Gunpowder Plot, in her home hastens her downfall. She finds herself trapped in the cultural and religious contradictions of the period for, as she fatalistically tells her accusers, ‘If you cannot try me as a witch, you’ll charge me as papist.’²

I have opened my study of the queering of contemporary Gothic with reference to Winterson’s The Daylight Gate since, as well creating a vivid representation of an oppressive episode from early seventeenth-century history, it introduces the reader to some of the themes and narrative strategies that typify fiction of this kind, ones that we shall encounter again in the novels and stories discussed in the following chapters. Teasing out the connections between ‘Gothic’ and ‘queer’, Winterson employs a fictional genre familiar to readers for its focus on transgressive sexuality and its association, as Fred Botting describes, with ‘liminality’ and ‘ghosts of the mind’,³ to recount the story of a female protagonist whose behaviour and sexual preferences are regarded by society as disruptive. As is frequently the case in queer Gothic, Winterson’s treatment of the tension between fantasy and realism, the uncanny dimension of existence and the material world, metaphorically evokes the tension between queer and hetero-normative perspectives. Whereas queer sexuality is associated in the novel with a secret realm of magic and illicit erotic encounters, heteronormativity is described in terms of the everyday reality of family life and church attendance. The interrogation of the concept of ‘the real’, in which Winterson engages, and the ambiguities and questions that it provokes, connect queer sexuality to the illicit and the taboo. The reader is uncertain whether the erotic encounter that Alice experiences with Elizabeth in the final chapters of the novel and the transformation of Southworth into a hare while seeking to escape his pursuers that she thinks she sees really take place or whether we should interpret them as examples of what Steven Bruhm terms ‘“magical” animism’,⁴ in which emotions of fear or excitement deceive the individual into believing that his fantasies assume material form. Alice herself is unsure whether these events actually occur or not, and, watching them through her eyes, we share her confusion. Ambiguities of this kind are, of course, integral to the operations of the uncanny and the Gothic novels and stories depicting them. It is the ability of Gothic to interrogate the reader’s preconceptions about reality and expose the unfamiliar underlying the mundane that, as Rosemary Jackson explains, makes it well suited to treating topics conventionally branded as taboo.⁵ Topics of this kind include different forms of queer sexuality for, as Freud, citing Schelling, explains, ‘The unheimlich is the name for everything that [according to social convention] ought to have remained…secret and hidden but has come to light.’⁶ The Gothic genre, as The Daylight Gate illustrates, is admirably suited to representing their relegation to the realm of the secret and taboo and – as illustrated by the public interrogation to which Alice is subjected at her trial – their eventual disclosure.

Winterson’s The Daylight Gate, as well as illustrating the ability of queer Gothic to explore the interrelation and tension between queer and hetero-normative sexualities, furnishes an insight into some of the themes and motifs that fiction of this kind prioritises. They include, in addition to sexualities that tend to be regarded as deviant, the vilification of certain sections of society as monstrous, a topic illustrated in the novel by the demonising of Roman Catholics and the branding of women who exist on the margins of society and reject sexual convention as witches. The grotesque body, another motif frequently employed in Gothic, is also to the fore. It is exemplified on a physical plane by the injured body of Christopher Southworth tortured by the Protestant authorities and, on a supernatural, by the transformation from human to animal that some of the characters enact or fantasise. References to mysterious rural and urban locations also feature in the novel. They are exemplified both by Pendle Forest, described in terms of its treacherous mists and its association with magic, and Dr Dee’s laboratory in London where he and his assistants attempt to discover the elixir. In addition, the progress of the narrative is interrupted on occasion by incidents of spectral visitation, as is illustrated by Alice’s unexpected meeting with Dr Dee when, prior to her arrest, his ghost appears to warn her of the dangers that beset her. Topics such as these, as well as being significant to Winterson’s text, give us a foretaste of their recurrence in the other novels and stories discussed in the chapters below where they assume different manifestations.

Winterson’s decision to commemorate a group of women hanged for witchcraft in seventeenth-century Lancaster by re-creating their lives and experiences in a work of Gothic agrees, it is interesting to note, with the emphasis that present-day critics and historians place on the importance of investigating the oppressive, as well as the positive, aspects of queer history. Heather Love, defending her ‘decision to look on the dark side’, criticises the tendency of ‘contemporary critics to describe the encounter with the past in idealising terms’.⁷ She argues that, instead of disavowing the difficulties that queer people living in earlier centuries experienced and constructing ‘a positive genealogy of queer identity’ and ‘female experience’ (p. 32), as the 1970s lesbian and gay liberation movements, with their emphasis on the celebration of gay pride, tended to do, we need to acknowledge the oppressive aspects of their lives. The historiographer Carolyn Dinshaw, describing her investigation into lives of women in medieval history as motivated ‘by a queer historical impulse, an impulse toward making connections across time’,⁸ describes the aim of her research as the building of an imagined community of the marginal. It is, she admits, necessarily imagined since, due to the fact that the majority of women living in earlier eras lacked literacy skills and could not record their experiences, the researcher has little relevant material on which to draw. Winterson adopts an approach of a similar kind to the histories of the women and queer individuals that she depicts. In representing the persecution of a group of seventeenth-century women who, on account of their unorthodox lifestyles and the fact that their sexualities conflict with hetero-patriarchal conventions, were eventually imprisoned and executed, she foregrounds the dark side of the past and creates a similar community of the marginal. The emphasis that Love and Dinshaw place on the need for writers and historians to address the oppressive aspects of queer history is, as we shall see, also relevant to some of the other works of contemporary queer Gothic discussed later.

Fiction, Gothic Motifs, and Queer Sexualities and Genders

The Daylight Gate, characterised by Winterson’s interrogation of ‘the real’ and her representation of the persecution of a group of women living in the seventeenth-century who were suspected of practising witchcraft, illustrates, of course, only one of the forms that contemporary queer Gothic fiction takes. There are also numerous others. I have selected the novels I discuss with the aim of illustrating its versatility in terms of its treatment of sexuality and gender, as well as its utilisation of Gothic motifs and narrative strategies.

As we might expect from Freud’s reference to the individual’s experiencing of an uncanny event, such as seeing a ghost, as furnishing a metaphor for the return of his repressed desires and fears,⁹ several of the novels examined in the chapters here focus on the topic of spectral visitation. Contemporary writers frequently employ the ghost story as a vehicle to explore queer history and the influence it exerts on the present. Whereas Steve Berman in Vintage: A Ghost Story represents his teenage narrator’s encounter with a ghost giving him an insight into male homosexual life in the 1950s and indirectly helping him to clarify his own desires and needs, Louise Tondeur in The Water’s Edge employs the haunted house narrative to explore family history, elucidating the interplay between heterosexual and lesbian sexualities that it can reve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Queering Contemporary Gothic
• 2. Ghosts and Haunted Houses
• 3. Uncanny Others: Vampires and Doubles
• 4. Tracking the Monster
• 5. Regional Gothic: Uncanny Cities and Rural Areas
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter