All of it is brilliant, earnest, inspiring, convincing--unlike, say, Coleridge, also brilliant, but with loose ends showing, fragments and rough edges, sometimes protesting too much...
Male-Gothic, according to Williams and others, runs along the following lines--
Core fantasies of maternal horror--anxieties about overwhelming, engulfment, being devoured by the powerful "mother" (this is a fantasy of the mother, of course, based on infancy and early childhood)...
Systems and paranoias--godlike Faustian genius, access to secret knowledge, powers over life and death (compensatory in light of that maternal fantasy-horror?), at the borderline of madness or over it...
Violent, objectifying, near-pornographic fantasies of controlling and victimizing women.... (see The Monk)
Tales of exile, wandering, alienation from family and society (Frankenstein monster, the Wandering Jew, the vampire)...
Homophobic fantasies of persecution and conspiracy (overlap with paranoia).
Horror effects--material, physical abominations--filth, contagion, blood, dismemberment. "Fissions"--things fragmenting, swarming, multiplying (like rats, flies, crowds of faces). "Fusions"--things usually separated are superimposed, overlapped, unnatrually conjoined (monsters and nightmares of many kinds).
The sublime in the Gothic mode--its excesses and intensities unsettling and unmooring self-identity rather than being brought back around to its affirmation.
Fragmented, unfinished, sometimes incoherent texts (Christabel? The Monk, again)
Though Wordsworth's powerfully synthetic literary rhetoric seems to handle various negations with ease, might we still catch traces of the Gothic in his work?
If nothing else, maybe we can mark how the wilder side of Gothic is disarmed and domesticated? As if Wordsworth, tremendously resourceful, can pull the emotive intensities of Gothic into his system and put them to his sort of constructive work?
It would be interesting to find a point or points where such employment doesn't quite take, loose threads in the tight weave he makes...
Dorothy with those shooting-lights wild eyes--the engulfing Nature of his younger years which cannot be painted--the ghosts of sex and violence that haunt in The Thorn (instead of being staged dramatically)... That ravaged/ravished grove in "Nutting"--
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
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3 comments:
I feel like all of these elements combine to form the basis of something like a witch trail. The blatant fear of anything different/sexual goes hand in hand with the idea of sexual repression. The overhang of the religious influence creates the fear. The males are afraid of the tempting females, while the females are afraid of the domineering males. Even if there is not an element of horror there is always and underlying sense of fear towards what is no understood and towards the idea of freedom. Perhaps Dorothy's wild eyes are simply a reference to her wild nature. She isn't insane, she's free.
I think Wordsworth tries to tame the Gothic in his work. He has the basic elements of the Gothic in some of his poems like The Thorn. It has the aspects of exile from society and the horror affects surronding the child's death. However, where Wordsworth could have placed a huge emphasis on the Gothic, by making the woman a clear example of the supernatural, he leaves it up to the readers interpretation as to whether the woman is living or dead. He controls the Gothic aspects so that they do not overwhelm the reader. I personally wish he would have made the woman more ghost like so that the supernatural could have been explored more in depth in the poem. But the poem does pull together everything to create feelings of horror in the reader, even though the Gothic is tame compared to other authors.
To be honest, I'm kinda surprised at how gothic Worsdworth's work has been. I don't know why, but I've always kind of thought he'd be more of the sentimental romantic. I thought I was going to be slitting my wrists while I was reading him, but I actually liked his writings. I think he uses the Gothic aspects very subtly, almost like he's inviting you to hunt and find it.
Lauren T.
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