“More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve

Clara Reeve’s (1729–1807) Gothic novel The Old English Baron is a node for contemplating two discursive exclusions. The novel, due to its own ambiguous status as a gendered “body”, has proven a difficult text for discourse on the Female Gothic to recognise. Subjected to a temperamental dialectic of reclamation and disavowal, The Old English Baron can be made to speak to the (often) subordinate position of Transgender Studies within the field of Queer Studies, another relationship predicated on the partial exclusion of undesirable elements. I treat the unlikely transness of Reeve’s body of text as an invitation to attempt a trans reading of the bodies within the text. Parallel to this, I develop an attachment genealogy of Queer and Transgender Studies that reconsiders essentialism―the kind both practiced by Female Gothic studies and also central to the logic of Reeve’s plot―as a fantasy that helps us distinguish where a trans reading can depart from a queer one, suggesting that the latter is methodologically limited by its own bad feelings towards the former.

The Secret of Divine Providence

The emphasis on political continuity in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution leads to a specifically Whig providentialism, examined in Chapter 3 through the work of Clara Reeve, Horace Walpole, and Matthew Lewis. In Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron, the country Whig version, stressing links with the medieval past, unites with Newtonian theology in which God’s finger is at work in every ‘natural occurrence’ to render the supernatural revelatory of this providential care. Divine justice and historical inexorability, romance, and realism are conjoined. By contrast, the sceptical Horace Walpole, representative of the Walpolian Whig narrative of political rupture, questions Providence in The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, and substitutes himself as quasi-divine author, whose originality lies in the grotesque mixture of realist and supernatural elements. Matthew Lewis essays an eschewal of Providential mechanisms in The Monk but here grotesque features such as the bleeding nun disclose an aporia which reveals the limit of libertine desire and a negative supernatural.

Chopin and the Gothic

This chapter talks about how the Gothic angle has not been explored as one of Chopin's probable literary inspirations. The main reason for such an omission is that until the 1970s most critics and commentators considered Gothic literature a sideshow of Romanticism at best or an embarrassing and destructive cultural phenomenon at worst. When the Gothic was not vilified, it was either politely ignored or offhandedly dismissed as a poor relation to the Romantic movement. However, early Gothic writers in England eagerly absorbed and expanded the themes and the moods of their forerunners. English readers met new Gothic fiction with delight and a growing demand for more. After Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, the throng of authors included Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Maturin, along with many others.

Ancient Liberties

Chapter One explores how the historical novel emerged in the 1760s as a form which at once employed and interrogated the dominant political narrative of ‘ancient liberties’. The notion of ancient constitutionalism allowed proposals for reform or for limits on monarchical power to be seen as attempts to ensure stability or, at most, (as with the theory of the Norman Yoke) to return to political origin. Yet for Horace Walpole ancient constitutionalism seems at times a troubled jest; Clara Reeve senses that the motif desperately needs reinforcement; and even after the more radical uses of the theory of the Norman Yoke by the Constitutional Society in the 1780s and 90s, Ann Radcliffe considers it a frozen political fable. Haunted by the spectre of the divine right of kings, in the historical novel the narrative of tradition ultimately proves an insufficient underpinning for the constitution.