Embodied Antiquity

The final chapter of the book turns to the nexus between classical antiquity, Romanticism, and the Gothic, as it is reflected in the writings of Mary Shelley. “Reanimation” has been frequently identified as a consistent trope in Shelley’s work. This chapter argues, by contrast, that Shelley repeatedly creates fantastic scenarios in which ancient and modern times meet, and modernity is revealed to be weak or insufficient when faced with the strength and vitality of the ancient world. The chapter turns first to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which Victor Frankenstein’s efforts at creation are implicitly compared to the ancient model announced in the subtitle, and judged a grotesque failure. Then, the chapter turns to a series of texts written while Shelley was living in Italy—the short story “Valerius, the Reanimated Roman,” her novella Mathilda, and her verse drama Proserpine—each of which dramatizes the unsatisfying and disappointed search for emotional connection with characters from antiquity. Finally, the chapter turns to Shelley’s end-of-days novel The Last Man (1826). This novel’s many allusions to Rome and antiquity reinforce the gulf that separates an idealized antiquity from a doomed, weakening present. Shelley’s writings vividly demonstrate the seductive pleasures of engaging with ideas from antiquity, but ultimately she expresses little hope that we can truly connect with the frightening giants of the past.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances

This chapter examines the role of classical literature in the life and writings of Ann Radcliffe. A strong case can be made for Radcliffe’s awareness of, and interest in, classical literature, even if it is impossible to claim decisively that she could read Latin. First, it examines allusions to Greek and Roman antiquity in The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). These allusions are used to articulate an ethical sensibility for these novels’ heroines: they are susceptible to the grandeur and sublimity of the classical world, and yet direct their attention and sympathy not to heroes or leaders but to the innocent victims of grand ambition. The second part of the chapter examines Radcliffe’s work of travel literature. In this work, the Roman historian Tacitus is quoted in Latin three times, in each case to describe the traces of war and suffering in the places that Radcliffe and her husband visit. Finally, the chapter turns to Radcliffe’s final novel published in her lifetime, The Italian (1797), in which the eroticism of Herculaneum wall paintings, and the shadowy walls of a Roman fort are sources of terror for the novel’s heroine and hero.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism

This chapter examines the dynamic and evolving relationship between conceptions of “Gothic” and “classical” in mid-eighteenth-century criticism. It argues that both terms were highly changeable in their content and were rarely imagined as mere opposites. The chapter focuses on three authors, all of whom reinterpreted the classical world as an object of private aesthetic experience rather than as a source of political or ethical examples. In his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Edward Young imagines the Roman poets as a giant “spectre,” which threatened to overwhelm modern poets, inhibiting their capacity for original creation. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke describes a frightening descent into the Underworld of Virgil’s Aeneid as an opportunity to form homosocial bonds with other male readers. Finally, Richard Hurd in Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) describes the classical world as a distant forerunner to a more modern preoccupation with enchantment and imagination. In all three of these authors, the classical world is shifting its meaning and significance. It is becoming, paradoxically, increasingly Gothic.

Afterword

The book ends with a brief “Afterword,” offering examples of nineteenth-century versions of the “Gothic classicism” traced in this book, and posing the question of how Gothic literature and criticism might help us to reconceive our examinations of the presence of antiquity in contemporary life. After brief accounts of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Coliseum” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, It argues that the notion of “haunting” captures the continuing presence of the classical past better than the current paradigm of “reception,” especially when we aim to analyze aspects of the ancient world with a pernicious legacy in the present.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic

The fifth chapter of the book moves across the Atlantic to consider the influential author of the early American Gothic, Charles Brockden Brown. Although scholars have examined classical themes in certain branches of his published work, this chapter gives the first comprehensive vision of classicism in Brown, taking into account his novels, short fiction, and periodical writing. Overall, his texts communicate a powerful skepticism about the status and value of antiquity in the new nation, although Brown himself is not reticent about demonstrating his own classical erudition. The chapter centers around readings of two of Brown’s novels: Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), with its sinister vision of superstitious reverence for the Roman orator Cicero, and Ormond (1799), which encourages readers to question the conservative, classicizing vision of American culture voiced by the novel’s own narrator, Sophia. Brown’s novels illustrate well what John C. Shields has called the “acceptance and denial” pattern of American classicism, in which writers assert their own status and learning through the use of classical literature and ideas, and yet simultaneously call for a progressive departure from desiccated European tradition. The Gothic is the perfect genre for capturing that contradiction, since it expresses in sinister terms the lingering power of history over contemporary minds.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation

The fourth chapter of the book turns to Matthew Lewis, author of the scandalous 1796 novel The Monk. More than many of his contemporaries, Lewis was able to blend intricate and learned allusions to Greek and Roman literature into the popular frame of his Gothic texts. This chapter argues that he uses these allusions to give voice to particular anxieties: about the consequences of Gothic publishing and, particularly, about his own queer desires. The chapter begins by examining the translations in The Monk of poems of Horace and Anacreon, both explicitly homoerotic texts from antiquity. Second, it turns to The Love of Gain (1799), a free translation of a satire of Juvenal, which Lewis used as a covert means of defending his career as an author of Gothic texts. Finally, I turn to a translation of Goethe in Lewis’s ballad collection, Tales of Wonder (1800), and a classicizing parody of that translation in the accompanying volume, Tales of Terror (1801), both of which comment implicitly on Lewis’s own specific authorial and erotic anxieties. Rather than truly blending Gothic and classical, Lewis uses the erudite allusions to antiquity to open up a new channel of communication within popular works, giving voice to desires and fears that would otherwise have remained unsaid.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection

This chapter examines the presence of classical texts and objects in the work of Horace Walpole, in his writing and also among his vast collection of miscellaneous artifacts at his villa, Strawberry Hill. First, it considers the textual reuse of lines from Horace and Lucan in his novel The Castle of Otranto and his Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother. In each case, the classical images and ideas are startlingly, aggressively altered in their context and meaning to fit the aesthetic choices of those works. The chapter then turns to Walpole’s ideas on classical theater, as reflected in a periodical piece and in the prologue to The Mysterious Mother. Walpole praises Attic drama for its free expression of horror; the classical becomes associated with the wild imagination that has been dammed up and repressed in his own age. Finally, the chapter examines the classical objects in Strawberry Hill, arguing that Walpole was consistently attracted to objects that exemplified horror and hybridity, thereby challenging facile assumptions about symmetry and decorum in ancient art. Walpole establishes a paradigm for the presence of the classical within the Gothic: it is not absent or ignored, but rather irreverently fragmented and rearranged.

Introduction

The book begins by briefly surveying the origin and history of the word Gothic from the Roman Empire to the first canonical novel of the English Gothic tradition, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). It then surveys relevant debates about the classical world and its legacy in eighteenth-century England, including the aftershocks of the French “Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns” and appropriations of classical ideas and images in politics, art, and literature. The Gothic was a “pan-European” phenomenon. Although this book focuses largely on literary works from Britain and America, the allusive connections with Classical literature remind us that the impact of the Gothic was not limited to the English-speaking world.