Literature and Theatre
Chapter 4 develops the concept of “moor eeffocish things.” G. K. Chesterton coins this term—which derives from an uncanny moment in Dickens’s autobiographical fragments (where he reads “Coffee Room” in reverse as “Moor Eeffoc”)—to describe the many eerily animated objects in Dickens’s universe. Accordingly this chapter analyzes animated objects as effigies, especially masks and dolls, in the text and illustrations of Bleak House. Two effigies in Bleak House that get particular attention in this chapter are Esther’s doll and Roman Allegory painted on Tulkinghorn’s ceiling. Throughout the novel Bleak House, characters such as Esther, Bucket, Tulkinghorn, Smallweed, and Krook, whose representations all incorporate the ontological otherness of objects like dolls, doubles, reflections, painted images, and masks, appear alternately as portraits of human subjects or as effigies of desubjectifying social forces
The first chapter explores the creative explosion of caricature in the early nineteenth century as a type of characterization that offers an alternative to mimetic forms such as realism, and in particular to that of portraiture. The term caricature is often used in relation to Dickens’s characters, and has been from the beginning, but critics have rarely stopped to consider what caricature is and what it has to offer as a nonmimetic form of representation. Chapter 1 looks at how caricature offers a destabilizing potential for representing subjectivity at the very moment that mimetic portraiture is reinforcing a certain seemingly unassailable egocentric display of the subject. Caricature counters the image of the mirror implied in mimesis with a gesture of distortion that haunts the mimetic self-image of the subject with a spectral element. This dreamlike distortion, or anamorphosis, has not only destabilizing but in fact revolutionary potential, as illustrated by the origin of this creative explosion, the political lithographic artwork of the French caricaturists, Daumier, Philipon, and Grandville. This chapter explains why anamorphosis in particular has both ontological and political implications.
Chapter 2 demonstrates how dreams and distortion, as spectral forms, hold political and symbolic potential for refiguring the way we think about subjectivity or the idea of a person. The central mechanism of these forms of representation is anamorphosis, whether literally or figuratively, which is a means of shifting the point of perspective outside of the subject, a gesture of desubjectification that spectralizes the egocentric model of portraiture. The character of Rosa Dartle, from David Copperfield, provides a key example of this gesture of desubjectification inflicted upon the mimetic subject in the form of her scar. This chapter also looks at how Dickens and his illustrator, Phiz, engage in a specular play—a play between the visual and the verbal—that is inspired by the dreamlike distortions developed in the visual language of the lithograph, especially by Daumier and Grandville. This specular play exposes the “gaze” (in Lacan’s sense of the term) that is concealed in portraiture and it is explored through themes of imitation and play throughout The Pickwick Papers.
Through an extensive study of Dickens’s “new art form,” the illustrated novel, Spectral Dickens sets out to transform certain fundamental assumptions about realism, literary forms, and imitation of personhood that have long defined the discourse of novel criticism and character studies. This book redefines and expands the critical discourse on fictional character by bringing a wider range of modern critical theory to the study of Dickens’s characterization, using in particular the three “hauntological” concepts of the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian Real to give new ontological dimensions to the basic question: “What is a character?” By taking into account visual forms of representation and emphasizing the importance of form in rethinking the strict opposition between real person and fictional character, Spectral Dickens shifts the focus of character studies from long-entrenched values like “realism,” “depth,” and “lifelikeness,” to nonmimetic critical concepts like effigy, anamorphosis, visuality, and distortion. Ultimately, the “spectral” forms and concepts developed here in relation to Dickens’s unique and innovative characters—characters that have, in fact, always challenged implicit assumptions about the line between fictional character and real person—should have broader applications beyond Dickens’s novels and the Victorian era. The aim here is to provide a richer and more nuanced framework though which to understand fictional characters not as imitations of reality, but as specters of the real.
Chapter 3 introduces the concept of effigy, another form of spectral representation that haunts the mirror-reflection model of the ego with a sense of the uncanny, here especially in reference to bourgeoisie and its (social) self-image, as illustrated by Daumier’s famous caricature of King Louis Philippe as a pear. Effigy is an under-theorized and under-recognized means of characterization, yet it is everywhere in Dickens’s novels, early to late, from the figurehead of a ship Quilp uses as an effigy of Kit Nubbles to the Wooden Midshipman in Dombey and Son to painted Allegory on Tulkinghorn’s ceiling. As an object or image that acts as a symbolic substitute for a person, effigy defies the opposition between original and representation and at the same time it is uncannily reflective of the commodity fetishism—attributing a “magic” or “phantasmic” value to objects—burgeoning under nineteenth-century speculative capitalism. Dickens draws on these parallels with the commodity form, this chapter suggests, but also sees effigy as a self-reflexive metaphor for his own unique form of characterization, as it links subjectivity with objects, absence, and death.
On a return to the Wilderness Garden at Powis Castle in Mid-Wales where I once lived and worked, I am absorbed by a mood through which memory is recovered from place. Writing about this experience involves field notes, memoir, dream, natural history, Blake, the paranormal, natural magic, landscape theory and object-oriented ontology. Here, the ecoGothic becomes a literary form for the conservation of this uncanny mood created within the garden and through which the observer is observed by something unseen.
In his depiction of Blackwater Park in The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins uses the Gothic to suggest that the more-than-human world is neither passive nor necessarily benign, but active in its own right. With its stifling trees and sinister lake, Blackwater Park exerts an agency all of its own. As such, it suggests a form of ecoGothic, in which human narratives are haunted by the possibility of an agential materiality. With its emphasis on the performative intra-action of matter and discourse, Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism suggests a new way in which to evaluate this Gothicised depiction. Using agential realism as a framework, this chapter discusses the nineteenth-century ‘improvement’ of parks and estates, and their subsequent neglect, a neglect which at Blackwater enables the more-than-human world to reassert itself; it returns to haunt those with whom it intra-acts. At the same time, however, the power of that world to haunt Collins’s characters reflects its subjugation, even its withdrawal, as theories of hauntology underline. Gothic tropes and forms are, in part, a manifestation of this troubling persistence of a repressed agentiality.
Charles Darwin’s botanical writings, especially his books on insectivorous species and plant fertilisation, were scientifically innovative and culturally fertile. Coinciding with the popularity of ‘sensation fiction’ in the 1860s and 1870s, these books blurred the boundary between plants and animals in uncanny ways, helping to bring the Gothic into English gardens, much as sensation fiction imported Gothic romance into the domestic realism of the British novel. The chapter examines several gardens in the sensation fiction of Mary Braddon and Wilkie Collins as well as the gardens and hothouses at Darwin’s home in Kent, where much of his botanical research was conducted.
Joseph von Eichendorff’s 1819 romantic fairy tale, The Marble Statue, with its enchanted yet threatening garden of Venus, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s famously enigmatic novel from 1809, Elective Affinities with its transformation of the baron’s lands into a vast English garden that results in four deaths, both portray idyllic gardens so lush and blooming as to seem almost mystical. And yet these gardens take on an ominously Gothic tone when their grounds or plant life are revealed to have startling power. If the traditional Gothic typically has gloomy castles and landscapes associated with a dark, possibly supernatural and definitely historical destiny from which we cannot escape, the ecoGothic tends in contrast to trap human beings in an uncertain status dominated by natural or ancient, physical forces. When these forces are vegetal, we can speak of the ‘Gothic green’, as we see in the narratives from Eichendorff and Goethe, who uncomfortably reintegrate the fate of human beings into natural processes and botanical energies beyond human control.