Fashioning Gothic bodies 9781526125590

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Curtain’d in mysteries: an introduction to Gothic fashion
Revolution and revealment: the Gothic body and the politics of décolletage
Clothes make the man: fashioning the self in Victorian Gothic
Mysteries of the visible: dandies, cross-dressers and freaks in late-Victorian Gothic
Cosmo-Gothic: the double and the single woman
Undead fashion: 1990s style and the perennial return of Goth
Refashioning Gothic bodies: an anti-conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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FASHIONING GOTHIC BODIES

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For Christine and Derek Spooner

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Fashioning Gothic bodies Catherine Spooner

Manchester University Press Manchester

Copyright © Catherine Spooner 2004 The right of Catherine Spooner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978 0 7190 6400 5 hardback ISBN 978 0 7190 6401 2 paperback ISBN 978 1 5261 2559 0 Institutional First published by Manchester University Press 2004 First digital paperback edition published 2012

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements

page vi vii

1

Curtain’d in mysteries: an introduction to Gothic fashion

2

Revolution and revealment: the Gothic body and the politics of décolletage

23

Clothes make the man: fashioning the self in Victorian Gothic

46

Mysteries of the visible: dandies, cross-dressers and freaks in late-Victorian Gothic

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3

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5

Cosmo-Gothic: the double and the single woman

128

6

Undead fashion: 1990s style and the perennial return of Goth

159

Refashioning Gothic bodies: an anti-conclusion

200

Bibliography

204

Index

219

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Figures

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4 5 6 7

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Circle of Jacques-Louis David: Portrait of a Young Woman (c. 1798). Chester Dale Collection, photograph copyright Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington Dr Julius Pollack: photographs showing patient before and after reconstructive surgery. Reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Society of Medicine, London Joseph Merrick on his admission to the London Hospital in 1886. Reproduced by kind permission of the Royal London Hospital Joseph Merrick in his ‘Sunday best’ c. 1889. Reproduced by kind permission of the Royal London Hospital Smirnoff advertisement, March 1998 From ‘She’s In Parties’, by David Sims. Styling by Nancy Rohde. The Face 2: 78 (March 1995) From ‘The Clinic’, by Sean Ellis. Styling by Isabella Blow. The Face 3: 2 (March 1997). Reproduced by kind permission of Sean Ellis From ‘The Clinic’, by Sean Ellis. Styling by Isabella Blow. The Face 3: 2 (March 1997). Reproduced by kind permission of Sean Ellis From ‘Black White Red Magic’, by Paolo Roversi. Styling by Edward Enninful. i-D 175 (May 1998). Reproduced by kind permission of Paolo Roversi

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121 122 186 190

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Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the illustrations used in this book. Any queries should be directed to Manchester University Press.

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Acknowledgements This book has been a long time in the development, and as such it would be impossible to thank everyone who has inspired, encouraged, advised or otherwise played a part in its fashioning. There are several people whose contribution stands out, however, and whom I would particularly like to thank here. As my PhD supervisor, Chris Baldick read more drafts than he probably cares to count, and the value of his erudition, criticism and advice has been incalculable throughout. Special thanks are also due to Emma McEvoy, whose honest and perceptive criticism has also helped shape this work, and who has contributed an immeasurable amount to the finished manuscript by way of intellectual discussion and exchange. I would also especially like to thank David Punter and Aileen Ribeiro for providing encouragement and constructive criticism. Many others read all or part of the manuscript at different stages of its development or offered practical advice and support, and here I would like to thank Justine Baillie, Helen Carr, Debbie Challis, Harriet Darcel, the team at Manchester University Press, Alex Goody, Sam Greasley, Trevor Holmes, Sarah Martin, Helen Minchin, Flora Nuttgens, Eddie Robson, Andrew Teverson and Jason Whittaker. For assistance in locating picture ownership or obscure information and material, thanks to Flora Bathurst, Sheron Burton, Jane Desmarais, Kayte Ellis, Jonathan Evans and David Rose. I am grateful to the AHRB for enabling me to begin this project by awarding me funding for PhD research, to Goldsmiths College for contributing to conference expenses, and to Falmouth College of Arts Research Unit for providing word-processing software. Finally, last but not least, thanks to all the students at Goldsmiths College and Falmouth College of Arts who contributed to the lively ongoing debate of the material contained herein. A shorter version of Chapter 5, ‘Cosmo-Goxhic: The Double and the Single Woman’ previously appeared in Women: A Cultural Review 12: 3 (Winter 2001) pp. 292–305.

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Curtain’d in mysteries: an introduction to Gothic fashion And yet I had a terror of her robes, And chiefly of the veils that from her brow Hung pale, and curtain’d her in mysteries (John Keats, ‘The Fall of Hyperion’, 1818)1

At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst, both Gothic literature and the history and theory of fashion have achieved increasing prominence within academic discourse, being reinstated from marginal disciplines to vital and important areas of intellectual enquiry. Despite an attendant proliferation of publications on both subjects, however, no work has as yet considered the two together.2 This might seem all the more surprising in the light of the fact that costumes and disguises, veils and masks are ubiquitous features of Gothic fiction. According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal critical text, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980, revised 1986), Gothic is fundamentally stagy and theatrical in its nature. From the giant helmet that falls on Walpole’s Conrad in The Castle of Otranto (1764) to the costumes worn for contemporary Vampire Balls, clothing has always played a vital role in the construction of Gothic narratives. Indeed, the Gothic novel is historically linked to fashion through the emergence of modern consumerism in the eighteenth century. Just as innovations in production techniques and the development of the cotton industry spread the consumption of fashionable clothing from metropolitan areas and the aristocratic elite to the provincial middling classes, the flood of Gothic novels produced from the 1860s onwards reflected the tastes of an expanding reading public.3 This book attempts to uncover some of the connections between historically specific fashion discourses and the various kinds of clothing described by Gothic fictions. In doing so, however, it aims not simply to identify trends, but also to explore how these specific discourses contribute to the development of Gothic narrative conventions.

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Sedgwick’s study was written as a response to a particular kind of Gothic criticism which was prevalent at the time and has persisted to the present day, although in increasingly sophisticated forms. This conventional critical response, according to Sedgwick, follows a psychoanalytic surface and depth model, which she describes as ‘one in which superficial layers of convention and prohibition, called “the rational”, conceal and repress a deep well of primal material, “the irrational”, which is the locus of the individual self’.4 Subsequent to Freud’s influential essay on the topic, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), Gothic literature has characteristically been read in terms of the return of the repressed, and therefore of deeply buried psychic material that reemerges into the cold light of academic scrutiny. The result of using this kind of approach is an impatience with imagery of the surface and a tendency to dismiss it as ‘trappings’ or stage props, superficial to the interpretation of the ‘deeper’ material of the text. According to Sedgwick, this methodology ‘has left unexplored the most characteristic and daring areas of Gothic convention, those that point the reader’s attention back to surfaces’.5 Part of the problem that Sedgwick identifies is that within the Western critical tradition, clothing has tended to be dismissed as trivial and ephemeral, and therefore unworthy of serious critical attention. The surface-depth model not only plagues criticism of the Gothic, but also conventional views of fashion. The ascription of triviality and superficiality to dress derives from a dualistic tradition within Western thought, in which clothing as artifice is opposed to the natural body, a false covering for the authentic self beneath. From the Old Testament to the medieval danse macabre, clothing is associated with earthly vanity and constructed as a medium of deception and a marker of humanity’s ‘fallen’ state. Contemporary critical theory has repeatedly deconstructed the logic on which this dichotomy is based, demonstrating both its implication in a Judeo-Christian system of morality and its frequently misogynistic nature (adornment usually being associated with feminine duplicity, vanity and sensuality). At the beginning of the twenty-first century clothing is viewed as playing a much more integral role in its relationship with the body and the self, in which the subject is not only articulated through dress, but dress also articulates the subject. According to Anne Hollander’s influential and by now highly familiar text Seeing Through Clothes (1975), representations of the body in fine art (and concomitantly in literature) are always historically determined by the fashions they are wearing, even when they are naked: ‘At any time, the unadorned self has more kinship with its own usual dressed aspect than it has with any undressed human selves in other

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times and places, who have learned a different visual sense of the clothed body’6 The artist’s model therefore always bears the traces of the garments she or he has removed, the current dictates of fashion determining the artist’s perception of the unclothed body. Thus, for example, the opulent flesh of Reubens’s women echoes the opulent yards of fabric used in contemporary costumes, and the infamously distended belly of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini bride signifies not pregnancy, but the focus on the stomach customary in women’s clothing of the period. Posture and pose are likewise affected by garments, so that ‘even nude snapshots will betray their date. People without clothes are likely to behave as if they still wore them.’7 In conclusion, the body in Western culture is inarticulable except through clothes. The so-called ‘natural’ body is always filtered through the dual lens of fashion and artistic convention. Hollander’s attention to literature is largely restricted to the nineteenth-century Realist novel, which is richest in costume descriptions and links clothing most clearly to social context. She argues nevertheless that despite the relative lack of references to actual garments, fictional characters of the Romantic period (which she extends rather later than usual, into the 1840s) ‘wear the look of their creators’ time more vividly … than at any other’.8 Despite being set in the past, Hollander suggests the Brontës’ novels in particular seem expressly clothed in the ‘gothic [sic]’ clothes she identifies in the illustrative style of the 1840s: Everyone of both sexes with long black hair and large eyes, elongated torsos, sharply sloped shoulders; men in boots, their white or swarthy faces smoldering inside the frame of standing collars. Women’s dresses might be drab or rich, but they would always have constricted shoulders, a long, pointed bodice, and full, unstiffened, mobile skirts in a bell shape. Hair dropped over ears from a center part. Seriousness and passion barely contained are well clothed in these garments.9

These garments, restrictive, heavily layered, often with elaborately twisted hair, indeed suit our preconceptions of the Gothic. As Hollander suggests, they function according to an aesthetic of containment, of surfaces that point to something else beyond or beneath. Yet this mysteriously implied depth is precisely produced through manipulation of surface. Clothes do not literally barely contain seriousness and passion. Rather they reflect it symbolically, articulate these properties of the self in terms of bodily appearance. Clothing is above all a means of inserting the self into social discourse, literary or otherwise.

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Hollander’s argument derives from the dress historian C. Willett Cunnington, whose English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (1937) sets out the history of nineteenth-century women’s dress as a struggle between classical and Gothic styles, with the Gothic peaking in the 1840s. For Cunnington, the shapes created by women’s dress of this decade echoed those of Gothic Revival architecture, ‘so that sometimes it almost suggested that it was built up of scraps looted from an Early English church’.10 The resonance this provides for Gothic fiction, as averse to the social and architectural movement of the Gothic Revival, is that the style expressed ‘a preference for illusion’ and ‘an inclination to alter the appearance of reality by distortion, decoration or a discreet veiling’.11 Gothic garments are characterised by artificiality and ornament rather than naturalism. Their exaggerated features ‘mislead the eye’, so that the body is subordinated to the outward effect.12 Cunnington’s thesis is suggestive, but should not be mapped back directly onto the clothing found in Gothic literature. The Gothic Revival in architecture frequently diverged from Gothic fiction in outlook and politics, tending to be more nostalgic and conservative in its relationship with religion and British history. The dichotomy between naturalism and artifice is also problematic, as contemporary fashion theory stresses the socially constructed nature of all forms of dress. Finally, the chronology does not always match, as the peak of the Gothic novel’s popularity in the 1790s coincided with the emergence of the classical revival in women’s dress, while by the 1840s the Gothic novel had mostly been absorbed into a range of other genres. Wuthering Heights (1847) and Jane Eyre (1847) are arguably more late Romantic than Gothic, and if perhaps two of the best known, are not the most representative texts of the genre. If the clothes of the 1840s are archetypally Gothic, how are to be explained the very different fashions sported by Ann Radcliffe’s heroines, or by Dracula, or indeed contemporary Goth subculture? The answer lies in the very manipulation of surface described above. Gothic garments articulate the body in terms of a range of characteristic Gothic themes: sensibility, imprisonment, spectrality, haunting, madness, monstrosity, the grotesque. They fashion the body as Gothic subject. As such, however, they fashion the body as a historically specific subject, a subject whose garments are ‘Gothicised’ versions of what people were wearing at the time of writing. As Robert Mighall has argued in a different context, ‘Gothic cannot be an essence, for what is Gothicized constantly changes.’13 What each period constitutes as Gothic fashion alters, and if revivals of earlier styles take place, they are inevitably inflected with different meanings.

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Veils and masks If Eve Sedgwick’s important work articulates the problems of using a simplistic psychoanalytic surface-and-depth model in analysing the Gothic, it is not sufficient simply to reverse this model and privilege surface over depth. Gothic texts do not necessarily privilege surface but rather consistently foreground it in order to interrogate the surfacedepth relationship. The metaphors of masking and disguise seem to indicate an ‘authentic’ self hidden beneath, but in Gothic texts they consistently work to problematise that authenticity. In the surfaceand-depth model, a disguise that is removed is a ‘doubleness’ that resolves itself into the reassuring ‘singleness’ of the monolithic subject, as in the conventional conclusion of the detective plot. In the Gothic, however, disguise replaces the monolithic subject, as Judith Halberstam suggests of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890): disguise becomes equivalent to self in a way that confuses the model of subjectivity that each author maps. While at first the model of a monster hiding behind a respectable or aesthetically pleasing front seems to produce a deep, structured subjectivity, in each the hidden self subverts the notion of an authentic self and makes subjectivity a surface effect.14

For Halberstam, Gothic selves are multiple, performative and dispersed across a continuum of appearances. This position is reiterated by Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro in their definitive study of fashion and critical theory, Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body (1998). For Warwick and Cavallaro, clothing maintains an ambiguous relationship with the body, as it simultaneously closes it off from the external world, demarcating its boundaries, and opens up its surfaces for participation in discourse. Its intermediary position renders it unclear as to whether it is an attribute of the self or of the external environment. Furthermore, it is precisely the ‘Gothic’ phenomena of the mask and the veil that evoke this disruption most plainly: The equivocal characteristics of masks, veils and other similarly screening garments throw into relief the problematic nature of the relationship between surface and depth, by intimating that truth cannot be explicitly associated with a deep dimension, hidden beyond or beneath an illusory surface, and indeed that the surface cannot be unambiguously equated with deceptive appearances. In fact, the realization that the mask may reveal by concealing, that the subject’s identity may constitute not so much a secret, inner core of meaning as

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a play of contingently superficial and external manifestations, interrogates at once the validity of both the depth-versus-surface and the truth-versus-deception binaries. Whatever is understood by the category of truth, as the regimes of signification to which a culture is prepared to accord value, may lie precisely on the surface; this surface, moreover, may turn out to conceal not a presence but an absence, not a depth but a vacuum.15

This disappearance of the body is a recurrent theme throughout Warwick and Cavallaro’s book: as they sashay through Lacan, Kristeva, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and Foucault, the body is perpetually collapsing under its sartorial freight, diffused into the surfaces that construct it. As in H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), the removal of the eponymous protagonist’s wig or gloves or false nose reveals a gaping chasm, a horrific absence. Without the necessary array of surfaces through which his identity can be made manifest, the Man is unable to function, is unrecognizable and unable to communicate, a walking vacuum. This erasure or effacement of the body beneath the mask is a recurrent feature of Gothic fictions, as will become evident in the ensuing chapters. Just as in the characteristic ‘Chinese box’ structure one narrative is begun that contains another narrative, and then another, commonly the mask is removed to reveal another mask, or the veil lifted only to disclose another illusion. The most infamous of all Gothic veils, that encountered by Emily in the Castle of Udolpho in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), illustrates precisely this point. The reader is led to suspect along with Emily that the veil conceals the body of the murdered Laurentini; it is finally explained that all that Emily really saw was a particularly grisly memento mori. The ‘genuine’ body is shifted into a further level of illusion, the gruesome physicality of death displaced into its imitation. Despite the disappointment expressed by most readers at this anticlimactic revelation, deferral of bodily presence is in a sense intrinsic to the functioning of Gothic narrative. The veil itself is the bearer of mystery (and of terror); what lies behind it is (literally) immaterial. This theme is evoked by the epigraph from Keats that heads this chapter, in which the narrator’s terror is occasioned not by the goddess Moneta but by her robes, and ‘chiefly … her veils’. Moneta is not herself the mystery, but is rather ‘curtain’d … in mysteries’ embodied in her garments.

Contagion Warwick and Cavallaro’s concern with the body’s disappearance is echoed by Eve Sedgwick’s own description of ‘contagion’. In a

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supplementary essay to her original research that was later incorporated into the revised edition of The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, she delineates the way in which ‘the attributes of the veil, and of the surface generally, are contagious metonymically’ or indeed, in which ‘the attributes of veil and of flesh are transferable and interchangeable’.16 This is the way in which clothing and the surface of the body transmit their qualities to other surfaces, thus ‘spreading … a particular chain of attributes among the novel’s characters’.17 Simultaneously, contagion flattens or empties out that which is inside or within, transforming it to one more link in the signifying chain. Thus external appearances are represented as more constitutive of personal identity than the apparently interior aspects of the self, suggesting a kind of ‘possession’ by appearances: a denial of substantive presence beyond a profoundly unstable continuum of surface effects. This trope is not unique to Gothic fictions, but what is remarkable is both the extent to which it is foregrounded, and its investiture with qualities of the uncanny. A prime example of this process occurs in Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone (1868). The renowned Sergeant Cuff, brought from London to solve the mysterious disappearance of the Moonstone, decides that the key to the mystery lies in the whereabouts of a garment marked with paint from the door-frame of Rachel Verinder’s boudoir. The garment turns out to be the nightgown of Franklin Blake, which has been hidden in the Shivering Sands by a deformed housemaid, Rosanna Spearman, who is suffering from unrequited love for him. Mr Blake himself has no knowledge that the marked nightgown is his, and therefore on its recovery and identification undergoes a scene of uncanny recognition: The uppermost side, when I spread it out, presented to view innumerable folds and creases, and nothing more. I tried the undermost side next – and instantly discovered the smear of paint from the door of Rachel’s boudoir! [ … ] The nightgown itself would reveal the truth; for, in all probability, the nightgown was marked with its owner’s name. I took it up from the sand, and looked for the mark. I found the mark, and read: MY OWN NAME.18

In this scene, the nightgown is marked twice: once with the incriminatory smear of paint, and once with Franklin Blake’s name. On one level this might be read according to a psychoanalytic model, as the smear is marked on the ‘undermost side’ of the garment, as if suggesting that Franklin’s guilt is locked in his unconscious, which is

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indeed the case, as he took the diamond in an opium-induced trance of which he retains no memory. However, the process of contagion contradicts this model: the painted surface is transferred onto the surface of the gown, which metonymically conveys guilt to Franklin as the wearer of that nightgown. Furthermore while the gown as garment possesses a front and a back, an inside and an outside, in relation to its wearer it is rather a continuous surface, an envelope for the body. Ultimately, while the marked nightgown reveals the truth in that it suggests who was wearing it when the diamond was stolen, it does not reveal the whereabouts of the diamond itself, or even the real thief, the nefarious Godfrey Ablewhite. The diamond, which has been stolen again and again throughout its history, is a residual absence at the heart of the narrative. Thus the ‘truth’ revealed by the marked garment is purely self-referential: the Moonstone, which should be its final signified, vanishes into the chain of signifiers.

Gothic Camp The emphasis on the surface in Gothic narratives can also be related to the emergence of the sensibility now known as camp. According to Susan Sontag’s famous essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’ (1964), ‘the origins of Camp taste’ are to be found in the eighteenth century, with ‘Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth’.19 For Sontag, camp is the embrace of theatricality and artifice to the ultimate exclusion of nature; it is the tendency to place everything in quotation marks. At the same time, camp must be driven by passion taken to excess: ‘Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much”. … Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp – what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic.’20 This conjunction of overblown passion and knowing theatricality is an effective way of describing a certain strand of Gothic fiction, one that embraces The Castle of Otranto, Vathek (1786), The Monk (1796), Lady Audley’s Secret (1862–3), Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Hammer horror films and the fiction of Patrick McGrath. These texts comply with Sontag’s description and break with both high art and the avant-garde in refusing ‘both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling’.21 In the realms of camp, style is everything. It goes without saying that such a form of creative expression is heavily reliant on costume. Nevertheless, just as not everything that is camp is Gothic, not all Gothic is necessarily camp. Passion taken to excess does not always

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seem ‘too much’, particularly if it is in the service of political liberation, as in much ‘female’ Gothic. The diverse strands of thought that have been collectively labelled Romanticism emerged at a similar period to Sontag’s Camp, and Gothic texts often seem situated uneasily between the two. Gothic shares many of the (often conflicting) recurrent themes of Romantic discourses: the evocation of feeling, particularly of terror and the sublime; passionate individualism; political liberation and social consciousness. Many Gothic texts therefore appear to be situated at a kind of crossroads, where the emptying out of meaning into surface is countered by a pull towards interiority. The emphasis on camp surfaces does not necessarily preclude, therefore, a Coleridgean striving for plenitude and depth. Ken Russell’s film Gothic (1987) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre vividly dramatise this tension: Gothic replays the biographies of Byron and the Shelleys as pure camp, a tale of lurid excess. Jane Eyre, on the other hand, refigures the conventional ‘female Gothic’ plot and attendant Gothic imagery as Romantic quest for self. Gothic, furthermore, has anything but the ‘sentimental’ attitude to the past Sontag identifies as camp. As contemporary critics from Robert Miles to Robert Mighall have shown, the majority of Gothic fictions, in counterdistinction to the politics of the Gothic Revival in architecture, tend to present the past as a place of barbaric injustice, animating the concerns of progressive Whiggish liberalism and emphasising the value of modernity and enlightenment. Camp can help explain the Gothic preoccupation with surfaces, but it does not adequately capture the complex relationship of Gothic to history, or its genuine capacity to disturb.

Patchwork bodies Part of the capacity of Gothic texts to disturb derives from their presentation of the body as lacking wholeness and integrity, as a surface which can be modified or transformed. Thus to Sedgwick’s theorisation of Gothic surfaces should be added Judith Halberstam’s Skin Shows (1995). For Halberstam, skin is the primary surface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gothic: Skin houses the body and it is figured in Gothic as the ultimate boundary, the material that divides the inside from the outside. The vampire will punctuate and mark the skin with his fangs, Mr Hyde will covet white skin, Dorian Gray will desire his own canvas, Buffalo Bill will covet female skin, Leatherface will wear his victim’s skin as a trophy. … Slowly but surely the outside becomes the inside and the

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hide no longer conceals or contains, it offers itself up as text, as body, as monster. The Gothic text, whether novel or film, plays out an elaborate skin show.22

Halberstam’s deployment of a model of outside and inside, separated by an all-too-manipulable and permeable skin, deliberately recalls Sedgwick’s own discussion of outside and inside as divided by an arbitrary but absolute boundary, the disruption of which is inevitably accompanied by violence. The force of this violence is in direct proportion to the arbitrariness of the barrier. Thus the very lack of depth accorded to models of the body and the self in Gothic fiction results in an increased violence surrounding skin, and by extension, clothing, our ‘second skin’. Writing about the skin has frequently focused on its significance as the ultimate bodily boundary, following on from T. Turner’s essay, ‘The Social Skin’ (1980), which indicates that ‘the surface of the human body becomes, in any human society, a boundary of a peculiarly complex kind, which simultaneously separates domains lying on either side of it and conflates different levels of social, individual, and intrapsychic meaning. The skin (and hair) are concrete boundary between the self and the other, the individual and society.’23 Similarly, Armando Favazza writes, ‘The skin is a border between the outer world and the inner world, the environment and the personal self.’24 Gothic literature has long displayed a preoccupation with the skin as a surface to be marked, as Sedgwick amply demonstrates in the final chapter of her revised version of The Coherence of Gothic Conventions’. ‘Writing on flesh occurs explicitly at different levels of literalness’, from the burning cross inscribed on the Wandering Jew’s brow in The Monk to formulaic uses of expression such as emotion being ‘written’ on the countenance.25 This emphasis on the body as surface on one level points to a more social conception of the body, defined through its ‘public’ aspect and therefore through interaction with others rather than any sense of intrinsic or authentic being. For Halberstam, however, Gothic posits skin primarily as a boundary to be disrupted, a locus of transgression. As she suggests in her analysis of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), the horror film’s literalisation of cinematic suture, of cutting the skin, opens up a space for the stitching together of new, regendered identities. There is a sense, however, in which Halberstam may be somewhat too optimistic in her claims for the general subversiveness of Gothic horror. In psychiatric terms, cutting the skin can be read not as a transgressive but rather as a reaffirmative act. As Favazza indicates, cutting of the skin does not, for psychiatric patients suffering from

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depersonalisation, necessarily instigate a sense of loss of bodily boundaries, but rather their reinforcement. He states: ‘At first glance this act might seem paradoxical since skin cutting might be thought to open a portal through which the inner self and outer world might flow into each other. In fact… cutters… are able to focus attention on the skin border and to perceive the limits of their bodies.’26 Cutting the skin, therefore, does not necessarily constitute a transgression of boundaries but rather a reinforcement of them. The Gothic mark, the writing on the flesh, can be seen not as a disruption but rather as a demarcation of a boundary. Like the garment or ‘second skin’ it suggests the taboos circulating around the all-too-permeable membrane. The fragility of the skin sets up a complex tension whereby the boundary’s permeation and its reinforcement often happen within the same symbiotic movement. Halberstam’s contribution is perhaps most significant in her gesture towards the Gothic body as a kind of patchwork entity, stitched together from fragments and scraps of discourse. Following on from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the idea of an artificially assembled being whose piecemeal identity challenges the Enlightenment notion of the well-balanced, organic whole (whether of body or text) has recurred constantly in Gothic discourses. Although Shelley does not describe how the monster is pieced together, simply indicating ‘I had selected his features as beautiful’, cinematic interpretations have portrayed him with surgical stitches overtly visible.27 The monster stands for body as garment. If in Shelley’s novel it is definitively Frankenstein who plays the part of the tailor, in later versions of the body-as-patchwork the monsters themselves do their own self-fashioning. In Silence of the Lambs (1991), the serial killer Buffalo Bill fashions himself a ‘woman-suit’ from the skins of his victims; in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) Sally Rag Doll offers a more optimistic version of self-transformation, endlessly unpicking, dismantling and restitching her patchwork body to facilitate her intervention in the narrative. Offering a version of the body which is provisional, manipulable and entirely made up of bits of cloth, she is perhaps the quintessential self-fashioning Gothic body.

Technologies of self-fashioning Since the publication of Sedgwick’s text, Foucault has overtaken Freud within the academy and the ‘repressive hypothesis’ has been replaced with the notion that mechanisms of power are productive rather than inhibitive. This leads to an alternative model of the self in which the

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subject is either a ‘docile body’, passively subjected to the operations of power, or in Foucault’s late work, a participant in ‘technologies of the self which allow for active self-fashioning but within culturallydetermined limits. The Foucauldian body, which comes into being with the Enlightenment and which is therefore coincident with the rise of Gothic fiction, achieves interiority only through subjection to discipline and surveillance, or in other words from the management and observation of the surface. As Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro argue, ‘One of the ways in which the body can be made docile is through clothing. Dress renders it analysable, either forcibly through required clothing, or voluntarily through self-selected garments; it becomes manipulable through the effects of being dressed.’28 For Warwick and Cavallaro, clothing performs the same function as the confession in transforming the self into discourse: ‘If all speaking of the self is confession, then as well as seeing the flesh made word, we can also see the flesh made fabric through clothing: dress is the text that first clothes and then displaces the body.’29 In this formulation clothing speaks not of ‘the body, as in much conventional theorisation of clothing as a language, but instead of the body. The body becomes an ambiguous presence in discourse, simultaneously implied and absented by the garments it wears. As Warwick and Cavallaro conclude: The wearing of clothes is the emblem of the obedient and improved (absented) body, yet this forces the subject to recognize his or her subjection, the place he or she has taken in the shifting grid of knowledge, and to become nostalgic for the flesh. This, we would suggest, is at the root of the uncanny feeling experienced in the presence of empty clothes. We long, not for the bodies that once occupied them, but for our own bodies, which we do not possess, and have never possessed, hostage as they are to the scopic regimes we inhabit.30

If, however, clothing is the means by which the body is articulated within discourse, then nostalgia for a pure, unadulterated, ‘natural’ body is nostalgia for an unknowable prediscursive state. There is no body prior to its entrance into the techniques of fashion, but if the subject is permanently barred from possession of the body, he or she may nevertheless become more or less proficient in the available array of fashion techniques. As Jennifer Craik argues in The Face of Fashion (1994), the concentration on fashion ‘technologies’, or ‘techniques of fashioning the body’ inspired by Foucault’s late work has enabled fashion theorists to evade the conventional dichotomies of primitive and civilised, natural and artificial which have plagued constructions of dress throughout the centuries:

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Codes of dress are technical devices which articulate the relationship between a lived body and its lived milieu, the space occupied by bodies and constituted by bodily actions. … Our habitus of clothing creates a ‘face’ which positively constructs an identity rather than disguising a ‘natural’ body or ‘real’ identity. … Considered in this light, ‘fashioning the body’ is a feature of all cultures although the specific technologies of fashion vary between cultures.31

Not only does this means of describing clothing escape the dichotomy of natural and artificial, depth and surface that Sedgwick and others have found problematic, but it also allows individuals a circumscribed autonomy in orienting themselves to their environment. This is an important point to stress in the context of gender and class analysis: the subject is by no means always at the mercy of patriarchal ideology, false consciousness and the capitalist imperative to consume, nor are they merely a docile body as passive bearer of structures of power. Notions of self foregrounded by Gothic are always located in an historical, active, embodied subject: a subject defined, but not passively determined, by its historical context.

The return to history The influence of Foucault has marked a return to historical analysis within the academy, although this has not necessarily entailed a wholehearted embrace of Foucault’s theories. Some have found his analysis too generalised and divorced from historical specificities, while feminists in particular have complained about his failure to incorporate gender into his analysis of power structures. While this book is broadly informed by Foucauldian cultural analysis, it attempts to avoid the reductivism of a rigidly Foucauldian methodology. Indeed, similar criticisms could also be applied to Sedgwick’s earlier work.32 The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, although covering texts spread over almost a century, is concerned with mapping universal structures of Gothic literature rather than differentiating between them according to historical context. It takes, furthermore, minimal account of gender and class in its reliance on what Sedgwick herself terms an alternately phenomenological, psychoanalytic and structuralist methodology.33 Sedgwick’s constructions of ‘the surface’ and ‘the veil’ tend towards the abstract, with no reference to the contemporary discourses surrounding clothing in the specified periods. If as Sedgwick argues, however, the body in Gothic fiction is consistently displaced into its

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garments, and is therefore pre-eminently a clothed body, then it needs to be taken into account that the body constructed through dress is not universal, but historically and culturally specific. This necessitates an approach that allows for diversity and contradiction: fashion – whether regarded as the mode or as the full range of clothing practices – does not develop in a consistent and linear manner; as Warwick and Cavallaro indicate, its tendency to recycle and its ‘antichronological admixture’ of past and present spectacularly contradict ‘the dream of a total history and totalizing narratives’.34 While points of continuity remain, there can be no grand narrative of progress or development; merely smaller narratives, digressions, and ‘contagion’ from one set of discourses to another. This is not to deny the importance of historical context in discussing fashion; rather to resist imposing an artificial order upon it. The same might be said of Gothic; indeed, as Jacqueline Howard points out, [T]oo often studies of Gothic fiction which purport to be historical are so broad in their sweep of their theses that they seem static and homogenizing. Concern with synchronie elements and evaluative comment overtakes interest in the historical, social, and cultural specificity of individual texts and leads to a suppression of awareness of the interpretative process itself.35

Howard employs a Bakhtinian methodology in order to combat some of the problems she isolates here: genres are not static, homogenous entities but develop diachronically, building on earlier texts, interacting with other genres, reflecting the historical conditions in which individual texts are produced. Texts do not therefore belong to a genre but rather participate in it. Howard is thus able to emphasise the contingency of generic features and the necessarily partial nature of interpretation at any single point in time. The following chapters take it for granted that the set of discourses with which Gothic interacts changes over the course of time and that each period or text is subject to specific and localised thematic concerns. This may seem like common sense, but it offers an explanation why certain groups of texts – like the Victorian Sensation novel – may participate very fully in Gothic conventions without always having been critically recognised as Gothic as such. With these shifts in generic form come shifts in sartorial focus: madness, a consistent theme in Gothic fiction, may only be articulated in terms of fashion discourses in the Victorian period, just as by the 1960s Hammer horror heroines’ heaving cleavages have lost their associations with Marie Antoinette.

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History and fashion Much criticism of Gothic literature focuses on the importance not only of historicising narratives but also on the function of history within the narrative. Chris Baldick’s authoritative definition of Gothic in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (1992) points precisely to this feature: ‘For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.’36 For Baldick, the dependence on the convention of the past returning or ‘fearful inheritance in time’ situates the genre firmly within its historical context: ‘Moulding our common existential dread into the more particular shapes of Gothic fiction … is a set of “historical fears” focusing on the memory of an age-old regime of oppression and persecution which threatens still to fix its dead hand upon us.’37 This model, he demonstrates, is adaptable to the expression of political concerns, for example in the Gothic fairy tales of Angela Carter or in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which evoke the regimes of patriarchy and slavery respectively in order to further a feminist or black feminist agenda. In many cases, however, it is just as likely blankly to follow generic formula or simply to reify the beliefs of a Protestant middleclass readership concerning their own civilised superiority over the barbaric regimes of medieval Catholicism and feudal aristocracy. Baldick’s influential definition is further extended by Robert Mighall A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999). Mighall claims that the defining feature of Gothic is its concern with the ‘vestigial’, with anachronisms that have survived into the present. This supports his argument that Gothic is a progressive genre founded in Whig politics, concerned with reifying the conditions of modernity and enlightenment through banishing the spectres of ages past. This view is one that this book implicitly supports. Nevertheless, when considered in relation to fashion, the notion of the ‘vestigial’ becomes more fraught. Fashion is replete with anachronisms, constantly reviving past styles and making them new. This was no less prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than today. Throughout the period covered by this book, historical styles were periodically revived and reinterpreted: the ‘classical’ shift at the turn of the eighteenth century, for example; the reinterpretation of the ‘early Victorian’ puffed sleeve in the 1890s; or the variety of historically themed headdresses throughout the Victorian period. These ‘revivals’ are no less fantasised than those of Gothic fiction: the fancy hats in the style of Jane

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Seymour or Marie Stuart worn for 1840s balls bore little more relation to what these historical personages actually wore than The Mysteries of Udolpho provided an accurate picture of life in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless the revival of one style always entails the relegation of another to the barbaric realms of ‘last season’. The refashioning of an outdated mode as ‘new’ is always at the expense of other, less favoured anachronistic survivals. Under this logic ‘Gothic’ clothing should really consist of those vestigial remains of former fashions that fill us with horror: for instance wearing flares when it should be drainpipes, or vice versa. To a certain extent this is the case: Maud Ruthyn’s dismay at her cousin Milly’s short dresses and navvy boots in Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864) is a good example. More significantly, however, the twenty-first-century popular horror over nineteenth-century corsetry performs the same manoeuvre. Our perception of the corset as barbaric, unnatural, restrictive, anti-feminist, and so on, is precisely a product of our need to confirm our own liberation, and enormously simplifies the complex discourses circulating around the theme of tight-lacing in the Victorian period. As costume historians from David Kunzle to Valerie Steele have shown, much of the historical ‘evidence’ for the extremity of tight-lacing derives from fetishistic correspondence in one or two magazines, and bears no relation to the actual size of any of the hundreds of corsets that survive in museums, or to the experiences of the actual women wearing them. Nevertheless in the twenty-first century, the corset seems an archetypally Gothic garment, troping on a form of physical imprisonment and bodily torture that our enlightened age no longer inflicts on women. While the influence of Rousseau in the eighteenth century did lead to a similar construction of stays as barbaric, reflecting their temporary loss of popularity in fashion, by the time they were reinstated to modishness in the Victorian period, they no longer figure in Gothic discourses. There is a difference, however, between Gothic fashion – ‘vestigial’ garments that evoke a less enlightened past – and the fashioning of Gothic bodies – their construction through contemporary discourses of clothing. For the most part, clothing in Gothic fiction tends to be resolutely modern in character. Just as Radcliffe’s nominally sixteenthcentury French Catholic Emily St Aubert possesses the values of an eighteenth-century British Protestant, so she is dressed in the appropriate clothing of a modest eighteenth-century woman – once she makes her escape from Udolpho, pausing only to purchase a hat. When Gothic fashion discourses do evoke the past, as in certain strands of Goth subculture and contemporary vampire literature, this does not

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speak so much of the past as of present concerns. As Caroline Evans argues in her essay ‘Yesterday’s Emblems and Tomorrow’s Commodities: The Return of the Repressed in Fashion Imagery Today’ (2000), ‘The haunting of contemporary fashion design by images from the past is a kind of return of the repressed, in which shards of history work their way to the surface in new formations and are put to work as contemporary emblems.’38 Belying her reference to Freud, Evans insists that contemporary designers like Alexander McQueen enact a Foucauldian ‘genealogy’, constantly re-evaluating the past in the light of the present through their rag-picker-like recycling of historical influences. The same could be said of the shreds of historical costume that surface in Gothic discourses. Like the costumes for the eighteenth-century masquerades passionately frequented by Horace Walpole, these say more about the desires of those wearing/writing about them than they do about their historical source. They constitute a kind of sartorial tourism, in which any plain young lady of pecuniary means could get to play Mary Queen of Scots for an evening, without in the least impeaching her reputation. Such costumes are only disguisedly historical, a theatrical evocation of period rather than authentic recreation of it. The imposing of the desires of the present onto the past leads to another problem in the discussion of Gothic fashion, which again can be illustrated through the theme of tight-lacing: that of ascribing transgression to particular fashion practices. The wearing of corsetry in the twentieth century is frequently associated with fetishist discourses, discourses that often deliberately mobilise a concept of ‘normal’ behaviour, through the transgression of which pleasure is produced. The adoption of fetish wear by Goth subculture and the often dark and sinister aesthetic of such clothing often leads to its mapping back on to Gothic fiction. However, there is nothing essentially Gothic about fetishism, or indeed essentially fetishistic about Gothic. In their essay ‘Gothic Criticism’ (2000), Baldick and Mighall identify a current academic trend to regard Gothic texts as uniquely transgressive or subversive: either revolutionary in their critique of middle-class values, or a site for the playing out of identities and sexualities not normally given expression in mainstream literature. As Baldick and Mighall argue, this manoeuvre generally expresses the personal agenda of the critic rather than contributes to the accurate historical analysis of the text. It is perhaps on some level to confuse plot with text: the presence of transgressive behaviour within a narrative does not necessarily make the narrative itself transgressive. It is not the purpose of this work, therefore, to set out a simplistic interpretation of Gothic fashion as

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that which is eccentric or extreme, subverting the norms and expectations of the day. Frequently, in fact, the clothing styles presented as most Gothic are precisely those which are most acceptable to the society of the day, either as that which is most familiar made strange, or as that which represents the constrictive forces of ‘normality’. Where clothing does appear extreme in the terms of its historical context, for example in the case of some strands of finde-siècle dandyism, it is as a magnified vision of conventional masculinity. In the case of twentieth-century subcultures, Goth style may be a conscious decision to distinguish the subject from the perceived ‘mainstream’, but that very mainstream is a construct produced out of the subcultural subject’s desire for difference, and cannot therefore be simply mapped back on to a straightforward model of transgression and normality. For this reason, ‘transgression’ is treated cautiously in this volume, and applied only to very local and specific contexts. As Warwick and Cavallaro point out of clothing, ‘Transgression, like discipline, cannot be a permanent condition: it can only ever be local and temporary, dependent on the changing configurations of systematic relationships.’39

Fashioning Gothic bodies This study aims to open up a new direction for Gothic studies: one that is genuinely interdisciplinary, seeking not only to identify instances of correspondence between clothing and text, but to investigate the functioning of clothing as a discursive mechanism in the production of Gothic bodies. Anyone who hopes to find a genealogy of style and cut here will be disappointed: one cannot identify in Gothic texts, as in the mainstream of nineteenth-century novels, the precise shade and trimmings of the majority of Gothic garments. Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland may lie ‘awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating between her spotted and her tamboured muslin’, but Radcliffe’s Emily St Aubert has higher things on her mind, and Valancourt is certainly unable to discourse on the properties of muslins with the same flair as Henry Tilney.40 The restoration of such material details to the Gothic plot in Nonhanger Abbey (1818) is precisely the focus of Austen’s satire. Famously, the mysterious manuscript Catherine finds in the wooden chest at Northanger turns out to be a laundry list. Austen is taking out Radcliffe’s dirty washing, so to speak: the Gothic novels that Catherine and her friend Isabella so avidly consume are given their rightful place among a range of contemporary commodities, from the newly fashionable cotton prints to General Tilney’s Staffordshire china.

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Such specific details are not forthcoming in the majority of Gothic texts, even in the period during the mid-nineteenth century when they cross over most closely into literary Realism. Clothes in Gothic remain mysteriously nebulous a good deal of the time. That does not mean, however, they can be regarded as abstract and universal: they always map back onto contemporary debate. The terms of these debates are then rein-fleeted through the discourses of Gothic, made sinister or strange according to generic convention. The following chapters will thus attempt to avoid any large judgements concerning the function of clothing in Gothic fictions, focusing instead on the local and specific. Gothic is regarded as a mobile and sometimes contradictory set of discourses, which consistently engages with the set of generic conventions described above but which nevertheless is inflected historically in a variety of ways. Each of the following chapters takes a specific moment in the development of Gothic and traces the relationship between the clothes worn within the texts and the bodies thereby constructed. These clothes may not always be the ‘height of fashion’ (although sometimes they are), but they nevertheless are always attributable to historically specific fashion techniques. This book does not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of either fashion or Gothic literature during the period it covers, which would be an impossible task. Clearly, there are many gaps here: these should be seen as an invitation to further research. It is the intention of this book not to offer a definitive statement on the subject, but to delineate a field and offer potential lines of enquiry. Chapter 2 concerns the debates surrounding the fashion for décolletage during and immediately following the French Revolution, linking this set of discourses with the exposure of women’s bodies in Gothic fiction. The popularisation of the chemise-dress by Marie Antoinette and the subsequent revival of the classical shift by the women of the Directory inflected the representation of female Gothic bodies in this period with political rhetoric. The motifs of concealment and revealment therefore did not merely provide titillation but rehearsed contemporary debates about the moral properties of contemporary women’s dress. Chapter 3 examines the function of clothing in early to mid-Victorian Gothic, suggesting that the Gothic trappings of veil and disguise take on new resonance in the literature of the period, acquiring a material specificity and an association with discourses of secrecy and madness. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–34) provided a philosophy of the surface that argued nineteenth-century society was made up of hollow men fashioned merely from their garments. This philosophy complemented the popular discourses of

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moral management and self-help, which together produced a Gothic subject constructed through the manipulation of surface signs. In Victorian Gothic, the familiar is made strange: the sartorial display of ‘proper’ gender and class identity becomes sinister and disturbing, frequently through recourse to contemporary concepts of insanity. Chapter 4 shifts in focus to the fin de siècle, and reiterates many of the previous chapter’s concerns with dress as a badge of social status. It explores a nexus of connections between dandies, female-to-male crossdressing, and monstrosity. Dandyism provided a new kind of philosophy of the surface, which in Gothic fiction becomes not only sinister but also suggestively monstrous. This line of associations reaches its apotheosis in the retellings of the story of Joseph Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’, who is depicted as utilising dandyism as a means of self-presentation. Chapter 5 traces the development of the female doppelgänger in the twentieth century according to the ideologies of femininity implicated in contemporary women’s magazines, which present fashion techniques as a means of achieving a ‘superior’ self. The double becomes a motif through which the limits of female consumer ideology can be tested: in a world where women are encouraged to aspire towards an ideal version of themselves, articulated through fashion and lifestyle choices, the ‘single’ girl is represented as a problematically double entity in Gothic texts. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the apparent revival of Gothic style in the fashions of the 1990s, both in mainstream and subcultural form. It argues that Goth subculture has been dismissed by outside commentators precisely because of the theatrical presentation of identity it derives from the Gothic literary tradition, and that appropriations of Goth fashions by haute couture and the style press exploit the creative potential and cultural cachet of this theatricality even as they denigrate Goths themselves as barbaric anachronism. The critics’ desire to read depth into millennial Gothic is accompanied by a contradictory tendency to portray Goth as superficial, merely ‘Gothic chic’. Nevertheless, as this book hopes to show, theatricality and preoccupation with the surface are not a distortion of the Gothic tradition but are fundamentally in keeping with it. In conclusion, this book aims to demonstrate that a similar thread runs through all of the works discussed here as ‘Gothic’, but is far from a monolithic set of conventions undifferentiated between texts. The book ends with a reading of an episode from Season Two of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the Gothic preoccupation with the surface identified by Sedgwick is subtly replayed as a means of enhancing the characters’ psychological

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development and depth. Gothic itself is a mutating genre, constantly redefining its own terms. The representation of clothing in Gothic fictions engages with generic demands but subtly alters according to context: it is not static but as flexible and transient as fashion itself.

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Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

Keats, Poetical Works, p. 409. Gavin Baddely’s Goth Chic: A Connoisseur’s Guide to Dark Culture (London, Plexus 2002) appeared as this book was going to press; despite its title, however, this book is less a study of Gothic clothing than a popular history of Gothic. See, for example, Breward, The Culture of Fashion, and Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction. Sedgwick, Coherence, p. 11. Ibid., p. 141. Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, p. xiii. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 436. Ibid., p. 438. Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing, p. 131. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. Mighall, Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, p. 286. Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 64. Warwick and Cavallaro, Fashioning the Frame, p. 133. Sedgwick, Coherence, pp. 142, 145. Ibid., p. 149. Collins, Moonstone, pp. 309–10. Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, p. 109. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 115. Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 7. Turner, ‘The Social Skin’, p. 139. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege, p. 148. Sedgwick, Coherence, p. 151. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege, p. 148. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 318. Warwick and Cavallaro, Fashioning the Frame, p. 75. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., pp. 84–5. Craik, The Face of Fashion, pp. 4–5. Sedgwick’s work from the mid-1980s onwards takes a more historically situated approach and is overtly politicised in relation to gender and sexuality. Sedgwick, Coherence, p. 7. Warwick and Cavallaro, Fashioning the Frame, p. 97.

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35 36 37 38 39 40

FASHIONING GOTHIC BODIES Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction, pp. 1–2. Baldick (ed.), Gothic Tales, p. xix. Ibid., p. xxi. Bruzzi and Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures, p. 106. Warwick and Cavallaro, Fashioning the Frame, pp. 87–8. Austen, Nonhanger Abbey, p. 54.

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2 Revolution and revealment: the Gothic body and the politics of décolletage

‘Such excessive nakedness’: revealment and Revolutionary fashion One of the most striking features of the majority of Gothic novels produced in the final decade of the eighteenth century, the period usually associated with the most productive phase of early Gothic fiction, is their pitting of a sinister, devious older man against a young, helpless, beautiful woman. This is not an unvarying dynamic, but nevertheless continues as a persistent feature of the form throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The respective focus on the psychology of the villain or the plight of the heroine has led some commentators to divide these texts into ‘male’ and ‘female’ Gothic.1 The female body, however, remains a contested ground in both, the site on which innumerable fears and desires are played out. Needless to say, these fears and desires are not universal but culturally and historically specific. The way in which the eighteenth-century Gothic heroine is clothed – or more characteristically, semi-clothed – plays an important part in the construction of her identity and, indeed, the fashioning of her body. Gothic heroines of this period seem to have a problem in keeping their clothes on – the kerchief covering their bosoms is constantly coming askew, or they are spied on while in the privacy of their bath – but this is more than mere titillation. Readers in the early twenty-first century are familiar with the soft pornography of Hammer films and their imitators and parodists, and at first glance the chance exposure of female flesh in these novels seems to perform a similar function. Hammer films, however, tend to animate deliberately a post-Freudian narrative of repression and liberation specific to their own cultural context, the ‘swinging’ sixties. ‘High’ Gothic texts, on the other hand, are located in a

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pre-Freudian era of sensibility and sentiment. The exposure of the heroine’s body in these novels is a product of the debates surrounding these issues, and any titillation it provides must be understood within this framework. It is also a product of the fashions of the age. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, women’s clothing underwent a series of radical changes that costume historians often describe as comparably revolutionary to fashion as the French Revolution was to politics. Indeed the two were frequently connected in contemporary discourse, in which the moral debates over the proprieties and improprieties of female dress became part of a rhetoric of décolletage, deployed in political discussion. This discussion did not produce a unitary reading of the exposed female form, but rather mobilised a variety of meanings, in which women were alternately natural and artificial beings, victims and aggressors, appropriated for radical and conservative politics. The Gothic novel of the period participates in this discussion, and its heroines’ bodies are fashioned by it. Women’s fashion in 1790s Europe was revolutionised by the unprecedented relinquishing of the corset, a ubiquitous feature of women’s dress since the late Middle Ages. While perhaps only the most daring women threw off their stays completely, corsets were drastically reduced in size and the predominant styles of dress featured increasingly high waistlines, thus rendering tight-lacing redundant. Throughout the eighteenth century women’s fashions were primarily focused on the display of the breasts, initially incorporating stiff, flat-fronted corsets that pushed up the bosom to provide a frequently dramatic cleavage. At the end of the century, the breasts remained the focal point, but were displayed in a loose, informal manner, veiled by a chemise. Corsets were reduced to about six inches in length or jettisoned altogether. Women were not necessarily, therefore, exposing their breasts to any markedly greater degree in the late eighteenth century than in the immediately preceding period; however, the style of exposure changed dramatically. The female body was effectively restructured by the discarding of the bulk of the underwear and corsetry that formed an essential part of everyday dress, substituting a looser, supposedly more ‘natural’ appearance. As Willett and Cunnington indicate, ‘The Englishwoman of the fashionable world succeeded in reducing the total weight of her clothing to a couple of pounds. Such a thing had never been previously attempted in this country.’2 The supposed Englishness of this particular look carried significant ideological weight in late-eighteenth-century France: it was thought to embody the superior freedom and democracy of the English political system, although ironically, as Valerie Steele points out, it was

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primarily initiated not by the liberal middle classes but by the huntingand-shooting aristocracy.3 Indeed, despite the promotion of the chemise-dress by fashion leaders such as the Duchess of Devonshire, many British women in particular continued to wear stays throughout the period, loose clothing remaining inseparable from the connotations of loose morals. This did not prevent the French dubbing the style à l’Anglaise in acknowledgement of the informal wear associated with the pleasures of English country life. Britain also led the way in industrialised manufacture of light cottons and muslins, essential to the production of the new style. Its modishness, however, was largely due to the influence of the artist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the French queen Marie Antoinette. Vigée-Lebrun was an early advocate of classical dress and frequently wore classically inspired white garments, as in her selfportrait of 1789. She also preferred to pose her aristocratic sitters in informal dress, and in 1783 produced a portrait of the queen dressed in a diaphanous white blouse that caused a scandal when exhibited at the Salon. While to modern eyes, less flesh appears to be on display than in comparable portraits of the French court, it was the informality of the garment that was considered shocking by the eighteenth-century public: the chemise-dress was overly intimate, being apparently uncorseted, and had the appearance of an undergarment. As VigéeLebrun states in her Memoirs (1835–37), ‘the evil tongues could not resist the temptation of saying that I had painted the Queen in her underwear’.4 The French monarchy depended on spectacular display in order to consolidate its power, but the queen, it seemed, had overexposed herself, leaving insufficient distance between herself and the spectator. As Aileen Ribeiro suggests, the increasing informality of court dress over the course of the 1780s may in part have contributed to the decreasing respect for the aristocracy held by the Third Estate.5 Despite its initial popularity at the French court, the affectation of informality rapidly took on new political inflections, proving a particularly suggestive vehicle for successive waves of propaganda. It soon became a necessity on the streets of Paris as a visible demonstration of sympathy with the urban poor and with Jacobin ideals. The style inclined to suppress class distinctions, characteristically rejecting expensive fabrics in favour of practical linens, cottons and wool. For women this frequently included a lack of stays – in France, working-class women did not tend to wear corsets (this was less the case in Britain where stays were more widespread across the classes). Implicitly, stays were constructed as a middle-class affectation, like gloves, a demonstration that the wearer did not need to

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perform hard physical work (although in Britain many poorer women could and did work in stays). The chemise-dress modelled by the queen was, however, considered too risqué and virtually disappeared during the Revolution proper, as its royal connotations were too persistent. Ultimately, the most extreme version of the ‘undressed’ look was popularised by what Ribeiro terms ‘the raffish demi-mondaine society thrown up by the Directory’, suggesting ‘a direct mockery of established morality and the almost bourgeois virtues advocated by Robespierre during the Terror’.6 After the overthrow of Robespierre, female clothing was regarded as an area of special privilege, as it had been subjected to less severe policing and propaganda than male clothing during the crucial years of 1789–94. Ironically, when the issues of what the ideal republican should wear and how the royalist sympathisers might display themselves became matters for intense scrutiny and concern, female clothing still apparently retained the stigma of being frivolous and (at least relatively) meaningless. For the leading women in Directory society, such as Mme de Tallien and Mme Récamier, female dress became the ideal medium for rejecting the Jacobin ideology. The most gruesome fashions included having the hair cut short à la victime, and wearing a red ribbon around the neck to commemorate those who died by the guillotine. Décolletage, however, remained one of the most potent symbols of the new order, in that it not only transferred the decadence and glamour of the ancien regime to the nouveau riches, but also subverted Robespierre’s classical Republicanist propaganda, using the more luxurious associations of ancient Greece to defy Robespierre’s evocation of the austerity of Rome. As Valerie Steele argues, accounts of the Merveilleuses, as the more extreme followers of the new fashions became generically known, walking down the Champs-Elysées semi-naked or damping their dresses to make them clinging and transparent are probably exaggerated. Nevertheless ‘in comparison with previous styles … the chemise dress looked naked; muslin is more transparent than heavy silk or wool’.7 A portrait of an unknown young woman made during this period by one of David’s school, nevertheless, clearly reveals the nipples underneath the fine gauze of the bodice (figure 1). This is by no means exceptional; several similarly attired portraits are also in existence. The satirical accounts and moralistic outrage to which the Merveilleuses and their male counterparts, the Incroyables, gave rise are sufficient evidence of their rhetorical power (and delayed the adoption of the style in Britain, where transparent shifts were in any case impractical for the weather). Before long, however, the classical shift became institutionalised into the Empire Line.

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Figure 1 Circle of Jacques-Louis David: Portrait of a Young Woman (c. 1798)

In some ways the diaphanous garments of this period remained consistent with preceding styles in that they primarily centred around the display of the breasts. Nevertheless, whereas earlier eighteenthcentury corsets confined the waist and pushed up the breasts in order to elevate and make prominent, the 1790s model rather sought to create the illusion of merely revealing the natural form of the body, deliberately drawing on eighteenth-century preoccupations with the state of nature. Classical robes were valorised not only for their

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cultural resonances but also because they supposedly renounced worldly sophistication, complementing the natural form of the body. In Emile (1762), Rousseau dismisses corsetry as ‘Gothic shackles’ that deform the body and insists on the superiority of the uncorseted Greek figure.8 The term ‘Gothic’ is being used here, of course, in the sense of barbarism: the cruel and senseless custom of a former age that needs to be shaken off in the advance towards Enlightenment. If man was born free but everywhere in chains, woman was everywhere in corsets. As David Kunzle points out, however, Rousseau’s argument did not necessarily represent an advance for female liberation but in some respects performed a conservative function, reinforcing the association of femininity with motherhood. 9 The construction of these newly revealing fashions as natural and therefore morally superior, however, was in direct conflict with more conventional modes of morality that insisted that the body should be decently covered. At times, furthermore, the ‘natural’ look required artful assistance. The concomitant fashion for ‘bust improvers’ of wax or stuffed cotton led The Times in 1799 to remark rather snidely that, ‘The fashion of false bosoms has at least this utility, that it compels our fashionable fair to wear something.’’10 Similarly an anonymous engraving of 1799 entitled ‘Full Dress’ or ‘Parisian Ladies in their Winter Dress for 1800’ portrays a group of naked women clothed only in elaborate headdresses and long drapes of virtually transparent fabric. This brazen display was explicitly what contemporary critics deplored, as for example Louis-Sebastien Mercier, who called for the ‘lascivious Venuses’ of classical statuary to be banished to the museums, in case women might take their emulation one step too far, and show ‘such excessive nakedness, they [might] become offensive even to themselves’.11 The issue of modesty, therefore, becomes something of a vexed question. The borderline between natural simplicity and artful revealment is increasingly hard to discern. These issues are dramatised most vividly in Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796). The controversy this novel occasioned on its publication was as much due to its perceived blasphemy, and the audacity with which Lewis flaunted his status as member of parliament on the title page, as to accusations of sexual immorality, but nevertheless Lewis was obliged to censor the more suggestive passages for subsequent editions. The novel is outstanding in the way in which it explicitly critiques the contemporary discourses of modesty, while simultaneously exploiting them as a source of prurient appeal, in a manner that recalls de Sade’s Justine (1791), which Lewis had probably read. The heroine of The Monk, Antonia, is presented as

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ideally virtuous, and yet her virtue is shown to be the implicit precondition of her rape and murder. Her modesty is repeatedly presented as an incentive to sexual desire, which her ignorance of sexuality prevents her from detecting and thus averting. The demonic seductress Matilda, on the other hand, loses sway over the eponymous monk Ambrosio’s affections precisely because she has jettisoned all appearance of modesty: ‘Did she know the inexpressible charm of Modesty, how irresistibly it enthralls the heart of Man, how firmly it chains him to the Throne of Beauty, She would never have thrown it off.’12 Nevertheless, if Antonia’s ‘blue down-cast eyes’, ‘gentle voice’ and ‘spotless heart’ at first appear to inspire Ambrosio with a ‘mingled sentiment of tenderness, admiration and respect’ rather than the ‘voluptuous desires’ provoked by Matilda, he is soon shown to be deceiving himself, through a series of provocative tableaux in which Antonia’s innocence is blatantly sexualised.13 In one scene Ambrosio is allowed to watch Antonia bathing by means of a magic mirror: The amorous Monk had full opportunity to observe the voluptuous contours and admirable symmetry of her person. She threw off her last garment, and advancing to the Bath prepared for her, She put her foot in the water. … Though unconscious of being observed, an in-bred sense of modesty induced her to veil her charms; and she stood hesitating on the brink, in the attitude of the Venus de Medicis.14

This natural propensity to cover her body – the ‘in-bred sense of modesty’ with which Antonia conceals herself even when she believes herself unobserved – is, in the absence of sexual knowledge, merely a standardised gesture. Moreover, despite the intervention of a significantly ‘tame’ linnet which engages in ‘wanton play’ with her breasts, it is not a ‘natural’ pose but a culturally constructed one, an imitation of one of the very ‘lascivious Venuses’ that Mercier deplores in his tirade against ‘excessive nakedness’.15 In his repeated associations between Antonia and this statue, Lewis not only inverts the conventional relation between art and nature (she resembles the statue rather than the statue resembling her) but also likens her to a classical goddess not renowned for her espousal of chastity. This suggests again that the ‘natural’ is highly culturally determined, but also problematises the relation between modesty and chastity. If modesty consists of adopting the pose of a classical sculpture, then it is essentially an ‘artificial’ posture, a fetishised form of body language; as Robert Miles states of Rousseau’s depiction of Sophia: ‘Women … are forbidden to express their desire in words: their natural language for the expression of desire is the semiology of the body.’16 This is reified by

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Lewis’s representation of Antonia’s eventual replacement, Virginia della Franca, who is altogether more canny in her presentation of the modest self: discerning the Duke de Medina’s approval of ‘the sweetness of her manners and her tender concern for the suffering Nun. … She redoubled her attention to the Invalid.’17 Furthermore, the two chevaliers in the cathedral have already suggested (with obviously prurient motives) that modesty is subject to cultural relativism: Lorenzo insists that “‘It is certainly from your being a Stranger … and as yet unacquainted with our customs, that you continue to wear your veil.’”18 This is corroborated by Antonia’s aunt Leonella, who virtually insists that it would be immodest to retain the veil, thus deflating the erotic mystification it affords: “’Blessed Maria! What a fuss and a bustle about a chit’s face! Come, come, Child! Uncover it; I warrant you that nobody will run away with it from you – … If it is the custom in Madrid, that is all we ought to mind, and therefore I desire you to take off your veil immediately.”’19 If the other ladies of Madrid are quite easy about removing their veils and showing off their charms, it is paradoxically by wearing a veil that Antonia becomes so erotically fascinating. Like Rousseau’s Sophia, the ideal partner of Emile, Her adornment is very modest in appearance, and very coquettish in fact. She does not display of her charms; she covers them, but, in covering them, she knows how to make them imagined. When someone sees her, he says, ‘Here is a modest, temperate girl.’ But so long as he stays near her, his eyes and his heart roam all over her whole person without his being able to take them away; and one would say that all this very simple attire was put on only to be taken off piece by piece by the imagination.20

The fragmented body that initially attracts the chevaliers’ attention, consisting of neck, hair and foot escaping from beneath the veil, is Rousseau’s female body waiting to be taken to pieces by the imagination. Don Lorenzo’s first impulse, having introduced himself to Antonia, is to attempt to remove her veil. In Rousseau’s ideal woman, therefore, the concepts of modesty and coquettishness are understood to be coextensive, to Mary Wollstonecraft’s understandable disgust when she quotes the passage in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In this respect Ambrosio’s reaction to Antonia is merely a more extreme version of the two chevaliers’ culturally sanctioned response: both derive erotic pleasure from the concealment/revealment motif, but the chevaliers are not engaging in moral hypocrisy and are moved to conventional romantic courtship rather than violent rape.

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Thus wearing a veil can be construed as provoking an incentive to remove it, and modesty, for Rousseau and for Lewis, is not only interprétable as sexual invitation but is presented as alarmingly coextensive with sexual invitation. Lewis asserts of Antonia while she sleeps that ‘there was a sort of modesty in her very nakedness, which added fresh stings to the desires of the lustful Monk’.21 Her very unconsciousness, which in this case is the prime source of her innocence, inflames the Monk’s desires, in the same way as her more self-conscious gestures of modesty have done previously. The construction of modesty therefore lies primarily with the ‘lustful Monk’ who perceives it, and not with the girl who enacts it. This corresponds to Ambrosio’s misinterpretation of Antonia’s declaration of love as a sexual invitation. His knowledge of women comes from art and not life, and therefore he ‘reads’ her attitude in terms of artifice, even as he validates it in terms of its innocence.

Pitying the plumage: revealment in Revolutionary discourse The preoccupation with revealment and concealment thus becomes a crux around which numerous political issues circulate. Ludmilla Jordanova, for example, suggests that the ‘unveiling’ of a female body representing Nature before the omnipotent male gaze is a standard metaphor for scientific and medical enquiry in the Enlightenment.22 This is illustrated vividly by Jacques-Louis David’s 1788 portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and his wife; as Martin and Koda point out, Mme Lavoisier’s modish chemise à la reine, ‘so newly brought from boudoir intimacy into the light of day, is as emblematic of the rationalist’s impulse to scrutiny as the scientific equipment on Monsieur Lavoisier’s table’.23 Marie-Anne Lavoisier’s chemise-dress, however, like that of Marie Antoinette, represents less an unveiling than a redirection of the gaze to the veil itself: what is revealed is not her body but the layer of cloth that veils her body from the enquiring eye. In characteristic Gothic fashion, the veil has come to stand in metonymically for the flesh it conceals. The paradoxical nature of this form of revealment, however, is most politically invested in relation to the contested body of Marie Antoinette. Subsequently, therefore, the tropes of revealment and concealment become an object of elaborate rhetoric in the explosion of discourse surrounding the French Revolution. Before the Revolution the overt display of the queen’s body was greeted with prurience, as the outcry in 1783 over the exhibition of her excessively intimate portrait by Vigée-Lebrun suggests. However, in

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Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the shocking spectacle of the ‘almost naked’ queen is rather a rhetorical object of pity that provokes the desire to conceal in order to protect, not to censor, drawing on his earlier assertion in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) that ‘beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty’.24 Burke presumes a sentimental audience to whom the spectacle of feminine distress is an incitement to moral response and ultimately to political mobilisation. Thus the moral disapproval incurred by Marie Antoinette’s bodily exposure is transferred from the queen herself to her persecutors: A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with … blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and through ways unknown to the murderers had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment.25

For Burke, clothing becomes a metaphor for the refinements of civilisation, which he opposes to the brutal (rather than noble) ‘savages’ who suggestively tear off even the scalps of their victims, denuding them not only of garments but also of their skin: ‘It was … a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages … leading into hovels hung round with scalps.’26 The savagery of nakedness is not that of the queen herself but that of the attacking murderers. Her nakedness is inadvertent, caused by the hastiness of her flight (in contrast to the calculated revealment of the Vigée-Lebrun portrait). Thus Burke reverses Rousseau, for whom the naked body is classical and ‘natural’ while the clothing that restricts it is ‘Gothic’. Gothic barbarism is shifted from the body’s covering to the perpetrators of its uncovering. The emphasis is implicitly transferred from the veil to the act of unveiling. In the process of this transferral, however, Burke effectively positions the queen as victim: paradoxically, by shifting her to the moral high ground, he denies her agency. As Claudia Johnson argues, Burke’s version of sentimentality premises violence in its very appeal against violence: The naked queen menaced by ruffians beating down her bedroom door during a moment of insurrectionary violence becomes the symbol of a state which at all times needs our sheltering chivalry and love because it is so vulnerable. In reactionary deployments of sentimentality, in other words, the queen is always on the verge of being raped; take the threat away and the basis of sentimentality itself will disappear.27

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The shocking intimacy and informality which the Vigée-Lebrun portrait previously invited has become the precondition for sentimental politics; however, her ever-imminent unveiling is no longer her own initiative, but is implicated in the protective gaze of the male spectator. Nevertheless, if Burke sees the Revolutionaries as savages, he also equates them with reason in terms uncannily reminiscent of the Lavoisier portrait: the ‘pleasing illusions’ of power under the ancien régime are opposed by a ‘new conquering empire of light and reason’ which is figured in terms of a shameful exposure of the (implicitly female) body: ‘All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off’28 For Burke, this reduction of the human body to its rationalist, scientific common denominator does not inaugurate egalitarianism and the rights of man but makes man and woman (and specifically woman) something less than human: ‘On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order.’29 Humanity is dependent precisely on qualities such as illusion, romance, imagination, chivalry, figured specifically through sartorial metaphor: ‘All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination.’30 The young Marie Antoinette, ‘glittering like the morning star’,31 is the fairy-tale princess of this realm of illusion. The vastness of her sartorial wardrobe (consisting of thirty-six formal dresses and many more informal outfits ordered regularly three times a year) suggestively becomes a symbol not of outrageous material privilege but of moral and imaginative capital in the beholder. Burke appears to make a distinction, however, between the ‘decent drapery of life’, which represents civilisation, and the fashionable clothing of Paris, which in its desperate grasp of the new threatens to overthrow civilisation altogether. The baleful influence of Parisian fashion was a common theme of moralists of the period, and clothing was a major source of expenditure for English tourists in the French capital. Burke translates this theme into a metaphor for political manners: ‘In England we are said to learn manners at second-hand from your side of the water, and that we dress our behaviour in the frippery of France. If so, we are still in the old cut, and have not so far conformed to the new Parisian mode of good-breeding.’32 Ironically, of course, French fashion was at this point proclaiming English influence, both in clothing and in morals. The taste for the comparative simplicity and practicality of English country costume deliberately reflected an admiration for English principles of democracy. For Burke, however, the English are thankfully behind the fashion, the frivolities

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of French taste demonstrating the poverty of their moral wardrobe. In the ‘new conquering empire of light and reason’, the dignified, civilising garments this wardrobe contains ‘are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd and antiquated fashion’.33 ‘Decent drapery’ becomes, for the Enlightened supporters of the Revolution, an anachronism that Burke desperately seeks to defend. In this manoeuvre Burke implicitly dissociates fashion (in the sense of the mode) from the French court or from vulnerable femininity and makes it an attribute of Jacobinism – again somewhat ironically, as under Robespierre prescriptive dress codes were instituted and the French fashion industry collapsed. In contrast Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–92) argues that Burke privileges the theatrical display of the persecuted body over its political actuality, so that ‘He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. … His hero or his heroine must be a tragedy-victim expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon.’34 The image recurs in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she declares of her contemporaries that ‘like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves’, being more concerned with fashion and romances than with education.35 In this schema clothing is seen as obscuring the naked truth, dimming the light of reason. Worse, it is actually immoral, serving social divisions of rank, class and gender. In her reply to Burke, the Rights of Men (1791), Wollstonecraft suggests that the French queen’s ‘rank alters the nature of folly, and throws a graceful veil over vices that degrade humanity’.36 This ‘graceful veil’ is not natural but an acquired beauty, one which women work to produce in order to please men rather than themselves: they ‘have laboured to be pretty, by counterfeiting weakness’.37 Thus Wollstonecraft suggests that the very system of chivalry and courtesy Burke calls upon to protect the naked queen is in fact what placed her in a position of vulnerability in the first place: it ‘vitiates [women], prevents their endeavouring to obtain solid personal merit; and, in short, makes those beings vain inconsiderate dolls, who ought to be prudent mothers and useful members of society’.38 Returning to the equation between clothes and manners, she indicates that this outmoded system is specifically ‘Gothic drapery’,39 recalling Rousseau’s ‘Gothic shackles’, and the vulnerable body of the woman it clothes is dependent on Burke’s own definition of the beautiful as little, smooth, delicate and fair. In the place of this body constructed through the conceptual clothes it wears, she substitutes the purity of a ‘stripped’ body,

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implicitly classical in its claim to reason and truth.40 Thus Burke’s ‘Gothic drapery’ is figured as a kind of fall from a ‘naked’ spiritual truth, recalling Paine’s equation of clothing and government as similar indications of a fallen state: ‘Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.’41 Reversing the association of radicalism and lack of corsetry, the caricaturist Gillray depicted Paine, who had worked professionally as a stay-maker, as tight-lacing Britannia in the image Fashion before Ease; or – a good constitution sacrificed for a fantastick form (1793). The political fashion for radicalism is thus equated with other ‘unhealthy’ fashions imported from France; the ‘healthy’ political body implicitly one unshackled by extremism. If Gillray appears to ignore the radical sartorial fashions actually coming out of France, he demonstrates how feasibly women’s underwear could be pressed into the services of political rhetoric. Just as the term Gothic could, in the eighteenth century, be appropriated for radical or conservative political ends, so could the Gothic body: on the one hand shackled by the fetters of fashion; on the other revelling in its fantastic drapery. The fiction often combines both in the same text, deploying one against another. Just as innocence and worldliness form an inseparable binary in the fiction of this period, so do the excessively clothed and naturally unclothed. These binaries are reiterated in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), published towards the end of the first phase of Gothic fiction, when the ‘natural’ look (since the turn of the century, institutionalised as the Empire Line) was also reaching the end of its period of modishness. By this time the ‘natural’ look had moved a long way from its revolutionary ideals and was increasingly assisted by body-sculpting underwear such as the notorious ‘Divorce Corset’ – so called not because of a tendency to promote adultery but because of its inset steel panel radically dividing the breasts. Melmoth the Wanderer, like Wollstonecraft and Paine, equates lost innocence with the adoption of fashionable clothing and chivalry with outmoded garments, in contrast to the ‘innocent’ naked body. One of the many inset narratives of the novel details how Immalee, a castaway brought up in a state of nature on a tropical island, is discovered and returns to lateseventeenth-century Spain. Here the rituals of dress are seen through the foil of her innocence, and therefore given a suggestively postlapsarian quality. The cavaliers’ ‘eager arrangement of capas, and hats, and plumes’ directly corresponds to ‘the manners of a nation still half-feudal, and always gallant and chivalrous’, qualities that are

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implicitly Catholicised.42 Display and excess in the dress code echo excessive spectacle and ritual in the religious and moral system. Thus in an earlier inset narrative, as Chris Baldick writes, ‘the magnificent jewelled dress in which [his mother] prostrates herself before Monçada and secures his monastic vows serves as an allegory of Catholicism’s false humility, and above all of its artificiality’.43 Similarly the Spanish women Immalee encounters are characterised by The creaking of their large fans – the tremulous and purposely-delayed adjustment of their floating veils, whose partial concealment flattered the imagination beyond the most full and ostentatious disclosure of the charms they seemed jealous of – the folds of the mantilla, of whose graceful falls, and complicated manoeuvres, and coquettish undulations, the Spanish women know how to avail themselves so well. . . .44

Immalee’s ignorance of these rituals and their sexual mores, unlike that of Lewis’s Antonia, is not foolish and misguided but a result of a kind of innate Protestantism. Her modesty is not a duplicitous form of behaviour which surreptitiously invites the disordering gaze of the imagination but rather approaches a form of the sublime, invoking a vision of unearthly wholeness to which the appropriate response is astonishment and wonder: ‘Men of the loosest gallantry fell back as she approached, with involuntary awe – the libertine who looked on her was half-converted – the susceptible beheld her as one who realized that vision of imagination that must never be embodied here.’45 Thus her innocence does not make her vulnerable to male attentions, but miraculously protects her from them. She likewise restores a state of equivalence between her garments and their rational and functional purpose: ‘If her fan moved, it was only to collect air – if she arranged her veil, it was only to hide her face – if she adjusted her mantilla, it was but to hide that form, whose exquisite symmetry defied the voluminous drapery of even that day to conceal it.’46 In contrast to the Spanish women, who are ‘crippled’ by their hideous costumes, Immalee displays an ideal unity between body and brain that apparently transcends its ‘trappings’: she retains ‘a bounding elasticity … that made every action the expression of thought’. Both the women and Immalee are only partially concealed by their garments, but while the women avail themselves of their art to make less seem more, to suggest what is not really there, Immalee’s body diminishes her clothing to ‘voluminous drapery’, a dull and excessive quantity of fabric. The Spanish women’s costume is a fabulous concoction of shifting surfaces and perpetual motion. Immalee, on the

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other hand, embodies absolute authenticity, a point at which the Gothic surface breaks down, is reduced to stage effect. Ultimately, neither Melmoth nor society is able to destroy this ideal harmony of mind and body. Not constructed within Spain’s feudal society, she remains spiritually if not bodily impervious to its Gothic strictures. Nevertheless, Immalee is hardly the ‘prudent mother and useful member of society’ Wollstonecraft envisaged when she called for a female body ‘stripped’ of the vestiture of outmoded values. This is partially because both Immalee herself and her Edenic isle are irredeemably freighted with cultural assumptions about what constitutes ‘natural’ femininity. Besides the numerous implicit references to Genesis and Milton, and the fact that Immalee has miraculously acquired both the capacity of language and a predisposition to Christianity, she is also unequivocally clothed, and the terms used to describe her dress correspond with those used to describe the Spanish women: ‘a feathery fan of wild drapery’.47 Adorned in ‘fantastically entwined’ flowers, feathers, shells and bird’s-eggs, she apparently possesses the ‘natural’ feminine instinct to ornament which Wollstonecraft makes fun of in Rousseau and Dr Gregory: He advises [his daughters] to cultivate a fondness for dress, because a fondness for dress, he asserts, is natural to them. I am unable to comprehend what he or Rousseau mean, when they frequently use this indefinite term. If they told us that in a pre-existent state the soul was fond of dress, and brought this inclination with it into a new body, I should listen to them with a half-smile.48

While Wollstonecraft realises that the ‘natural’ is socially constructed, she nevertheless believes that this ‘false’ construction can be destroyed in favour of a ‘true’ one, the naturally clothed woman replaced by the naturally naked one, both in constitutional and sexual politics. Maturin, on the other hand, makes no such distinction: Immalee’s ‘natural’ nakedness is held in place by a series of extravagant, culturally determined props. Few twentieth-century critics would now disagree with Paine and Wollstonecraft that Burke’s ‘pleasing illusions’ worked to reinforce extreme social inequality and the corrupt power of the ancien régime. However, in their nostalgic desire for a ‘naked’ state of truth and reason prior to the sartorial accoutrements of civilisation, they neglect to realise – as Burke does – that theatricality, rhetoric and representations of power are as much a part of reality as the irreducible fact of the suffering body. Significantly, the designs later made by Jacques-Louis David for an egalitarian dress for the new republic were based

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substantially on existing theatrical costume. Every type of power has its ‘pleasing illusions’; some simply please more of the people more of the time.

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Accidental exposure: the female form in Gothic fiction Gothic discourses respond precisely to this realm of theatricality and imagination that Paine seeks to banish with the light of reason. They replay at the level of fantasy the political controversies of their age: both the national pride in the English tradition of chivalry and the discontent that the inequalities of this system occasioned. Within this literary register the image of the semi-clothed Marie Antoinette fleeing her potential murderers recurs throughout the 1790s in the form of the persecuted heroine, particularly those of Ann Radcliffe. Nevertheless, as Claudia Johnson points out, Burke’s spectacle of feminine distress is less about the female victim than the male viewer: ‘To him, the queen’s particularity … was secondary to the broader question of how the manliness of political subjects is effectively constituted.’49 This association follows through into Gothic fiction: at moments of exposure, the heroine is frequently unconscious and therefore her own subjectivity and agency are temporarily vacated. As Johnson maintains, the discourse of sentimentality galvanised by this kind of affective spectacle did not necessarily empower women through their appeal to the ‘feminine’ virtues of feeling, as the ‘affective practices associated with it are valued not because they are understood as feminine, but precisely and only insofar as they have been recoded as masculine’.50 The semi-conscious, exposed heroines of Gothic fiction are dependent specifically on a sentimental male viewer in order for their display to function effectively. Nevertheless, this is given a further level of complexity by the fact that the greater part of Radcliffe’s readership was female; the consumption of the sentimental male viewer (and the recumbent female body) is thus a suggestively feminised pleasure. It should be recalled, furthermore, that the initial image of royal exposure was not Burke’s Reflections but the image orchestrated by the queen herself and her female portraitist, with apparently little in mind beyond the superficial mobilisation of a number of fashionable discourses of classicism, ‘English’ democracy and Rousseauesque naturalism within a sartorial and artistic register. Vigée-Lebrun’s own commitment to ‘classical’ attire suggests rather an aspiration to convey a modish air of rationalism and learning through dress than a direct appeal to sensibility in the viewer. The Vigée-Lebrun portrait can thus be read primarily as an exercise in the influencing of taste. The tension

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between the opposed images of ‘bad’, scandalous queen and ‘good’, threatened queen invoked by contemporary discourse therefore provides a complex space of female subjectivity through which the figure of the Gothic heroine is produced. The appeal for pity and protection through the revealment of the female form and, most significantly, the breasts, is made most explicit in Radchffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791). At the beginning of the novel Adeline is dressed in a ‘grey camlet’ habit of Rousseauesque simplicity that ‘shewed, but did not adorn, her figure’, which under the effects of exhaustion and distress has become ‘thrown open at the bosom, upon which part of her hair had fallen in disorder, while the light veil hastily thrown on, had, in her confusion, been suffered to fall back’.51 While the sexual nature of this image is overt, it incites La Motte not to rape and despoliation but rather to benign, fatherly protection from the uncouth mob of banditti. He is, in a sense, Burke’s ideal spectator, made indignant by ‘Such elegance and apparent refinement, contrasted with the desolation of the house, and the savage manners of its inhabitants’, and thus moved to reinstate a more chivalric code of behaviour.52 Although the erotic spectacle of Adeline’s ‘decorative distress’ (as Chloe Chard terms it), ‘interested him more warmly in her favour’, Radcliffe takes pains to spell out the ‘innocence’ of this form of voyeurism, insisting that ‘his sense of compassion was too sincere to be misunderstood’.53 Nevertheless, despite these protestations, it is essential for the Burkean dynamic that the spectator of Adeline’s disarray is male. As Johnson points out, ‘Obviously, Adeline’s “glowing charms” solicit not reason, not sexually neutral “humanity” of sexually nonspecific onlookers, but heterosexual manhood in particular: Adeline’s body arouses varying degrees and admixtures of tenderness and desire in the gentlemen bending over her.’54 Significantly, Madame La Motte, a character distinctly lacking in sensibility and refinement, does read sexual intentions into her husband’s protection of Adeline. Sensibility precludes impure motives, but nevertheless they are suppressed into a subtext read by ‘vulgar’ characters, in a suggestively defensive gesture directing the reader to reject them. If this incident, appearing in print only a year after the Reflections, is a fairly straightforward re-enactment of Burke’s depiction of Marie Antoinette, subsequent texts incorporate increasingly sophisticated permutations of the theme. It is to Emily St Aubert’s credit that when she expects her room to be broken into, she prudently forestalls any compromising exposure by lying down to sleep in her clothes. In direct contrast, however, Matilda in The Monk recreates the moment of

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exposure in order cynically to exploit the expected spectatorial response, mimicking virtue in the same way that she poses for the icon of the Madonna hung in Ambrosio’s bedroom. Pointing the knife at her own breast, she deliberately re-enacts the Burkean tableau in order to exploit Ambrosio’s spectatorial responses, thereby also implicitly alluding to Burke’s contention that the queen would, like Lucrèce, end her own life rather than suffer shame: ‘she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; … in the last extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace, and … if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand.’55 In her self-conscious revealment, Matilda is engaging in a particularly successful act of erotic rhetoric. As Ann Hollander argues in Seeing Through Clothes (1975), pictorial conventions suggest that the exposure of a single breast is always an unconscious gesture, the subject being unaware she is being observed. Until the late fifteenth century it was associated exclusively with the nursing Virgin. By the period of the Gothic novel and the French Revolution it was used to indicate self-forgetful female zeal: heroism, devotion, sacrifice (as illustrated, for example, by Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People). Through this deliberate staging, Matilda also recalls the socalled Affair of the Queen’s Necklace, in which two fashion-workers successfully duped the Cardinal de Rohan into believing he had kept a midnight tryst with Marie Antoinette herself. As Valerie Steele indicates in Paris Fashion (1988), the impersonator, a milliner and parttime prostitute named Oliva, was dressed by her companion in a highquality white lawn chemise-dress, rather than a brocade court-gown. Thus the queen’s identity was signalled not by the conventional sartorial signs of rank but by the simpler robe en gaule, which she had popularised. For Oliva as for Matilda, rhetorical revealment is paradoxically a disguise, a ‘fake’ signal of authenticity. It is intriguing to consider in this context the only existing portrait of Charlotte Dacre, the author of a number of Gothic novels, the best known of which is Zofloya, or, the Moor (1806). This engraving appeared, labelled with her characteristic pseudonym of ‘Rosa Matilda’, opposite the title page of her volume of poetry Hours of Solitude (1805), and depicts the author in a startlingly décolleté classical shift, through which the outline of the nipples is suggested, reminiscent of the dress portrayed in Figure 1. Dacre’s choice of pseudonym, as numerous commentators have pointed out, combines Rosario/Matilda besides referencing the poetic school of ‘Delia Cruscanism’ with which she apparently wished to align herself. As such it suggests a deliberate staging of identity made more dramatic through the fact that very l ittle is known of Dacre’s life. The décolleté white gown is an essential

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part of that staging, deliberately fashioning her as an ‘exposed’ Gothic heroine appealing for pity and protection, perhaps on the behalf of the male critic. The frequent disclaimers on the grounds of extreme youth that accompany the poems perform much the same function (intriguingly, there is some doubt over her genuine date of birth). Dacre presents herself as an elegant young woman at the height of fashion, but also combines the signifiers of purity and seductiveness in an apparently self-conscious manner reminiscent of Lewis’s Matilda. The transparent fabric covering her bosom blends seamlessly into her white skin: the veil is given the prurient qualities of flesh even as it apparently screens her body from the gaze. The suggestively manipulative nature of the image is reinforced by comparison with the images of ruthless and sadistic femininity found in Dacre’s fiction. Is she disavowing a persona like that of her arch-villainess Victoria in Zofloya, or is she staging an act of manipulation of which Victoria would be worthy? For Kim Ian Michisaw, ‘the image appears to locate her in the position of heroine-to-be-endangered, rather than as one of the damned’.56 Dacre certainly re-enacts the role of the Gothic heroine, but the conscious self-fashioning that appears to lie behind this role creates a sense of unease in the viewer: is all what it seems to be? Her own rhetorical revealment, under the ‘disguise’ of her pseudonym, paradoxically reveals nothing, only enhancing her mystery. Dacre’s portrait has the air of a fake, a counterfeit image in which it is the subject who enacts the role of artist-as-counterfeiter. The ‘fake portrait’ is also a key means by which Lewis’s Matilda, as Emma McEvoy points out, deploys a cultural association between art and sex in order to arouse Ambrosio’s ‘culturally determined and very intellectualised’ erotic desires.57 Matilda provides Ambrosio with a portrait of herself incognito as the Madonna, exploiting the stylised means of representation offered by the work of art in a manner not dissimilar from Dacre’s dissembling. Ambrosio’s response to this sacred image seems to overstep the bounds of religious devotion, again confusing purity with sexual attractiveness. Similarly, Matilda later represents Antonia to Ambrosio in the image of the Venus de Medici. Ambrosio is, in effect, the Burkean spectator as castigated by Paine, distracted by plumage and ‘not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination’.58 Lewis spells out the prurient voyeurism of this kind of spectatorship, which both Burke and Paine attempt to submerge. Radcliffe’s response to Lewis, The Italian (1797), revises his take on the revealment scenario, reinstating clothing as a fetishised

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boundary to the body that ultimately forestalls its penetration from the outside. The monk Schedoni enters Ellena’s bedroom with the intent to murder, but is prevented not precisely by revealment, but rather by a superabundance of clothing: He searched for the dagger, and it was some time before his trembling hand could disengage it from the folds of his garment; but, having done so, he again drew near, and prepared to strike. Her dress perplexed him; it would interrupt the blow, and he stooped to examine whether he could turn her robe aside, without waking her. … Drawing aside the lawn from her bosom, he once more raised it to strike; when, after gazing for an instant, some new horror seemed to seize all his frame, and he stood for some moments aghast and motionless as a statue.59

The complexity in part derives from the fact that the murdering mob and the Burkean spectator have collided in a single figure. Schedoni switches from one viewpoint to the other within the progress of the scene. Nevertheless, it is not directly the sight of Ellena’s exposed body that causes his transfixion with horror, but a miniature depicting his own face. Attempting to unveil Ellena he actually unveils an image of himself. In this reflexive image Radcliffe seems to indicate that it is really the subject-position of the male spectator that is at stake in these representations of revealment and not that of the exposed heroine. In fact the very moment in which Ellena’s body should become the most visible, as her robe is drawn aside, she vanishes and is replaced by a painted image of someone else entirely. Clothing forms a succession of layers which endlessly defer the revealment of the body: Schedoni is obstructed first by his own garment, then by Ellena’s, and then by a revealment not of her bosom but of an item of jewellery. A kind of contagion occurs, so that the image seems to transmit its own qualities to him, transforming him into a ‘statue’, and rendering him incapable of action. Thus the moment at which Ellena is most exposed is paradoxically the moment at which she becomes most protected. This episode strongly recalls Emma McEvoy’s suggestion that clothing in The Monk sometimes appears to exceed itself to the extent of metonymically supplanting the wearer, so that ‘Ambrosio’s habit proves at first a sign of, then merely a substitution for, his holiness’.60 Similarly Agnes’s disguise as the ‘Bleeding Nun’ leads first to her replacement by the actual bleeding nun and then to her own fabricated death within the nunnery. Lewis here seems to pastiche the kind of profound anxiety over the power of the visual image to obscure the living body exhibited by Paine. There is also a sense in which,

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however, as McEvoy indicates, the body itself is seen as part of this unstable visual lexicon, so that ‘bodies become interchangeable, or the body itself is treated as merely that which is to be marked with character’.61 The fear suggested is not only of the deceptiveness of appearances, although that does play a part, but also of a kind of possession by appearances, a contagion from clothing to character. Eve Sedgwick suggests that ‘Among the qualities that make The Monk such a formidably prurient book is its discovery that the attributes of veil and flesh are transferable and interchangeable.’62 The entire novel possesses a theatrical quality: the raiding of a dressing-up box of Gothic effects that points to Lewis’s later career writing for the theatre. The interchangeability of veil and flesh are recurrent features of Gothic fiction of this period; nevertheless this does not necessarily always have a negative effect. In The Italian the transference from living body to static image appears rather to protect and preserve the body than threaten it, to deflect violent action into an obfuscatory series of surface representations and resemblances. The demonic side of the ‘slippage from veil to flesh’ is that ‘the pallor, attenuation, insentience once proper to the veil’ are communicated to the character. Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho ‘is terrified at having a veil thrown over her – “wrapped around her, descending even to her feet” – by a thoughtless servant. “I thought,” the servant says, “how like you look to my dead mistress in that veil”; the veil is a carrier of death.’63 In the same scene, another veil conversely appears to be alive: gazing at the ‘black counterpane’ that adorns the bed of the dead marchioness, Emily is terrified to see it become ‘violently agitated’.64 There is a natural explanation: a smuggler is hiding in the bed, but for a moment, the funereal cloth itself seems to take on the semblance of life, just as the veil drained Emily of it. Similarly Antonia in The Monk, imprisoned in the Abbey vaults, ‘forced herself from [Ambrosio’s] arms, and her shroud being her only garment, She wrapped it closely round her’, prefiguring her ensuing death.65 The latter passage is echoed by the Ladies Monthly Museum of June 1802, which describes the contemporary fashion for ‘the close, all white shroud-looking, ghostly chemise undress of the ladies, who seem to glide about like spectres, with their shrouds wrapt tight about their forms’.66 The Gothic novel has, it seems, become a more appropriate reference point for the ‘classical’ look than the discourses of republicanism from which it arose. The neoclassical white shift which was originally opposed to Rousseau’s ‘Gothic shackles’ has, in the course of a decade of décolleté heroines, become an archetypally Gothic garment. The ladies in this description are suggestively

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dematerialised, distinguished by the speciality rather than the simplicity of their appearance. Thus if the presentation of women’s bodies in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic is determined largely by the development of the ‘undressed’ look, the Gothic novel also influenced the popular representation of sartorial fashions. The journalistic comment also surely recalls, at an oblique level, those Merveilleuses of the Directory who deliberately wore mourning at the bals de victimes held in the months after Robespierre’s defeat. The art of revealment and concealment is not only a matter for fashion and frivolous fiction, but is also inextricably entwined with the ‘serious’ political issues of the day.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

See for example Moers, Literary Women, Ellis, The Contested Castle, Delamotte, Perils of the Night. While in order to avoid gender essentialism, it is arguable that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are preferable terms, the chapter here follows conventional critical usage. Willett and Cunnington, History of Underclothes, p. 64. Steele, Paris Fashion, p. 29. Vigée-Lebrun, Memoirs, p. 33. The portrait is described by Vigée-Lebrun herself as ‘Queen Marie Antoinette with hat’! Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution, p. 39. Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, p. 117. Steele, Paris Fashion, p. 52. Rousseau, Emile, p. 366. Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism, p. 105. Cited in Ewing, Dress and Undress, p. 56. According to Ribeiro, the elegantly disordered ‘wild hair’ fashionable in the same period required comparable assistance, in the form of skilful cutting and curling – Byron once confessed to a friend that his hair had to be ‘curled naturally every night’. Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution, p. 122. Cited in the Lady’s Magazine 1798. Cf. Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, p. 117. Lewis, The Monk, p. 243. Ibid., pp. 242–3. Ibid., p. 271. Ibid. Miles, Ann Radcliffe, p. 117. Lewis, The Monk, p. 395. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid. Rousseau, Emile, p. 394. Lewis, The Monk, p. 300. Jordanova, Sexual Visions, ch. 5. Martin and Koda, Infra-Apparel, p. 30. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 100. Burke, Reflections, p. 164. Ibid., p. 159. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, p. 122.

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Burke, Reflections, p. 171. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 171. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 51. Wollstonecraft, Political Writings, p. 131. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid. From Common Sense (1776); cited in Paulson, Representations of Revolution, p. 80. Maturin, Melmoth, p. 327. Ibid., p. xv. Ibid., p. 327. Ibid., p. 328. Ibid., pp. 327–8. Ibid., p. 278. Wollstonecraft, Political Writings, pp. 99–100. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, p. 4. Ibid., p. 14. Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest, p. 7. Ibid, p. 7. Ibid, pp. xvii, 7. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, pp. 73–4. Burke, Reflections, p. 169. Dacre, Zofloya, p. xi. Lewis, The Monk, p. xxvi. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 51. Radcliffe, Udolpho, p. 234. Lewis, The Monk, p. xxi. Ibid, p. xxii. Sedgwick, Coherence, p. 145. Sedgwick, Coherence, p. 148. Radcliffe, Udolpho, pp. 535, 536. Lewis, The Monk, pp. 381–2. Cited in Ewing, Dress and Undress, p. 52.

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Clothes make the man: fashioning the self in Victorian Gothic

Fashioning madness: consumerism and concealment In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), a dramatic scene takes place when the mad Bertha Rochester breaks into Jane’s room two nights before her wedding and rends her bridal veil in two. As in Radcliffe and her contemporaries, Jane’s white wedding-garments are accorded spectral properties: they are ‘wraith-like’ and give out a ‘ghostly shimmer’.1 Similarly, the white dress in which Bertha is clothed simultaneously resembles ‘gown, sheet, or shroud’, and Bertha herself reminds Jane of ‘the foul German spectre – the vampire’.2 Nevertheless there is something distinctly different going on here to the earlier Gothic texts. Jane’s veil may be laden with symbolic significance, but it is a definitively material object, purchased in London by Rochester at lavish expense, and as such explicitly politicised by Jane, who is uneasy with the conspicuous consumption it represents. The language Brontë uses is self-consciously Gothic, and functions both to spectralise this object in Jane’s imagination and to produce Bertha as a specifically Gothicised figure. Nevertheless, it is not Bertha’s (or the veil’s) spectral properties that threaten to harm Jane, but her material existence as Rochester’s wife. Bertha is not a vampire, but a madwoman. Furthermore the veil itself does not literally conceal anything: it has been hanging innocuously in Jane’s closet. Nevertheless, its destruction by Bertha reveals the existence of a secret: Rochester is already married. The veil thus becomes a device not for concealment, but for marking the existence of a secret. The secret is not an essential property of the veil, but the means of its disclosure. The torn veil left discarded on Jane’s bedroom floor thus provides material evidence not only of the still more awful truth behind Jane’s Gothic imaginings but also of a new emphasis in the way clothes figure in Victorian Gothic literature. The focus on concealment paradoxically

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leads back to the surface: to the signs through which the secret is revealed. Clothing becomes the medium through which secrets can be constructed. Furthermore, Gothic fashions increasingly contribute to a social matrix linking material consumption, display and insanity. Bertha’s madness is not incidental to this process of refashioning. While Brontë may in many ways hark back to an earlier phase of representing the insane in terms of obvious violent derangement, rather than the more subtle gradations of Victorian monomanias and neuroses, her depiction of Bertha marks a turning point in the complex juxtaposition of the spectral and the material, to be repeated in texts like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860–61). In the early to mid-Victorian period, Gothic discourses no longer had the same distinct identity as in the heyday of their popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Gothic emerged in the form of themes, motifs, plot structures and points of stress in fiction that might otherwise be described as realist, such as that of Dickens and the Brontës. It also took a new popular form in the Sensation novel, which restaged characteristic concerns of crime, inheritance and particularly madness in a resolutely modern context. This focus reflected an emerging set of medical discourses reconfiguring the diagnosis and treatment of the insane, shifting from the practice of forcible restraint to more humane methods. The relationship between these discourses and the literature of the period has by now been discussed quite extensively, most notably by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth.3 Nevertheless this chapter hopes to place them in a new context by examining them specifically in the light of clothing. Attention to dress played a relatively small but significant part in discussions of madness in the nineteenth century. Under the broader doctrine of moral management, it could provide a means both of identifying insanity and of treating it. Some commentators associated the supposedly increased levels of insanity in the period with the stresses of modernity; at the same time, the burgeoning commercial culture and technical innovations in dress production and marketing (from ready-made clothing and mail order to the collapsible crinoline and aniline dyes) opened up a wider range of fashion choices to a wider range of consumers. Contrary to popular assumptions this did not produce an undifferentiated mass market but encouraged all classes of society to express their individual taste through consumer preference, to experience what Christopher Breward calls ‘the empowering nature of fantasy encoded within consumption’.4 As Breward writes in a later work,

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Clothing and the maintenance of a public persona were one area of ‘cultural’ production much less fixed and far more subjective than those fields associated with property or employment, yet central to the definition of social standing across the middle-class spectrum. … The sartorial presentation of self allowed for a negotiation with those more static class indicators, providing the possibility of movement from, or acquiescence with, the prevailing social stereotypes of what it meant to be middle-class.’5

Self-presentation became an essential element of social advancement and tied into discourses of self-help. This is reflected in Victorian Gothic fiction, which tends to pay much more specific and detailed attention to dress and other commodities than that of the preceding period. The manipulability of social persona through dress is sensationalised to produce the recurrent theme of the impeccable social façade that enables a discourse of secrecy to come into play. Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley ‘s Secret (1861–62) provides the paradigmatic example of this kind of narrative: Lucy Audley’s perfectly maintained feminine ideal, kept in place with a pattern of consumption that incorporates a range of products including perfume, hothouse flowers, fine dresses, ‘jewellery, ivory-backed hairbrushes, and exquisite china’, is the means of producing a series of secrets from lower-class origins to bigamy, murder and madness.6 Femininity is presented as an acquisition: Lucy tells her maid Phoebe that ‘with a bottle of hair dye, such as we see in the papers, and a pot of rouge, you’d be as good-looking as I any day’.7 Indeed appearances are all that separate Lady Audley from comparable social status to her maid. If Lucy Audley’s madness is coextensive with her maintenance of a notion of femininity grounded in accessories, insanity itself became corn-modified through fiction during this period: The Woman in White generated a merchandising industry producing themed bonnets, cloaks, perfume and dances.8 While this was not in itself a new practice – Matthew Lewis’s poem ‘Crazy Jane’ had started a fashion for a themed hat earlier in the century9 – the difference was in scale, and in the reflection of this new interest in commodities in the fiction itself. Victorian Gothic fiction traces the complex paths between madness, self-presentation, and consumerism, re-presenting all three in terms of a Gothicised subjectivity fashioned from clothes.

The philosophy of clothes and the psychology of concealment One of the major critics of the new commodity culture was Thomas Carlyle, whose first full-length work, Sartor Resartus (1833–34), is

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unique in that it is the only nineteenth-century philosophical text to concern itself with clothing. Although it initially received an extremely mixed critical response, after the publication in 1837 of Carlyle’s more instantly successful The French Revolution, Sartor Resartus found general acceptance and eventually became one of the bestsellers of the Victorian age. The initial critical hostility was in part due to the innovative style of the text, which is a genre-bending mixture of spoof biography, fiction, pseudo-translation, prophecy, philosophy and critical assessment. It purports to expound the notions of a fictional German Professor named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (which translates literally as ‘God-born Devil’s-dung’), the author of a text entitled Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken (Clothes, their Origin and Influence). Clothes are used as a metaphor for worldly objects and customs in which spiritual truth is inscribed, in a similar manner to St Augustine’s representation of the world as God’s book. For Carlyle, in effect, the world is God’s wardrobe. Twentieth-century critics have tended to follow through Carlyle’s ‘intentional’ reading of the text in which philosophical truth is privileged over the form in which it is expressed, sometimes to the extent of ignoring the fact that Carlyle says anything about clothes at all. However, this kind of approach passes too easily over the way in which clothes repeatedly ‘get in the way’ of inductive inference, enacting the very process of obscuring or replacing meaning that Carlyle describes as occurring in the external world. This manifests itself at the level of form in that the generic mixing foregrounds, through the juxtaposition of the voices of the Editor, Teufelsdröckh, and various other minor characters, the process of interpretation and creation of meaning from often recalcitrant symbols: the enigmatic paper bags marked with signs of the zodiac and containing Teufelsdröckh’s autobiography, for example. More importantly, however, the clothes themselves often draw the attention back to the surface and the phenomenal rather than the noumenal. If Teufelsdröckh’s ‘Philosophy of Clothes’ is profoundly ambiguous, combining reverence for the emblematic nature of clothes and disparagement for the way in which they obstruct vision, then this very ambiguity corresponds to the role clothing plays within Carlyle’s own text. Broadly speaking, Teufelsdröckh’s theory is that clothes (which are largely taken to stand for the material world in general) are the physical embodiments of an ideal, spiritual world: ‘all Emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven: must not the Imagination weave Garments, visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible

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creations and inspirations of our Reason are, like Spirits, revealed’.10 Thus clothes reveal and express the ideal world, but they may also disguise and conceal, or even replace it. Like the veil that communicates its property to the flesh, clothes turn men into clothesscreens – mere collections of garments with no substance. As Chris Baldick has discussed extensively, Carlyle implicitly references the Frankenstein myth in his representation of scarecrow-like humanity patched together from rags and charnel-house tatters.11 The raw materials from which clothing is made – wool, flax, silk, leather, fur – are presented as already dead and rotting on the body. At the same time, these empty husks are presented in another image borrowed from Gothic as possessed of an artificial life: ‘empty masks, full of beetles and spiders, yet glaring out … from their glass eyes, with a ghastly affectation of life’.12 Properties that should pertain to one thing are transferred to their opposite, so that the human body suggestively becomes a corpse, consumed by insects, but the glass-eyed mask fronting their body has come frighteningly to life. Dickens was enormously influenced by Carlyle (although intriguingly, Carlyle disapproved of his extravagant dress), and a similar sense of fabricated identities, as well as the same kind of transactions between the properties of life and death, occurs in his writing. The notion that clothing may possess a life of its own to the extent of supplanting its wearer is suggested by Dickens’s comicalgrotesque sketch, ‘Meditations in Monmouth Street’ (1836–37), which strongly recalls Carlyle’s own description of Monmouth Street (the centre of London’s second-hand clothes trade) in Sartor Resartus. For Carlyle, the ‘empty suits’ are ‘Ghosts’; in Dickens they are ‘dead’, ‘deceased’ and ‘mortal remains’. Carlyle’s Monmouth Street is a ‘temple’ for those who, like Teufelsdröckh, follow the Philosophy of Clothes. In Dickens’s more secular ‘burial place of the fashions’, clothes suggestively communicate not only the attributes of their wearers’ personalities but also their very life-force: whole rows of coats have started from their pegs, and buttoned up, of their own accord, round the waists of imaginary wearers; lines of trousers have jumped down to meet them; waistcoats have almost burst with anxiety to put themselves on; and half an acre of shoes have suddenly found feet to fit them, and gone stumping down the street with a noise that has fairly awakened us from our reverie.13

Dickens’s description is whimsical rather than uncanny but nevertheless presents its clothes as possessing the ‘ghastly affectation of life’ that Carlyle identifies. These clothes have more substance than

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their wearers, real or imaginary: they are able to button up ‘of their own accord’ and ‘put themselves on’. Dickens reprises this theme in a more straightforwardly Gothic mode with the description of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861). At Pip’s first meeting with Miss Havisham, he notes, I saw the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in a rich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me.14

Over the course of this passage a transition is enacted between the living bride and the inanimate skeleton. What should be living – Miss Havisham – becomes withered and diminished, corpse-like, while the waxwork and skeleton, which should be inanimate, appear to be alive. The only constant feature in each version of Miss Havisham is her eyes, which in the corpse-like woman are unnaturally bright, but in the animated skeleton disturbingly dark. When Pip watches the spiders and beetles running in and out of the rotten wedding-cake, Miss Havisham insists that ‘This … is where I shall be laid when I am dead’, leading Pip to fear that she might ‘get upon the table there and then’.15 She thereby creates an equivalence between her dead self and the ‘crawling things’ that explicitly recalls Carlyle’s ‘ghastly affectation of life’. By refusing to change her clothes from those she was wearing at the moment she was jilted, she has become so completely defined by her garments that she has effectively become them. Even when her dress is destroyed by the fire, she uncannily retains her former appearance: Though every vestige of her dress was burnt, as they told me, she still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had covered her to the throat with white cotton wool, and as she lay with a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of something that had been and was changed was still upon her.16

Despite change, Miss Havisham remains locked in the past, a living corpse beneath a ‘white sheet’ that explicitly prefigures her shroud. Laid on the table where she once claimed her corpse would be laid out,

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she has implicitly become ‘the complete realization of the ghastly waxwork at the Fair’ that Pip so dreads.17 Despite Carlyle’s (or Teufelsdröckh’s) disgust with the ‘despicable thatch’ in which he is clothed, clothing retains an ambiguous status in Sartor Resartus.18 For Carlyle as for Burke, civilisation is represented as an essentially clothed state, to the extent that man as a social being exists only through the assumption of dress: Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions, social polity; Clothes have made Men of us; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens of us.19 his Body and the Cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby [man’s] beautified edifice, of a Person, is to be built.20 Society … is founded upon cloth.21

If Burke, however, associates clothing with wonder and chivalry, the high points of civilisation, for Carlyle it is only by seeing through clothes ‘as through a magical Pierre-Pertuis, thou lookest, even for moments, into the region of the Wonderful, and seest and feelest that thy daily life is girt with Wonder, and based on Wonder, and thy very blankets and breeches are miracles’.22 In order to do this Carlyle denaturalises clothing, insisting that we recognise the constructedness of costume and that its various usages have specific social purposes; this is in contrast to previous writers who have hitherto regarded clothes ‘as quite natural and spontaneous, like the leaves of trees, like the plumage of birds. In all speculations they have tacitly figured man as a Clothed Animal; whereas he is by nature a Naked Animal; and only in certain circumstances, by purpose and device, masks himself in Clothes.’23 Nevertheless, these purposes amount to more than simple practical needs for warmth and modesty: clothing’s primary function is decorational, as in the tattooing and body painting of ‘wild people’, which do not fulfil functional needs for survival.24 While Carlyle suggests that this is debased, the spiritual desire for ornament being a mark of barbarism, his own argument somewhat undermines itself: man may be naturally a naked animal, but does not exist anywhere in this natural state, as even primitive peoples are always already clothed. Unlike Paine and Wollstonecraft, Carlyle does not suggest that it is possible to strip away clothes until one reaches the irreducible truth of the naked body, for he recognises that the body is in itself another form of clothing, a ‘Garment of Flesh’25 for the transcendent spirit: ‘Nay, if you consider it, what is man himself, and his whole terrestrial Life, but an Emblem; a Clothing or visible Garment for that divine ME of his,

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cast hither, like a light-particle, down from Heaven? Thus he is said also to be clothed with a Body.’26 True nakedness could hypothetically be achieved by denuding the spirit of all its earthly vestments; however, Carlyle does not seem to suggest that this is practically possible. Rather, he seeks to ‘look fixedly on clothes … till they become transparent’.27 This suggests, like the title of Anne Hollander’s book, the pun on ‘seeing through clothes’ – to see through clothes to what lies underneath or to see the world through the medium of clothes. Through this process, on the one hand, clothes become progressively more insubstantial; on the other, they hijack the process of seeing itself so that they suggestively construct what is experienced as reality. Thus, in effect, the gaze becomes defined through what it sees. The gaze that aims to render clothes transparent, furthermore, is not synonymous with the Enlightenment gaze of light and reason with which Paine and Wollstonecraft suggest we banish the outmoded garments of a corrupt system. Teufelsdrôckh’s thought is based on a simplified version of German Idealism, which makes a distinction between the discursive faculty of the understanding ( Verstand), and the intuitive faculty of reason (Vernunft). The former, associated with eighteenth-century British Empirical tradition (of which Paine and Wollstonecraft as well as Utilitarianism form a part), is represented as ‘vulgar Logic’, which may provide accurate factual information but cannot provide genuine insight into noumenal rather than phenomenal realities. It is reason, therefore, that allows access to the ‘intuitive’ realms of wonder and imagination.28 The ‘progress of science’, Carlyle declares, ‘is to destroy Wonder’, and the scientific gaze without this quality is ‘but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye’.29 Spectacles are a form of garment which are not only already transparent in themselves, but which also should aid the sight, making other objects ‘transparent’ in the sense of clearly recognised and understood. However, without an eye behind them the spectacles are useless, merely ornamental. The gaze becomes metonymically represented through the item of clothing it should see through. Thus on the one hand, Carlyle suggests that clothing forms a kind of magic key (or, indeed, keyhole) through which, if we learn to interpret it correctly, we can access higher truth and release the ‘divinity in man’. On the other hand, his insistence on the ubiquity of clothes tends to undermine the transcendentalism, suggesting an irredeemably debased modern world fraught with the anxiety that the material has replaced the spiritual and clothing has replaced identity.

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The resulting conflict remains unresolved by the text and the tension it creates gives the book much of its distinctive energy. These contradictory tendencies are also reflected in a characteristic construct of Victorian psychology, in which the drive to render transparent is balanced with the contrary drive to obfuscate and deflect meaning into surfaces. As Sally Shuttleworth argues, the notion of concealment is a vital element of selfhood in the Victorian period. Recalling Carlyle’s sartorial rhetoric, Esquirol’s enormously influential Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (1838, translated 1845) for example, constructed the insane as naked and the sane, therefore, as implicitly clothed: [The asylum] is the same world, but its distinctive characters are more noticeable, its features more marked, its colors more vivid, its effects more striking, because man there displays himself in all his nakedness; dissimulating not his thoughts, nor concealing his defects, lending not to his passions seductive charms, nor to his vices deceitful appearances.30

As Shuttleworth suggests, this passage not only describes the asylum in terms of a heightened normality (rather than an arena of essential difference), but also contains the disturbing implication that the healthy psyche is predicated upon a condition of concealment. This is not dissimilar from Carlyle’s own conception of madness, which suggests that man must build ‘a habitable flowery Earth-rind’ over the ‘dark foundations’ of irrationality present in everyone.31 As John D. Rosenberg suggests, ‘Sanity for Carlyle is not a natural condition but a fragile achievement, “creatively built” and constantly imperilled.’32 Esquirol’s construction of madness as a form of nakedness disconcertingly aligns it with a morally elevated, Rousseauesque state of ‘natural’ innocence; for Carlyle, on the other hand, the ‘Nether Chaotic Deep’ of madness is not so much ‘natural’ as beyond signification. Society allocates different symbols to insanity according to its current customs and beliefs (in this case, science superseding superstition) but gets no closer to apprehending its ‘true’ nature: ‘Witchcraft, and all manner of Spectre-work, and Demonology, we have now named Madness and Diseases of the Nerves. Seldom reflecting that still the new question comes upon us: What is Madness, what are Nerves?’33 Scientific diagnoses of madness, Carlyle implies, are simply another form of clothes. The ‘spectacles without an eye’ implicitly perform these scientific judgements without true knowledge of what they are observing, seeing only the ‘custom-woven, wonder-hiding Garments’ and not the real substance of their objects. Esquirol’s statement similarly indicates the tautological nature of the

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problem, implicitly suggesting that any individual who does not participate in the conventions of society, as symbolised by clothes, is necessarily insane. Shuttleworth uses the notion of concealment found in Esquirol to qualify facile surface-and-depth models of the psyche: ‘the condition of selfhood’, she argues, ‘is dependent on having something to conceal: it is the very disjunction between inner and outer form which creates the self’.34 Interiority, therefore, is generated by this continual process or drive towards concealment, even if there is no original object to be hidden. Through popular scientific discourses such as phrenology, the Victorian subject comes to participate in an eroticised series of acts of interpretation or unveiling, and baffling that activity in others, of which Jane Eyre’s encounters with Rochester provide the paradigmatic example. These activities, therefore, ultimately become pleasurable ends in themselves, quite divorced from the purpose of concealing or discovering secret information. This is reflected not only in Carlyle’s ‘Clothes-Screens’, under which shame is mysteriously produced through the process of concealment,35 but arguably in female fashions of the time, which apparently revelled in an extraordinarily excessive quantity of garments and undergarments, beyond all practical purpose of concealing or protecting the body. In the mid-1850s a typical lady of fashion would have worn, beneath her outer garments, a chemise and a corset on her upper half, and on her lower body lace-trimmed drawers, a flannel petticoat, an under-petticoat, a whaleboned petticoat wadded to the knees, a starched flounced petticoat, and two muslin petticoats – seven layers in all before the addition of the dress. This bracketing of the female body by successive layers of cloth (the petticoat-within-a-petticoat structure recalling the characteristically Gothic ‘Chinese box’ narrative) effects a very visible concealment which is thus, in effect, not a concealment at all, as it ultimately serves to emphasise what is hidden. The introduction of the crinoline in the late 1850s liberated women from some of the weight incurred by the sheer quantity of material but nevertheless created a kind of double concealment, in that it produced an even more voluminous effect, while actually reducing the number of layers required. One might imagine the undressing of such ensembles as a similar narrative to that of the Sensation novel as described by Lyn Pykett: a secret is disclosed which turns out to be not the real secret; an undergarment removed which turns out to be not the real undergarment. This is perhaps not so much a mystification of the female body as the practice of ‘creative evasion’ that Shuttleworth attributes to Lucy Snowe of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853).36

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Villette is saturated with references to clothing; while Lucy affects scorn for following fashion or beautifying herself, she both obsessively recounts the dress of others, and is continually preoccupied with wearing ‘appropriate’ dress. Tony Tanner suggests this is a symptom of bourgeois materialism, which the novel partially parodies, particularly in the painting of Cleopatra, who sports an ‘abundance of material – seven-and-twenty yards, I should say, of drapery’ but nevertheless ‘managed to make inefficient raiment’.37 In this reading Cleopatra is implicitly a supreme example of Thorstein Veblen’s contention that female fashion in capitalist culture is a means of displaying the male’s wealth and status: her excessive and wasteful consumption of fabric signals her position as sexual and aesthetic commodity. Nevertheless, the anxiety the painting evokes in Lucy is more subtle than a singlehanded rejection of sexual politics under capitalism, and has more to do with her dismissal of the painting as ‘claptrap’, one of the terms Eve Sedgwick uses to characterise the impatience critics have conventionally had with the Gothic.38 Throughout the novel Lucy is preoccupied with the notion of hypocrisy, a term she uses to describe the series of pictures denoting ‘la vie d’une femme’ that M Paul directs her to, and which is consistently associated with the Catholic culture of Labassecour. Thus the pink dress given her by Mrs Bretton, or the male costume she is induced to wear for the school play, afford her intense anxiety, primarily because they draw attention to her when she would rather be overlooked, but also because they seem to cause a disjunction between internal and external, to suggest that she is something that she is not. Visiting the ‘coiffeur’ before the school fête, she ‘could hardly believe what the glass said when I applied to it for information afterwards; the lavish garlandry of woven brown hair amazed me – I feared it was not all my own, and it required several convincing pulls to give assurance to the contrary’.39 Once persuaded that her hair is not fake, she is prepared to acknowledge the hairdresser’s artistry, which is clearly distinguished here from artifice. Her reaction to the Cleopatra is of a pattern with these responses: her criterion for a good painting is that it is realistic, like the ‘exquisite little pictures of still life’ she admires hung beneath the Cleopatra.40 Art, for Lucy, should apparently follow Ruskin’s dictates of ‘truth to nature’. Nevertheless, much of her unease in the Catholic community of Villette derives precisely from the fact that representation persistently swerves from such implicitly Protestant values, and frequently does so through the medium of costume. Gilbert and Gubar’s reading of the novel uses this feature in order to set up a conventional surface-and-depth model of the psyche based

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both on psychoanalysis and on the Romantic concept of a ‘buried self, in which somehow more ‘authentic’ passions and desires are concealed behind a social exterior. They relate this model to clothing by suggesting that the protagonist Lucy Snowe is similar to her predecessor at the Belgian school, Mrs Sweeny: ‘this alcoholic washerwoman has successfully passed herself off as an English lady in reduced circumstances by means of a splendid wardrobe that was clearly made for proportions other than her own. A counterfeiter, she reminds us that Lucy too hides her passions behind her costume.’41 The notion that Lucy is ‘hiding something’ preoccupies critics, who point to gaps and elisions in the first-person narrative; however, as suggested above, it is the process of concealment that is of importance to Victorian self-fashioning and not what is actually being hidden. Clothing plays a significantly more complex role than a mere ‘disguise’ for an implicitly ‘true’ identity or ‘deeper’ emotions. Gilbert and Gubar, for example, cite a passage in which Ginevra Fanshawe ‘is aware, as no one else is, that Lucy is “a personage in disguise’”, as a powerful insight into Lucy’s character.42 Not only is this not an insight of Ginevra’s, but an ironic suggestion of Lucy herself; it is also a repetition of Ginevra’s specific lack of insight. Ginevra is mystified by Lucy’s social ascendancy despite her apparent lack of prepossessing qualities, and latches on to Lucy’s comment by thinking she must have a ‘secret’ identity that she is concealing from her. She begs Lucy ‘with ludicrous tenacity’ to reveal this secret to her, but Lucy insists that she is only ‘a rising character: once an old lady’s companion, then a nursery governess, now a school-teacher’.43 Ginevra adheres to the cultural narrative that suspects any character who rises must be ‘peculiar and … mysterious’: must, like Braddon’s Lady Audley, have a secret. Lucy, oddly, defends the perpetrator of this kind of narrative while insisting that she personally does not need to conceal her humble origins in order to safeguard her sense of self-respect: If a man feels that he would become contemptible in his own eyes were it generally known that his ancestry were simple and not gentle, poor and not rich, workers and not capitalists, would it be right severely to blame him for keeping these fatal facts out of sight – for starting, trembling, quailing at the chance which threatens exposure?44

Here, the capitalist narrative of social ascension is predicated upon concealment of origins. Lucy, however, has no significant origins to expose; she has no secret as such, but the narrative process of ascension demands she must produce one. The process of producing a secret is precisely that which the narrative and Lucy’s own psychology describe,

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and furthermore, this is where the narrative converges most strongly with Gothic narrative conventions. Lucy’s secret, whether regarded as her mysteriously rising fortunes, her hidden attraction to Dr John or her sightings of the ghostly nun (commonly interpreted by psychoanalytic critics as a symptom of her repressed desire), is conceived of in terms of a Gothic vocabulary of ghosts, spectres and dungeons. As Sally Shuttleworth argues in detail, these Gothic metaphors cluster around Dr John’s diagnosis of Lucy’s ‘Hypochondria’. Dr John apparently compounds his role as voyeur, simultaneously describing himself as oddly passive, by suggesting his expertise looks in and sees a chamber of torture, but can neither see nor do much’.45 The body/mind (not clearly distinguished here) is itself constructed as a Gothic building, which suggestively contains another body/mind inside it that is undergoing the torture. The torture chamber simultaneously is and acts upon the subject: it suggests a chain of replicated chambers within chambers and selves within selves that recedes to infinity. Similarly, Shuttleworth suggests that boundaries of the self are dissolved in the novel as metaphors used for surroundings are transposed onto self: to Lucy, furniture looks ‘spectral’, but she also attributes that quality to herself, supposing she must look ‘like some ghost’. If hypochondria is also a ‘ghost’ or a ‘spectre’ that Lucy describes as visiting the king of Labassecour, the affliction and the afflicted appear strangely conflated.46 The most dramatic example of this process of the Gothicisation of the psyche, however, lies in the figure of the nun. As many critics including Gilbert and Gubar and Eve Sedgwick have noted, the nun always appears at moments of heightened sexual tension, when Lucy has the greatest difficulty in controlling her desires. At the end of the novel, the nun receives a Radcliffean exposure, and is revealed as Ginevra’s suitor in disguise. Conventionally critics have stressed how, again as in Radcliffe, the appearance of the nun is somehow in excess of the explanation, functions as more than the sum of its parts. However, seen in terms of the displacement of the secret onto the Gothicised body, it can also be read as less than the sum of its parts. Towards the end of the novel, Lucy returns home from opium-fuelled wandering through the carnival at Villette, to find the nun apparently lying in her bed. On closer inspection it turns out to be her bolster dressed up in a ‘genuine’ nun’s habit and veil.47 This strange insistence on the authenticity of the nun’s garments, despite the fact that the apparition in itself is not authentic, suggests an emptying out of meaning onto surfaces, so that the nun’s identity consists only in her

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costume. The nun’s literal role is vacated to become a signifier only of its own formation, the process of fashioning the disguise and bolstering it out. Thus the external orchestration of the disguise is in fact the only meaning or signification that the nun possesses; the supervision of a Gothic space which contains nothing more than the secrets of its own production. Lucy’s destruction of the apparition is figured in terms of an exorcism (she describes the nun in demonic terms as an ‘incubus’ and a ‘goblin’) that constitutes a literal fragmentation of the garments – the reduction to surfaces, negating the illusion of depth. Finally, she stows the remaining bundle of fabric beneath her pillow, selfreflexively repeating the act of constructing the secret. The ‘creative evasion’ of Lucy Snowe can therefore be interpreted as reflecting not any concealed depths within her psyche, but rather the process of generating an appropriate narrative with which to insert the self into discourse. A central incident in the novel occurs when Lucy, made desperate by her long isolation over the summer holiday, gives confession to a Catholic priest, apparently because she has no other means of expressing her misery. Despite the fact that she abhors Catholicism, Lucy is driven to confession by the need to articulate the self. Warwick and Cavallaro have described how dress can be seen as equivalent to Foucault’s description of confession in Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality (1976) as a means of inserting the body into discourse: ‘If all speaking of the self is confession, then as well as seeing the flesh made word, we can also see the flesh made fabric through clothing: dress is the text that first clothes and then displaces the body.’48 Thus the focus on clothing within the novel can be seen not as ‘disguise’ for Lucy’s authentic feelings, expression of her repressed sexuality, or even a parody of bourgeois materialism. Rather, it constitutes a vital part of the drive towards narrativisation, the need to speak of the self. As such it is the instrument not of repression but rather of the production of Lucy’s desire. The generating of a ‘secret’ is part of this process; however, just as clothing ultimately displaces the body in its articulation of it, the methods of the secret’s production ultimately displace whatever matter it may or may not contain.

Modes of wearing the hat: madness and sartorial coercion If the Victorian psyche predicated a space of concealment formed through an arrangement of surfaces, exterior appearances could logically provide an index to the psyche, and a means of rearranging it to correspond with societal norms. This was taken almost literally by

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the most popular method of treating the insane in the early to midVictorian period, the practice of ‘moral management’. As Elaine Showalter demonstrates, this school of thought emerged in response to the new medical category of ‘moral insanity’, a term first introduced in 1835 for a range of behaviour not conforming to the generally accepted and approved standards of society, but not necessarily involving any obvious derangement. Moral management aimed to restore the senses of the afflicted by gentle, paternalistic supervision and encouragement towards socially appropriate behaviour, usually associated with the domestic norm. Showalter points out the contradictions of this form of treatment: while apparently more humane than the brutal restraints previously exercised on the mad, it nevertheless constricted women (who she argues formed the majority of the patients) within the very ideology of domesticity that produced their ‘deviance’ in the first place. John Conolly, the new treatment’s best known practitioner, argues in The Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums (1847) that dress codes provide one of the most effective means of both diagnosing and curing madness. He suggests that, ‘Among the most constant indications of insanity are to be observed negligence or peculiarity as to dress, and many patients seem to lack the power of regulating it according to the seasons, or the weather, or the customs of society.’49 Thus by encouraging female patients to take care over their appearance, he considers it frequently possible to redirect them back towards mental health, dress codes metonymically representing the ‘customs of society’ as a whole. Clearly these dress codes implicitly represented a normative and class-specific version of femininity. As Jenny Bourne Taylor suggests, the figure of middle-class feminine domestic virtue came to be seen as the epitome of rationality and selfmanagement, and working- and upper-class women were thus considered the most susceptible to insanity – Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60), for example, representing either pole. Thus wearing inappropriate or eccentric dress – like Anne Catherick’s fixation on dressing in white – could be read as a distinct sign of mental disorder. The new techniques of photographing the insane established in the 1850s allowed practitioners to catalogue the physiognomy of madness, the facial features and expressions through which insanity could be identified. Nevertheless, in many cases, the signs of insanity seem to be produced not simply through physiognomy but also through the dress code of the subjects. A sufferer from ‘chronic mania’ photographed by Hugh Diamond is shown wearing her bonnet

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back-to-front. Another image taken by James Crichton Browne identifies an asylum inmate, sporting sausage curls, an enormous locket and an elaborate corsage, as suffering from ‘Intense Vanity’. Here madness appears to proceed precisely out of an over-adherence to or exaggeration of codes of femininity, a failed masquerade. As Showalter remarks, the subject wears ‘a costume too girlish for her years and unflattering to her heavy features, but hardly, it would seem, so tasteless as to demand sequestration’.50 The Sensation fiction of the 1860s and 1870s linked these new codes to the more familiar Gothic concerns with costume and disguise. In J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel The Rose and the Key (1871), the heroine Maud Vernon arrives unknown to herself at a lunatic asylum, and encounters a number of bizarre characters whose eccentricities are first suggested to her by their being ‘dressed extremely oddly, not to say grotesquely’.51 Like Esquirol’s asylum, Glarewoods is a heightened, intensified version of the world outside – the mirror image of Lady Mardykes’s residence, Carsbrook, where Maud believes she has been taken – but rather than a place in which dissimulation gives way to nakedness, it is a place in which garments come detached from all logical referents in a bizarre masquerade of social convention. Mr ApJenkins, for example, who is convinced he is the Spanish ambassador, wears a theatrical combination of white kid gloves, ‘shorts’, black silk stockings, ebony and gold walking cane, and ‘a short black cloak thrown Spanish fashion, in spite of the heat of the weather, across his breast and over his shoulder’. However, most significantly, he sports a broad-leafed black felt hat, concerning which he explains to Maud: ‘Have you observed, I entreat, any peculiarity in me? I anticipate your reply. You have. You remarked that in accosting you I merely touched, without removing, my hat. … I have the very great honour to represent her Majesty the Queen of Spain. … I cannot uncover before a subject. You understand. It is alike my painful prerogative and my loyal duty. I must in all but royal presence retain my hat.’52

Mr Ap-Jenkins’s delusion is crystallised in this one extremely codified gesture which notably marks a class /status boundary, albeit, in this instance, a fantasised one. It is also unnervingly reminiscent of Conolly’s insistence in The Indications of Insanity (1830) that ‘the very mode of wearing the hat will differ in the same man, in his sane and in his insane state’.53 Maud, who initially interprets the character as eccentric but nevertheless perfectly sane, does not possess the expertise to ‘read’ the signs that have gone awry. Her ignorance evokes the fear of the lay outsider that the unspecific continuum between

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merely eccentric and morally insane behaviour could lead to overpathologisation, as articulated by All the Year Round in 1862: ‘Let us account no man a lunatic whom it requires a mad-doctor to prove insane.’54 This anxiety over the fallibility of the diagnostic process is, of course, precisely encapsulated in Maud’s own plight. Deviance from class norms in dress was, in fact, frequently identified as the manifestation of madness. Conolly argues that ‘in private asylums, each gentleman should be encouraged to dress according to his station’, suggesting that failure to maintain class distinctions is inimical to order and therefore to health.55 In Collins’s The Woman in White, Hartright considers that Laura’s favourite plain white muslin dress differs ‘rather in material than in colour’ from those worn by her companions, being ‘the sort of dress which the wife or daughter of a poor man might have worn’, thus deviating from the conventions of her class status.56 Similarly, in The Rose and the Key, Maud is committed to the asylum largely on the charge that while on holiday she prefers to wear a dark serge dress rather than the more sophisticated costume appropriate to her rank, supposedly in order to ward off opportunistic suitors, but, according to the testimony of her mother’s minions, because she suffers from the delusion that she is a penniless artist. Maud’s delight in this sartorial subterfuge is, to a certain extent, in excess of her justification for it, particularly her satisfaction in duping the highly conventional romantic hero Charles Marston – a kind of ‘creative evasion’ not dissimilar from that of Lucy Snowe. The converse to this form of playful deception is represented in the Duchess of Falconbury, a.k.a. Mrs Fish, a lunatic Maud meets while at Glarewoods, and in some respects Maud’s double.57 The duchess is ‘a prepossessing young lady, dressed in very exquisite taste … with a gracious and kind expression, and a countenance so riant’ that Maud is irresistibly attracted towards her.58 Her masquerade is so successful that the only impropriety in her appearance is, in fact, that she is Mrs Fish of New York and not a duchess at all, and is therefore dressed inappropriately for her station in society. Recalling Browne’s sufferer from Intense Vanity, she remarks to Maud, ‘you are sweetly pretty; but by no means so pretty as I’.59 She also regales Maud with a stream of melodramatic fabrications ‘which, if one had only heard without seeing her, would have led one to suppose that she was reading a written composition rather than talking in colloquial English’.60 What reveals Mrs Fish as a fraud is that her masquerade is too polished, that she has her role off pat. She is enacting, or rather overacting, a bourgeois fantasy of aristocracy.

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Many of the surviving asylum photographs of the period demonstrate a similar sense of masquerade: as Showaiter demonstrates, many images dress up their subjects either in the characteristic garments and accessories of bourgeois, domestic femininity, or as approximations of cultural fantasies of madness, embodied in the literary stereotypes of Ophelia and Crazy Jane. Young women with disordered, flower-strewn hair appear with predictable regularity. One might question, however, whether such accoutrements represent the fantasies of the photographer or the subject: there is no way of knowing whether cultural stereotype influenced the physicians’ preconceptions or the patients’ delusions (these stereotypes were readily available to a wide audience through the medium of popular ballads as well as ‘high’ cultural artefacts). Helen Small argues, ‘By mid-century, [Ophelia] rarely entered the academic writing of even the most urbane physicians’; rather, Ophelia’s image came to represent a form of cultural capital which physicians such as Conolly employed in work intended for a lay audience.61 Just as the fictional Mrs Fish enacts her own Sensation narrative, in which her husband has been poisoned by the fascinating but wicked Lady Mardykes, it does not appear unlikely that these historical cases should similarly recycle popular cultural images in their own self-presentation. Showalter thus perhaps exaggerates the degree of coercion involved in the visual presentation of the insane. Conolly’s description of a patient afflicted with ‘Religious Mania’, for example, shows her choosing to be photographed with a book rather than having it foisted upon her, in order to compensate for a perceived lack of dignity in her asylum costume: In the case in question, the patient made some objection to her own dress, which she evidently thought not very becoming; and she at length made it a condition of her sitting quiet that she should be represented with a book in her hand. The book, indeed, was held upside down; but it did quite as well. Her sense of propriety was gratified.62

Indeed the encouragement of the subject to take an active part in the proceedings was seen by Conolly as a vital part of photography’s efficacy in assisting rehabilitation. Furthermore, considering that the object of moral management was emphatically the cure of the mental patient, the frequent use of the ‘before and after’ convention in portraiture of the insane might not only provide evidence of medical success but also reflect the patient’s own satisfaction with their restored health. Sander Gilman remarks of aesthetic surgery that ‘Real change as measured by the patient is the sole proof of the success of the

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operation. And the way to give the patient this proof is through the photograph.’63 Diamond noted similar effects on many of his mental patients: In many cases [the photographs] are examined with much pleasure and interest, but more particularly in those which mark the progress and cure of a severe attack of Mental Aberration. I may particularly refer to the four portraits which represent different phases of the case of the same young person. … This patient could scarcely believe that her last portrait, representing her as clothed and in her right mind, could ever have been preceded by something so fearful; and she will never cease, with these faithful monitors in her hand, to express the most lively feelings of gratitude for a recovery so marked and unexpected.64

In many cases of insane portraiture, the ‘Ophelia’ type represents the ‘before’ image while the domesticised type signifies the convalescent patient. The patient as well as the doctor could use such a contrast as reassurance of their own progress. It is arguable that the patients’ exertion of choice over the way they were presented renders them objects of knowledge as effectively as more overt surveillance; nevertheless, providing the patients themselves with the use of this knowledge also permits them a certain degree of autonomy. Showalter, by overlooking the patient’s participation in the process of portraiture or their subsequent consumption of the image, repeats the act of denying their agency. While contemporary ideologies of femininity and of a paternalistic medical establishment clearly determined the ways in which such images were constructed, portraiture of the insane did not necessarily represent a monolithic exercise of power, but rather a negotiation of the conditions of sickness and health through visual convention. The two types of visual representation can be illustrated by Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–62). Lady Audley’s mother is a sanitised, ‘golden-haired, blue-eyed, girlish’ Ophelia, rather like the childlike version in Arthur Hughes’s painting of 1852, skipping around the asylum with ‘her golden curls decorated with natural flowers’.65 Lady Audley herself, on the other hand, is a more subtle portrayal of feminine madness, as in outward appearance she is a paradigmatic version of the idealised ‘angel in the house’. Braddon argues: ‘All mental distress is, with some show of reason, associated in our minds with loose, disordered garments, and dishevelled hair, and an appearance in every way the reverse of my lady’s.’66 Lady Audley’s mother’s insanity is thus apparently ‘natural’ in that it fulfils conventional expectations of the appearance of female deviance, and is

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expressed through the visual stereotype of real flowers, recalling Esquiro’s reading of insanity as man in a state of nature. Lady Audley, however, is perceived as so artificial that she is equated with the gorgeous objects in her chamber, and apparently takes on the qualities of her clothes: ‘her cheeks tinged with as delicate a pink as the pale hue of her muslin morning dress’.67 As this chapter will explore in more depth later on, she demonstrates an extreme sophistication in manipulating visual conventions and dressing to effect, exploiting conventional ideas of femininity in order to further her own interests. While this representation of madness is every bit as circumscribed as Diamond’s Ophelias, it proceeds out of a stereotype of normality rather than of deviance, and for this reason is far more difficult to assimilate.

Any colour, as long as it’s white: managing the moral self The practice of a kind of moral management through clothing by female characters is a frequent feature in novels of the 1860s and 1870s. In Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, for instance, Mrs Fairlie insists on passing on her daughter’s old frocks to the young Anne Catherick, ‘explaining to her that little girls of her complexion looked neater and better in all white than in anything else’.68 The vague moral approbation in the term ‘better’ (rather than, for example, ‘prettier’), suggests not only the conventional association of white with purity and moral rectitude but also that wearing white frocks will somehow fit her ‘better’ for society. In the event, this incidence of moral management fails because Anne learns her lesson too well, refusing to wear any colour besides white for the rest of her life. It also fails because Collins implicitly undermines the moral associations attached to the colour white. C. Willett Cunnington records a case of a woman married in grey silk in 1871 because, at twenty-three (the same age as Anne at her death), she was considered ‘too old to wear white’.69 Anne’s insistence on wearing white beyond childhood detaches it from its original moral function, loosening it from its signified (’the good, neat child’) so that it becomes an excessive, floating signifier which can only be made sense of through the categories of mystery (her spectral appearances in churchyard and on heath) or irrationality (her sartorial monomania). Similarly, in a later novel by Collins, Poor Miss Finch (1872), the blind heroine Lucilla displays a marked antipathy towards dark colours and a preference for white, despite never having seen either. Like Laura and Anne, Lucilla insists on wearing light colours and even refuses to allow her companions to dress in dark shades, an obsession which

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seems all the more monomaniacal for the fact that her colour-detection through touch is frequently unreliable. The German doctor who restores her sight notes (in his broken accent) that this is both a common prejudice in the blind and typical of young women: ‘White is the fancy of a young girls. … In these cataracts-cases. … It is always black that they hate.’70 This is given a racial inflection in that on meeting a ‘Hindoo gentleman’, Lucilla shrinks in uncontrollable disgust due to her idea of the darkness of his complexion, to the embarrassment of the enlightened aunt who has introduced them. Once able to see, however, Lucilla finds that the mental image she had of each colour was an exaggerated one, and until she has become accustomed to her restored sensory capacity is unable in every circumstance to identify dark and light colours. Thus she learns to overcome her prejudice against the hero, whose skin has turned dark blue from the effects of taking silver nitrate as a cure for epilepsy. Conventional notions of light as good and dark as evil are overturned as the hero’s fair-skinned twin brother, after initially seeming the preferable character, is discovered to be corrupt while the discoloured Oscar emerges as the hero. Through the device of a character who is unable to see, Collins reveals the arbitrary and culturally constructed nature of colour-associations (and indirectly, of skin-colour prejudice). Poor Miss Finch is unusual, however, in that it ultimately rests its contrast of light and dark within an investigation of the nature of masculinity. In The Woman in White, the crucial association is between white and femininity. As John Harvey argues, the contrast of men in black with women in white was a perennial Victorian theme, permeating visual depictions of nineteenth-century social gatherings. White was also an alternative mourning colour to black, again frequently for children, suggesting that Anne’s costume is a form of prolonged mourning for Mrs Fairlie. Collins’s novel extensively exploits its conventionally Gothic associations with the spectral, the bridal and the shroud-like, Anne’s mistaken appearance as the ‘ghost’ of Mrs Fairlie uncannily foreshadowing her own death and burial in Laura’s grave, as well as Laura’s live burial within the asylum. The white wedding-dress worn by Laura in Anne Catherick’s dream is the cipher for her powerlessness and exploitation, recalling Angela Carter’s definition, ‘the supreme icon of woman as a sexual thing and nothing else whatever’.71 Similarly Laura’s own eccentric passion for white clothing (a fixation differing only in degree from Anne’s) eventually becomes a cipher for her own blankness or absence, which provides Fosco and Sir Percival with the practical means of erasing her identity. As Lyn Pykett points out, Anne is Laura without the social and

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economic advantages, and therefore by obliterating Laura’s social and legal identity Sir Percival Glyde is able to close the difference between them. Anne and Laura are notably unlike the controversial midnineteenth century ‘girl of the period’ whose defiance of familial control and social customs, like Rachel Verinder of The Moonstone (1868) or Le Fanu’s Maud Vernon, risks being interpreted as madness.72 Rather, their ‘conventional feminine dependence and passivity, in the absence of the social and familial framework which usually produce and sustain it, becomes a form of illness, an aberrant psychological state’.73 In fact this passive femininity is itself construed as a kind of absence, as Walter Hartright uneasily states of Laura: another impression … in a shadowy way, suggested to me the idea of something wanting. At one time it seemed like something wanting in her; at another, like something wanting in myself, which hindered me from understanding her as I ought. The impression was always strongest, in the most contradictory manner, when she looked at me; or, in other words, when I was most conscious of the harmony and charm of her face, and yet, at the same time, most troubled by the sense of an incompleteness which it was impossible to discover.74

It is precisely when Hartright is most conscious of her ideal femininity – the pleasing integration of her features and manner, as contrasted with Marian’s unsettlingly disjunctive appearance – that he is most aware of this ‘incompleteness’. His confusion is similar to that when he first encounters Anne, and is ‘perplexed and distressed by an uneasy sense of having done wrong, which left me confusedly ignorant of how I could have done right’.75 Of course the ‘something wanting’ in Laura is her resemblance to Anne, and in Anne is both her sanity and the ‘Secret’ which she talks about incessantly but does not really know. There is also a sense, however, in which the unsettling lack in Laura’s face is of just what Anne has gained to her detriment – the lines of suffering which make her distinguishable from Laura. Experience is seen as marking or defacing the exterior of the female body, and therefore absence of experience is a necessary requirement for ideal femininity. There are in fact two different kinds of whiteness in the novel, one associated with blankness and one with purity, and the proximity between the two is what enables the villains to manipulate them for their own benefit. The pair are contrasted at the moment when Walter Hartright visits Mrs Fairlie’s grave, and discovers that someone (Anne, it later transpires) has been cleaning the headstone:

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The natural whiteness of the cross was a little clouded, here and there, by weather-stains; and rather more than one half of the square block beneath it, on the side that bore the inscription, was in the same condition. The other half, however, attracted my attention at once by its singular freedom from stain or impurity of any kind. I looked closer, and discovered that it had been cleaned – recently cleaned, in a downward direction from top to bottom.76

The difference between the clean half and the stained half is implicitly echoed by Hartright’s comments when he sees Anne for the second time: The delicate beauty of Miss Fairlie’s complexion, the transparent clearness of her eyes, the smooth purity of her skin, the tender bloom of colour on her lips, were all missing from the worn, weary face that was now turned towards mine. … If ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie’s face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance-resemblance, the living reflexions of one another.77

The whiteness of Anne and Laura is analogous to the whiteness of the headstone: Anne is the weather-stained half and Laura the pure, clean half. Anne’s countenance is constructed in terms of absence: it is ‘missing’ Laura’s beauty and purity. Experience is characterised here as a loss. The youth and innocence she presumably once shared with Laura has been defiled, having received, like the gravestone, the stains and impurities or ‘profaning marks’ of suffering. It would therefore only require a similar ‘marking’ to occur to Laura for them to become identical (which is, in effect, what happens) – or a similar process of cleansing to restore the ‘innocent’ whiteness. If Percival and Fosco undergo this process of simultaneously ‘marking’ and erasing Laura, Hartright takes on the job of cleansing and restoring her. This restoration again takes the form of moral management, through which Walter and Marian gently encourage her to follow lightweight domestic pursuits such as drawing, walks and children’s card-games. It is itself ideologically marked in that it aims to return Laura to her pre-marital, childlike identity, parallel to Anne’s own prolonged childhood, in which innocence is valued over experience to the extent that Walter and Marian avoid reminding her of any of the events she has been through. Despite Laura’s plea, ‘don’t treat me like a child’,78 Walter proceeds to do just that, repeatedly describing her in terms of a child,79 and patronising her by pretending to sell her drawings while secretly only hiding them. Just as Anne longs to return to the idyllic Limmeridge days symbolised to her by her white clothing and the

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white gravestone, Walter aims to reinvoke Laura’s happy virginal days at Limmeridge before her marriage. However, crucially, Anne does her own cleansing and her own dressing, and her struggle against being incarcerated in the asylum is a struggle for the right to determine her own identity, however limited and troubled that may be. She also writes her own text – the two letters she sends to Laura, and the letters she writes on the sand at Blackwater Lake. Laura’s only self-authored text – the figures she draws in the sand on the beach at Limmeridge – are erased by the very weathering processes that mark her as a text for Fosco and for Hartright: ‘Wind and wave had long since smoothed out the trace of her which she had left on the sand.’80 Thus Laura’s restoration to her rightful status at Limmeridge culminates in the erasure of the false inscription from her mother’s gravestone, to be replaced by Anne Catherick’s name. Finally the two women are restored to their rightful halves of the stone: Anne is the ‘profaning mark’ on Mrs Fairlie’s grave (as she is her husband’s illegitimate daughter), while Laura once more becomes spotless. Count Fosco’s destruction is founded in a similar transaction of marks: the incriminating sign of the secret brotherhood inscribed on his arm is deleted by the slashing of his skin in the shape of a letter T, signifying ‘Traditore’, or ‘traitor’. The symbol is the only continual and stable sign of his identity: his flamboyance and corpulence are merely aspects of a particularly well-orchestrated disguise, in which he seeks to become invisible precisely by making himself more visible. Thus the revelation of his ‘true’ identity (as a treacherous member of the brotherhood) is simultaneous with the erasure of that identity: he is dragged from the Seine disguised as an artisan, ‘nothing being found on him which revealed his name, his rank, or his place of abode’.81 The mark of traitor effectively erases any other distinguishing mark; he is placed in the communal morgue ‘unowned, unknown’.82 ‘Ideal femininity’ is profoundly problematised by the novel, not only in that it provides Percival and Fosco with such a simple task in reprogramming Laura’s identity. Women who are ‘successful’ in the eyes of society are presented as troubling and disturbing: Mrs Catherick, for example, devotes her whole life to the pursuit of bourgeois respectability, to the extent of monomania, but is viewed by Hartright as a warped and twisted old woman. Even more sinister is Madame Fosco, Laura’s aunt, in whom the ‘successful’ erasure of identity and the ‘successful’ patient of moral management are combined. From a loud, vulgar, extravagant woman she becomes suggestively equated with Fosco’s pet mice and birds, her eyes

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conveying the impression of a ‘faithful dog’. Again, like the sufferer from ‘Intense Vanity’, she has formerly worn clothes that Marian considers inappropriate for her: ‘hideously ridiculous love-locks’ and low-cut dresses unsuited to her bony figure. These have been replaced by ‘stiff little rows of very short curls’, a ‘plain, matronly cap’, and ‘quiet black or grey gowns, made high around the throat’. From laughing, screaming and ‘always talking pretentious nonsense’, she becomes silent and virtually inanimate: her hair is like a wig, she is cold and impenetrable as a statue, ‘she sits speechless in corners’, and ‘sits for hours together without saying a word, frozen up in the strangest manner in herself’.83 The value of this change Marian sees as profoundly ambiguous: ‘For the common purposes of society the extraordinary change thus produced in her is, beyond doubt, a change for the better, since it has transformed her into a civil, silent, unobtrusive woman, who is never in the way. How far she is really reformed or deteriorated in her secret self, is another question.’84 In both these women, gender and class normality are produced specifically by manipulation of appearance. Dressed soberly, Madame Fosco becomes a sober and civil woman. In her black silk gown and slate-coloured mittens, Mrs Catherick is bowed to by the vicar. As in Carlyle, this ritualistic bowing is suggestively merely a sign of respect paid to the exterior, to clothes, and not in recognition of any inward qualities: ‘Nay, is it not to clothes that most men do reverence: to the fine frogged broadcloth, nowise to the “straddling animal with bandy legs” which it holds, and makes a Dignitary of? Who ever saw any Lord my-lorded in tattered blanket fastened with a wooden skewer?’85 Mrs Catherick’s transgression was motivated by and discovered through sartorial acquisition – the incriminating gold watch that she longed for – and her rehabilitation is equally defined by clothes, to the extent of deriving from the very material gain she forfeited herself for: ‘The dress of Virtue, in our parts, was cotton print. I had silk.’86 Her achievement of respectability thus depends entirely upon her outward show of bourgeois furnishings and strict adherence to sartorial convention. A comparable process of ‘moral management’ through clothing to those depicted in The Woman in White occurs in Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), in which Monica Knollys first takes charge of Maud Ruthyn’s dress, then Maud in turn takes charge of her cousin Millicent’s. Monica is as ‘palpably struck’ by Maud’s dress ‘as if it had been some enormity against anatomy’, suggesting both that the ‘natural’ body is constructed along the lines of the current fashion, and that wearing the wrong clothes is a sickness or deformity that requires treatment.87 Maud then

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proceeds to have a similar reaction to Milly: ‘If I was behind the fashion, what would Cousin Monica have thought of her?’88 For Milly in particular, moral reformation and sartorial reformation appear to be coextensive. It is principally by extending her dresses ‘at least a quarter of a yard’ that Maud succeeds in getting her to act like a lady. As Maud states, ‘in certain important points Milly was very essentially reformed. Her dress, though not very fashionable, was no longer absurd.’89 These changes are more effective than Mrs Fairlie’s, in that the world of fashionable society represented by Monica and the friends she entertains at Elverston is a benign world of safety and community rather than the one of loneliness and neglect in which Maud and Milly live at Bar tram Haugh. In both Uncle Silas and The Rose and the Key, two versions of the social and therefore implicitly fashionable world exist: a regular ‘original’, and a warped and distorted reflection in which dress becomes grotesque and sinister. In Uncle Silas, Monica Knollys’s concern with clothing as a means of maintaining social concord has its malevolent reflection in the governess, Madame de la Rougierre. At Madame’s introduction into the novel she appears ‘draped in purple silk, with a lace cap’, thus implicitly doubling Monica’s first appearance, ‘dressed handsomely in purple satin, with a good deal of lace, and a rich point … not a cap, a sort of headdress’.90 Lady Knollys, too, is unusually tall and in her characteristic outspokenness somewhat eccentric and unfeminine. However, Madame de la Rougierre’s preoccupation with fashionable dress is solely selfish, pandering to misguided notions of her own attractiveness. Her obsession with her appearance (the servants call her ‘Madame de la Rougepot’) culminates in a sinister tableau in which the night before Maud’s attempted murder, the ‘masculine’ and ‘largefeatured’ governess stands simpering before the mirror in her newly purchased finery: The vainest and most slammakin of women. The merest slut at home, a milliner’s lay figure out of doors. She had one square foot of lookingglass upon the chimney-piece, and therein tried effects, and conjured up grotesque simpers upon her sinister and weary face. […] [A]t last [I] fell fast asleep with the gaunt image of Madame, with a festoon of gray silk with a cerise stripe, pinched up in her finger and thumb, and smiling over her shoulder across it into the little shaving-glass that stood on the chimney.91

Like the madhouse sufferer from ‘Intense Vanity’, the governess is grotesque because she also wears a costume ‘too girlish for her years

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and unflattering to her heavy features’. However she is also, as a governess, in an ambiguous social position and therefore wearing extravagant clothing (she also appears in a shop in Paris wearing silk, velvet and the very latest in bonnets) is as inappropriate to her status as is Milly wearing short dresses and navvy boots. As in the doubling of Austin with his brother Silas, what is initially presented as socially acceptable and even desirable is shown to have a distorted and perverted mirror image. Through the medium of the portrait, Silas also becomes the sinister double of his own fashionable self. Maud Ruthyn is transfixed by his picture as ‘a singularly handsome young man, dark, slender, elegant, in a costume then quite obsolete, though I believe it was seen at the beginning of this century – white leather pantaloons and top boots, a buff waistcoat, and a chocolate-coloured coat, and the hair long and brushed back’.92 Here Silas’s strangeness is signified by simple unfamiliarity – the outof-date clothes in which he is dressed. However, at Bartram Haugh, Maud still views him in terms of a painting, the odd lighting in his room creating ‘the forcible and strange relief of a finely painted Dutch portrait’; and observes that he is still wearing anachronistic garments – ‘a pair of wrist buttons, then quite out of fashion’.93 Silas’s clothing represents the vestigial in fashion: the uncanny remnants of past styles that should have been superseded by modernity. His continual mediation through paintings and portrait-like images (such as a framed reflection in a mirror) suggests that he exists only through representations of himself, and he is always already a creation in his own image. Monica Knollys declares that, ‘When I saw him last … he dressed himself like a modern Englishman; and he really preserved a likeness to the full-length portrait at Knowl’, implying that even when dressed according to contemporary convention, he nevertheless evokes both his past and his own portrait.94 Maud imagines that Silas is an evil spirit who has taken human shape, ‘assumed the limbs and features of our mortal nature’.95 However, the effect he is able to produce on her over-susceptible imagination actually derives, like that of Collins’s outlandishly attired Count Fosco, from a supreme sense of the theatrical, of the manipulation of the visual image. His early days as a dandy are implicitly a preparation for this subsequent management of his appearance. The anachronism of his garments appears deliberately calculated to produce specific effects. His appearance in black appears not to reflect the prevailing male dress of the time but rather to exploit a range of historical associations. John Harvey’s history Men in Black (1995) suggests that ‘the man in black … is a whole family of

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personae’.96 Silas’s ‘ample black velvet tunic … rather a gown than a coat, with loose sleeves’ evokes in condensed form a potent and bewildering range of often contradictory meanings.97 It is continually associated with death – he is described as a ‘ghost’, a ‘spectre’ and a ‘corpse’ – and also with the black arts – ‘necromantic black’.98 It is also distantly suggestive of Hamlet, which lends it some of its theatrical quality. Yet the shade’s associations with religiosity, dignity, selfeffacement and respectability, evoked by John Harvey, combine with these associations to convey an ambiguous message. As Anne Hollander argues, nineteenth-century black produces a self-referential sense of its own play with dramatic conventions: Really frivolous rhetoric enters the spirit of dress when these serious functions of clothes [e.g. mourning, as a sign of religious respect] are not expressed directly but merely referred to – exaggerated, mocked, or in some way represented, as if on a stage. This phenomenon occurred especially in the fashion of wearing black clothing during and after the period of literary Romanticism. Rhetorical black invokes the concept of drama itself. … [I]n the nineteenth century it represents sartorial drama, in an essentially literary spirit.99

Silas’s self-dramatisation through costume, therefore, is less a kind of moral management than a self-management to produce a particular theatrical (or painterly) effect. Thus it represents the converse side of Diamond and Browne’s photographs of madwomen: while they are apparently ‘normalised’ or ‘recuperated’ through the conventions of the bourgeois portrait, Silas on the other hand exploits or subverts such conventions in order to reconfirm his position of power under social duress. Harvey asserts that ‘one may associate black not so much with power securely enjoyed as with a resolute assertion of power within a period of political anxiety’.100 Silas is, of course, the representative of a corrupt and deteriorating but nevertheless nominally powerful, patriarchal aristocracy; however, his legitimation crisis points to the fact that manipulation of sartorial signs was crucial precisely on contested boundaries of social and economic status.

‘You must be secret and vigilant’: self-definition and social advancement If the Sensation narratives of sartorial coercion that Showalter invokes are disturbing, they do not represent a monolithic exercise of patriarchal or capitalist power but are the reverse face of a set of discourses concerning voluntary self-transformation through dress,

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specifically in relation to class mobility. Roberta McGrath’s essay, ‘Medical Police’ (1984), discusses a number of mid-nineteenth-century ‘before and after’ photographs, in which clothing is used as a normalising technique. As Sander Gilman has elsewhere established, this genre of medical photography was pioneered by the American reconstructive surgeon Gurdon Buck in the late 1840s. By the 1880s it was in wide use among reconstructive and aesthetic surgeons and images ‘were subtly altered to emphasize the new happiness of the aesthetic surgeon’s patients. Every refinement of photographic technique and equipment, from the use of better lighting to the addition of fancier hair styling and cosmetics, has since been seized on to prove that a new and improved aesthetic surgery has dramatically increased the “happiness” of the patient’.101 One particular pair of photographs taken by Dr Julius Pollack, of a man with a deformed leg before and after surgery (figure 2), apparently effects a transition, expressed through costume, from working- to middle-class.102 McGrath uses this extraordinary image to demonstrate how ‘the more perfect, the more complete self and therefore the ‘normal’ self is implicitly constructed as middle-class.103 She suggests this operates defensively on the behalf of contemporary bourgeois anxieties over a rapidly increasing, rebellious and diseased underclass. The slippage in her terminology, however, between ‘middle-class’ and ‘aristocratic’ points to a more specific anxiety over the permeability of class boundaries through dress.104 Is the man ‘really’ working-class or middle-class, and in what sense can he be described as aristocratic? Which is interpreted as the more authentic, the horrific, diseased working-class body or the ‘complete’ middle-class one substituted by science? The implicit narrative of scientific progress is simultaneously one of upward class mobility through manipulation of external appearance. It is a horror story not necessarily because it voyeuristically exhibits the deformity of the proletariat to an implied bourgeois audience, but because the images it employs contest the idea of an integral identity or static class structure. The narrative of medical progress is not a cohesive structure that uninterruptedly proclaims the triumph of science over social inequality or, indeed, over social deviance. Rather, it is alarmingly coextensive with the narrative of personal advancement. This is by no means a new anxiety; the perennial attempts to establish sumptuary laws throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance period evoke similar spectres of social instability. However, the inflection specific to Victorian Gothic is that found in Carlyle: a concern not with the deceptiveness of appearances, but rather with a ‘possession’ by appearances; the substitution of clothing for identity

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Figure 2 Dr Julius Pollack: photographs showing patient before and after reconstructive surgery

suggested by the slippage from veil to flesh. The problem is not that an aristocrat may mistake a member of the bourgeoisie for another aristocrat, but rather that the conditions of aristocracy (or any other social class) are constituted only from surface signs and are therefore available for manipulation. This is the staple material of the Sensation novel. In Mary Braddon’s Henry Dunbar (1864), for example, the murderer Joseph Wilmot, an ‘outcast’ and ‘reprobate’, successfully assumes the identity of his victim, the millionaire Henry Dunbar, by changing clothes with him. Simply by getting a haircut and a smart suit, Wilmot’s class status is apparently transformed: He was no longer a vagabond. He was a respectable, handsome-looking gentleman, advanced in middle age. Not altogether unaristocraticlooking. The very expression of his face was altered. The defiant sneer was changed into a haughty smile; the sullen scowl was now a thoughtful frown. …

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The man’s manner was as much altered as his person. He had entered the shop at eight o’ clock that morning a blackguard as well as a vagabond. He left it now a gentleman; subdued in voice, easy and rather listless in gait, haughty and self-possessed in tone.105

Braddon attempts to maintain the illusion throughout the novel: Wilmot’s makeover precedes his assumption of the rich banker’s identity, and after the murder, the narrator continues to identify him as ‘Henry Dunbar’ until his true identity is revealed. She has a lot of fun using this scenario to expose the hypocrisy of working and middle classes alike: what was interpreted as insolence in the vagabond is regarded as aristocratic hauteur in the millionaire. However, the fact that the banker is not an aristocrat, but comes from new money, and furthermore has, like Wilmot, committed forgery in his youth, suggests that the difference between the two men is an outward matter only. Once dressed in the same clothes and allocated the same financial resources they are essentially interchangeable, each other’s double. Nevertheless, Joseph Wilmot’s transformation is also suggestive of contagion. As Nicholas Ranee indicates, ‘the process is more complex than that of assuming a disguise: Braddon shows the personality adapting to the unaccustomed dress and toilet, as she does Lady Audley becoming benevolent’.106 Anne Hollander similarly points out, ‘dress can deliberately express perhaps ignoble pretensions to a change of being, but it can also actually succeed so well in pretending that it truly transforms the aspiring pretender into the ideal’.107 She suggests that in the nineteenth century this can be understood as a replacement of Perrault’s ‘Cinderella’ as a predominant cultural fantasy by Andersen’s ‘The Ugly Duckling’. The narrative of innate beauty restored is replaced by that of social ugliness transformed. Thus, ‘Clothes make the man, not because they make up or invent what the man is or dress him up for show but because they actually create his conscious self. You are what you wear – especially when class structure lacks rigidity.’108 Hollander goes on to argue that Balzac (a major influence on Braddon) expresses this theme par excellence, demonstrating the socially constructed nature of one’s personal self. However, her insistence that ‘One’s objective moral being may well be unchangeable’ despite the behavioural qualities transmitted by clothes to the self, suggests a tension between this constructionist theory of clothing and selfhood and essentialist views of the individual subject.109 Lady Audley may look and behave and be every inch the lady but she still contains the moral taint of her lower-class origins – which, perhaps, is her real secret.

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The contradictions between a socially constructed self and objective moral being suggested by Hollander’s argument are taken to their logical trajectory in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Checkmate (1871), which contains purportedly the first fictive description of plastic surgery. In this novel, not only the clothing but also the body may be reconstructed in the pursuit of manufactured social identity, recalling the photographs described by McGrath and Gilman. The ruthless murderer Yelland Mace is enabled by reconstructive surgery to refashion himself as wealthy and elegant Walter Longcluse, and thus to participate in fashionable London society. Longcluse/Mace is the cast-off son of an illegitimate branch of the aristocratic Arden family, relocated in Australia; his criminal dealings, however, place him firmly in the underclass. His new face is conceived as ‘an immovable mask of flesh, blood and bone’, which enables his transactions with the external world even as it cuts him off from it: ‘Alone again. Not a soul in human shape to disclose my wounds to, not a soul.’110 This alienation is due partly to his inability to disclose the dreadful secrets of his past to even his closest acquaintances, and partly to the uncanniness of his appearance, which particularly disturbs the witnesses of Harry Arden’s murder. Simultaneously evocative of Yelland Mace and completely different from him, Longcluse’s ‘immovable mask’ is a kind of palimpsest that evokes recognition even as it denies it. This doubleness is embodied in the two ‘before and after’ plaster masks kept by the surgeon which carry the secret of his identity, and which, unlike the permanent change registered on his physiognomy, are ominously fragile. Unlike the ‘before and after’ photographs examined by Gilman, these masks do not offer confirmation of the subject’s satisfaction but in fact lead to his unmasking as villain. If the plaster masks appear easily destructible, they are also endlessly reproducible from their original moulds. Once Longcluse’s ‘immovable mask’ is destroyed, it cannot be resumed. The uncanny quality produced by the ‘doubleness’ of Longcluse’s visage is what eventually proves his undoing, as it provokes David Arden to seek out his true identity. His new face strangely echoes his old in that it is absolutely unlike: ‘They are opposites in form and character, as if fashioned in expression and in feature to contradict the other; yet so united!’111 Furthermore, despite his apparently effortless adaptation to the persona of Walter Longcluse, an irreducible residue of his former physical existence remains, embodied in his voice and in a distinctive scar. on his hand, which elicits the recognition of the housekeeper, Martha Tansey. Under investigation, therefore, the Gothic surface breaks down, and ‘authentic’ identity is reinstated despite the external signs of identity.

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The control that Longcluse exerts over his social image is somewhat extreme, and in the 1870s, not yet a widespread technique of self-fashioning. His literal construction of a social mask parallels the more subtle self-fashioning of Braddon’s Lady Audley, ‘ever alive to the importance of outward effect’.112 Like Uncle Silas, Lady Audley exploits pictorial convention to present herself in a series of painterly tableaux, usually in the sumptuous style of the Pre-Raphaelites. While these occasionally backfire on her – the effect of the Pre-Raphaelite portrait in her chamber is ‘by no means an agreeable one’,113 – her lavish tableaux vivants demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of the performative nature of femininity, carefully managed through makeup, accessories and pose. Lady Audley’s performances are alarming not only because they are for the most part utterly seamless, but also because they are perfectly compatible with contemporary notions of femininity and of self-management. Lady Audley does not represent a deviant version of femininity but conforms absolutely to the prescribed feminine ideal. In Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault suggests that the most sophisticated state of social surveillance is one in which the observer no longer needs to exist, individuals having internalised the mechanisms of power to such an extent that they automatically regulate themselves. Many mid-Victorian texts, such as Dr Forbes Winslow’s publication On Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Disorders of the Mind (1860), suggestively internalise the processes of moral management by emphasising the need for individuals to be their own ‘trustworthy sentinels’.114 As Robin Gilmour demonstrates in The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (1981), the mid-Victorian period was preoccupied with the notion of self-betterment, paradigmatically expressed in Samuel Smiles’s immensely popular treatise Self-Help (1859), which influenced Dickens’s Great Expectations among others. Pip’s quest to become a gentleman, Gilmour demonstrates, is not necessarily impelled by snobbery, but rather by the comparatively more admirable ethic of self-improvement advanced by Smiles. Self-Help is only the best known of a number of texts suggesting that everyone possesses the means towards their own improvement, provided they exercise strict discipline, hard work, and rational control over their own unruly faculties. Evidence of this outlook pervades mid-nineteenthcentury literature; for instance Lady Monica in Uncle Silas directs Maud to ‘govern your conduct, and command even your features … you must be secret and vigilant’; while Lady Audley declares of her tendency to insanity, ‘I had watched myself very closely since leaving Wildernsea: I had held a check upon myself.’115

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Whereas twentieth-century critics have tended to read this set of ideas in terms of either a Foucauldian model of internalised social surveillance or a Freudian model of repression and the unconscious, they have frequently underemphasised both the explicitly conscious nature of this activity, and its contemporary perception as frankly liberating, offering the opportunity for social climbing and the potential for development of a form of meritocracy. The subject of selfsurveillance is potentially disturbing because of their ability to highlight the tension between a rigid class system and an ethic of social advancement through hard work, manoeuvring around and between class boundaries. As Jenny Bourne Taylor points out, the very term ‘self-control’ is ambiguous, as it might predominantly mean the internalization of another’s regulating gaze, a self-objectification within the subject, but the term could none the less be claimed in a struggle for self-definition and autonomy in the face of established power – it retained a trace of its radical connotations even in the face of its recuperation.116

The typical ‘self-help’ plot is, at its most innocuous, merely a version of the ‘virtue rewarded’-type narrative of Richardson’s Pamela (1740–1) and its successors. However, in the fiction of the 1860s, there is something more complex going on. Lady Audley, for example, by watching and ‘holding a check’ upon herself, to the extent of pruning out inconvenient aspects of her life, is practising an exemplary form of self-management, as Dr Mosgrave’s initial analysis suggests: ‘She employed intelligent means, and she carried out a conspiracy which required coolness and deliberation in its execution. There is no madness in that.’117 In fact, Braddon suggests that control over one’s image can be, for women in straitened circumstances, the only means of survival: she notes ‘how complete an actress my lady had been made by the awful necessity of her life’.118 Braddon thereby implies that the social mechanisms which produce the cultural construction of sanity are identical to those which produce insanity: Lady Audley’s madness consists not of the sudden eruption of latent, repressed forces (as she herself professes to understand it); but the ‘normal’ processes by which the Victorian subject practises control over their social image, taken to their logical extreme. Thus, perhaps, the former of Pollack’s two photographs is the less disturbing of the two. It presents the threatening working-class subject as highly visible and suggestively immobilised by their condition. The monstrosity of the ‘amended’ subject, however, is invisible, the scars of surgery concealable beneath ordinary middle-class dress. As McGrath

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points out, early medical photography ‘was limited to the exterior of the body, because early emulsions were insensitive to red. … Thus favoured in photography were those diseases which erupted on the surface of the body such as skin diseases, burns, breaks and deformities.’119 In fact the theatrical ‘fancy dress’ McGrath notes in many of these images seems to express a need to accentuate difference or make it more visible. Difference can be ultimately reassuring; Victorian Gothic, as commentators as early as Henry James realised, was on the contrary concerned with the terrors of the familiar.120 The predominant horror of Victorian Gothic is not the disease or distress or social inequality that marks the surface but rather the unmarked surface, the surface that shows no differences. Thus in Collins’s Poor Miss Finch it is the identical twin with the flawless complexion who is the undetected villain, and his ‘marked’ brother who is innocent, his flaws being all on the surface. Similarly, the scarring of Esther Summerson in Bleak House (1853) does not indicate a flawed moral character but precisely the opposite: it is rather an external testimony of her unparalleled patience and fortitude. Dickens’s Great Expectations, which was published shortly after The Woman in White at the beginning of the Sensation decade, is an exception to this pattern, or rather invokes it only to confound it. The convict Abel Magwitch is, as Gilmour points out, a nightmare version of the Victorian self-made man.121 He is clearly a model for Braddon’s Joseph Wilmot: similarly convicted of forgery and returned from transportation, he is nevertheless far less sartorially proficient. On attempting to dress him as a ‘prosperous farmer’, Pip finds that ‘Whatever he put on, became him less (it dismally seemed to me) than what he had worn before. To my thinking there was something in him which made it hopeless to attempt to disguise him. The more I dressed him, and the better I dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on the marshes.’122 Magwitch possesses a kind of essential identity, generated by his insalubrious past, that is resistant to surface manipulation: the attempt at concealment in this case only produces further revealment, so that the two seem coextensive. Despite accumulating the necessary wealth, his engrained habits of life make him unable to turn himself into a gentleman, and he therefore seeks a surrogate to undergo the transformation in his place. The underlying criminal taint to the narrative of class ascension is thus concealed even from its subject himself. Pip is as convinced as everyone else that his expectations come from the socially legitimised source of Miss Havisham. Ironically, however, it is only after Pip realises the true source of his expectations – and in doing so loses them

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– that he genuinely becomes a gentleman. For Dickens, while gentility is a socially constructed quality, it ultimately cannot be achieved through external accessories but only through the cultivation of internal qualities. Nevertheless, Pip’s first notions of what constitutes a gentleman are dependent on notions of external appearance: Estella’s teasing makes him shamefully aware of his ‘coarse hands’ and ‘thick boots’.123 Despite a final privileging of the internal, gentility can be enabled only through the assumption of the correct exterior. Pip’s induction into the role of gentleman is dependent on his wearing the right clothes; the scene in which he visits Trabb the Tailor forms a kind of initiation into his new status. The mixture of excitement and discomfort that circulates around the purchase of the ‘fashionable suit of clothes’ points to its significant role in his education.124 Pip must learn how to wear the clothes; at first he is unwilling to be seen by the neighbours and leaves his new outfit at Mr Pumblechook’s house in order to avoid their attention. He is eager to be viewed by Miss Havisham, with whom his cultivated appearance now implies a bond, but is uncomfortable displaying his newfound wealth before those previously of his own social status, as if the attention that his attire will generate will paradoxically display his low-class origins, much as the attempt to conceal Magwitch’s past actually draws attention to it. The gap between what he was and what he is implied by the gaze of the local people prevents him from ‘passing’, while among his social superiors he goes unnoticed. This is demonstrated most clearly by the incident in which he is mimicked by Trabb’s Boy. The Boy’s comical masquerade of Pip’s pretensions reveals the disjunction between manner and manners, sophisticated costume and low-class origins: He wore the blue bag in the manner of my great-coat, and was strutting along the pavement towards me on the opposite side of the street, attended by a company of delighted young friends to whom he from time to time exclaimed, with a wave of his hand, ‘Don’t know yah!’ [ … ] He pulled up his collar, twined his side-hair, stuck an arm akimbo, and smirked extravagantly by, wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his attendants, ‘Don’t know yah, don’t know yah, ’pon my soul don’t know yah!’125

Trabb’s Boy draws attention to the performative nature newfound identity: Pip has become, in Carlyle’s terms, a screen’, a being fabricated through clothes. He explicitly himself and Magwitch as recalling Frankenstein and his although in Pip’s interpretation the roles are reversed so

of Pip’s ‘Clothesrefers to creature, that the

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creator seeks out and is affectionate towards his creation, but nevertheless is the more monstrous of the pair: ‘The imaginary student pursued by the monster he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me.’126 In truth, Pip-as-gentle-man is a monstrosity, an artificial clothes-screen, and Magwitch his unlikely tailor. Once again, clothes mark the existence of a secret: not Pip’s lowly social origins but his childhood concealment of Magwitch. In terms of the narrative, the ineffective concealment of class origins, as parodied by Trabb’s Boy, is thus in itself a concealment of the ‘real’ secret. For Ellen Moers, Pip belongs to a group of characters in Dickens’s late novels who evoke the cultural figure of the dandy, among them Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend and James Harthouse in Hard Times. Although this is debatable – Robin Gilmour, for instance, disputes it hotly, if somewhat excessively – nineteenth-century discourses of dandyism provide another route to understanding the role of surfaces in Victorian Gothic, evoking a similar pattern of class manipulability to the Sensational pretenders to aristocratic identity. As this chapter has argued, the mid-Victorian period saw an increasing preoccupation with social mobility as expressed – or, more significantly, not expressed – through dress codes. The perceived failure of dress to demarcate social boundaries filtered into Gothic and Sensation fiction through the notion that the outward signs of nobility or of gentility were more constitutive of social position than one’s birth or inner virtues. At the end of the nineteenth century, this concern crystallised in the figure of the dandy, a masculine role apparently preoccupied with surface to an unprecedented extent, who in his management of external appearance potentially highlighted a number of contradictions in the social order. The following chapter will therefore take up where this one leaves off and investigate the dandy phenomenon in more detail.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 303. Ibid., p. 311. See Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home and Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Breward, Culture of Fashion, p. 169. Breward, Hidden Consumer, p. 77. Braddon, Lady Audley, p. 69.

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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Ibid., p. 58. Sweet, ‘Introduction’, p. xv. Small, Love’s Madness, p. 13. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 56. Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow. Ibid., p. 179. For ease of reading I have omitted the second set of inverted commas denoting the parts of the quotation in which Carlyle is quoting Teufelsdröckh. Dickens, Sketches by Boz, pp. 76–8. Dickens, Great Expectations, p. 53. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 381. Ibid., p. 79. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 45. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., pp. 204–5. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 52. In this explanation I am indebted to McSweeney and Sabor’s Introduction, ibid., p. xxv. Ibid., pp. 53–4. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, p. 19. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 197. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, p. 13. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, pp. 196–7. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, p. 38. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 32. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, p. 243. Brontë, Villette, pp. 22, 275. Brontë, Villette, p. 276; Sedgwick, Coherence, p. 12. Brontë, Villette, p. 199. Ibid., p. 276. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, p. 409. Ibid., p. 410. Brontë, Villette, p. 394. Ibid., p. 395. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 290. Ibid., p. 569. Warwick and Cavallaro, Fashioning the Frame, p. 84. Conolly, Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums, pp. 59–60. Showalter, Female Malady, p. 86. Le Fanu, Rose and the Key, p. 264. Ibid., p. 269. Conolly, Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity, p. 379. Anon, ‘M.D. and MAD’, p. 513. Conolly, Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums, p. 64.

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56 57

Collins, Woman in White, p. 46. The duchess’s behaviour is a more extreme version of Maud’s and presents an example of what Maud could become if immured in the asylum for too long. She is also implicitly a version of Maud’s mother Lady Vernon, whose perfectly maintained social persona ‘conceals’ violent passions. Mercy Creswell’s explanation that ‘I do believe she really half thinks what she says, but her head is always running on mischief, and that’s the sort she is’ (ibid., p. 278) clearly parallels Miss Max’s description of Lady Vernon: ‘I don’t charge Barbara with acting, in this dreadful business, contrary to her belief. But she is the kind of person who believes whatever pleases her passions should be true. … I never in my life met a person with the same power of self-delusion. There is no character so dangerous’ (ibid., p. 322). Le Fanu, Rose and the Key, p. 272. Ibid., p. 272. Ibid., p. 274. Small, Love’s Madness, p. 57. Conolly, ‘Extracts from The Physiognomy of Insanity,’ p. 147. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful, p. 37. Diamond, ‘On the Application of Photography’, p. 154. Braddon, Lady Audley, p. 350. Ibid., p. 338. Ibid., pp. 294, 76. Collins, Woman in White, p. 50. Cunnington, English Women s Clothing, p. 17. It is also worth noting that at the time of Collins’s writing (although not of the period in which the novel is set), white was briefly unfashionable due to the overpowering effect when combined with the expanses of fabric occasioned by the crinoline: it is therefore, in this context, an example of ‘vestigial’ fashion. Collins, Poor Miss Finch, pp. 298–9. Carter, Shaking a Leg, p. 108. ‘Girl of the period’ is a label coined by Eliza Lynn Linton’s article in the Saturday Review, 14 March 1868. Pykett, Sensation Novel, p. 19. Collins, Woman in White, p. 42. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 441. Ibid., pp. 401, 403. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 581. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 194–5. Ibid., p. 195. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 182. Collins, Woman in White, p. 494. Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, p. 42. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 258. Ibid., pp. 18, 39. Ibid., pp. 398–9. Ibid., p. 9.

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

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105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

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Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 238. Ibid., p. 336. Harvey, Men in Black, p. 18. Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, p. 189. Ibid., pp. 194, 238, 277, 194. Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, pp. 374–5. Harvey, Men in Black, p. 77. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful, p. 37. McGrath incorrectly attributes this image to Dr. Behrendt. McGrath, ‘Medical Police’, p. 16. ‘His pose is more aristocratic. It seems that mending the leg has effected a transition from working to middle-class, thus implying that this and the aristocratic are the norm’ (ibid.). Braddon, Henry Dunbar, pp. 53–4. Ranee, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists, p. 127. Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, p. 443. Ibid., p. 444. Ibid. Le Fanu, Checkmate, pp. 309, 156. Ibid., p. 306. Braddon, Lady Audley, p. 298. Braddon, Lady Audley, p. 71. Ranee, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists, p. 117. Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, p. 73; Braddon, Lady Audley, p. 354. Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home, p. 31. Braddon, Lady Audley, p. 378. Ibid., p. 298. McGrath, ‘Medical Police’, p. 16. James, ‘Mary Elizabeth Braddon’, p. 742. Gilmour, Idea of the Gentleman, p. 140. Dickens, Great Expectations, pp. 315, 317. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., pp. 231–2. Ibid., p. 319.

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4 Mysteries of the visible: dandies, cross-dressers and freaks in late-Victorian Gothic

Dandies and freaks: Victorian monsters In recent years it has become increasingly prevalent to read latenineteenth-century Gothic in terms of fin-de-siècle discourses concerning degeneration. There are good reasons for this: degenerationism reprises the Gothic fascination with decay, situating it at the level both of society in general and of the individual human body. As Kelly Hurley argues in The Gothic Body (1996): ‘The province of the nineteenth-century human sciences was after all very like that of the earlier Gothic novel: the pre-Victorian Gothic provided a space wherein to explore phenomena at the borders of human identity and culture – insanity, criminality, barbarity, sexual perversion – precisely those phenomena which came under the purview of social medicine in later decades.’1 The gaze that accompanied social medicine, labelling and classifying the bodies under its scrutiny, has been amply documented, particularly in relation to the developing medium of photography. Nevertheless, the personae of fin-de-siècle Gothic are also subjected to another, equally discriminating gaze: that of fashion. The accelerating commercial culture of the late nineteenth century increasingly became concerned with bodies on display: with women walking unchaperoned through the urban streets and department stores; with fashionably dressed dandies, swells and ‘men about town’; with music-hall stars, celebrity actresses and freakshow exhibits. If on one level the medical impulse to scrutinise and taxonomise increasingly put bodies on display, on another, men and women were increasingly displaying themselves with the myriad of new techniques of self-presentation afforded by commercial culture. Management of social surfaces took on new complexities as the choice of what to wear

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and how to wear it became ever more varied, to an ever-wider range of people. Critical studies frequently isolate the specific personae of this period, often labelled as types by the Victorian print media: the New Woman; the Odd Woman; the child prostitute; the flaneur, the Aesthete. This chapter, however, will concentrate on two of these ‘types’ as having particular relevance for Gothic fiction: the dandy and the cross-dressed or ‘manly’ woman. Both the dandy and the crossdressed woman were ‘difficult’ bodies at the fin de siècle, personae whose clothing was read as excessive and charged with sexual deviance. Their occurrence has different implications for Gothic fiction: while the cross-dressed woman often seems little more than a sensational device, the dandy’s self-display has further-reaching affinities with Gothic as a fictional mode. Dandyism was an important influence on Gothic even when not directly represented within it, as its emphasis on the surface embodied in the charismatic, amoral male crystallises many of the genre’s pre-existing characteristics. It also reiterates the class anxieties elaborated in Chapter 3. Dandyism may have been the pursuit of aesthetic perfection through dress, but it produced a kind of monstrosity, as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1888) demonstrates. For Wilde, this is a moral monstrosity concealed behind Dorian’s flawless exterior, figured in the eponymous portrait. Elsewhere the dandy can be seen as monstrous in his difference, in his excessiveness. Carlyle specifically aligns the dandy with the freak-show exhibit, marvelling that the public ‘will waste its optic faculty on dried Crocodiles, and Siamese Twins; and over the domestic wonderful wonder of wonders, a live Dandy, glance with hasty indifference .. .!’.2 If Carlyle is commenting on the public’s apparent inability to view the dandy as monstrous spectacle, nineteenth-century novelists were far from indifferent to the freakish qualities of their fictional dandies. Often, representations of the dandy seem to reproduce a Jekyll-and-Hyde dualism, whereby public self and monstrous self are inextricably linked. One should be cautious, however, of reiterating the surface-and-depth model of polished exterior concealing monstrous interior. Just as Jekyll himself guesses that man ‘will ultimately be known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens’, a multiple and fragmented rather than merely doubled subject, dandies in Victorian Gothic resist simple dualisms. Rather, dandyism provides a mechanism through which monstrosity is produced within the text: an emphasis on spectacle that is in itself implicitly monstrous, privileging as it does surface over depth.

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Thus it seems appropriate that the links between dandyism and monstrosity should finally be negotiated in the true story of Joseph Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’. Dandyism, for Merrick, appeared to provide a cultural mechanism through which he could recuperate being put on show. It provided a sartorial choice that enabled him some limited means of reconciling the inevitable gaze of others and a sense of individual autonomy. The scanty evidence pertaining to Merrick’s life has a fictional quality to it (his autobiography was produced as a form of publicity, and his doctor Frederick Treves’s brief account was written over thirty years after his death). For this reason the final section of this chapter departs from historical consistency to examine, beside the available historical accounts, David Lynch’s 1980 cinematic interpretation of Merrick’s story, The Elephant Man. This final section does not pretend to comment solely on the period in question, but rather aims to explore the twentieth-century understanding of the relationship between dandies and freaks.

Fashioning the dandy: the nineteenth-century tradition Dandyism is almost as difficult a thing to describe as it is to define. Those who see things only from a narrow point of view have imagined it to be especially the art of dress, a bold and felicitous dictatorship in the matter of clothes and exterior elegance. That it most certainly is, but much more besides. (Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, On Dandyism, 1843)3

Critical discussion of the dandy in the late nineteenth century is frequently disabled by the fact that dandyism was not a coherent or static phenomenon. The overt self-display of figures such as Wilde was the culmination of a century-long tradition that had accrued different meanings and contexts since its inception with George ‘Beau’ Brummell in the Regency period. It is necessary, for example, to make a distinction between a practical and a philosophical tradition (which nevertheless frequently overlap): Aesthetic dandyism was far more than simply the wearing of clothes, as was the French intellectual dandyism of Baudelaire and Barbey. Excessive emphasis on the philosophical aspect of dandyism, however, erases the sartorial display enacted by certain groups of working- and lower-middle-class males, the ‘gents’ and ‘swells’ celebrated on the music-hall stage. Similarly, the understated elegance of Brummell himself was at odds with what is for many the popular image of dandyism embodied in the extravagantly dressed Count d’Orsay. Both, however, can equally be seen as part of the dandy phenomenon, even if Brummell was the more influential figure on

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theoretical constructions of dandyism. It is therefore advisable to resist generalisations on the topic; ‘dandyism’ is an imprecise label used to refer to a wide variety of masculine sartorial practices. Nevertheless, what the diverse strands of nineteenth-century dandyism had in common was an interest in masculine display that was viewed as excessive by contemporaries, outside the perceived norm of conventional nineteenth-century masculinity. As Carlyle famously defines it in Sartor Resartus: ‘A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress.’4 The dandy as constructed in much Victorian discourse is naturally an inversion: a man to whom the trivialities of life become the priorities, to whom surface is consistently privileged over depth as the bearer of meaning and significance. For Carlyle, he is an ambiguous figure. Carlyle was overtly hostile to dandies both in concept and as individuals, and the chapter of Sartor Resartus entitled ‘The Dandiacal Body’ became the classic rebuttal to dandyism of the Victorian period. Once again, however, the complex rhetoric of Teufelsdröckh and his fictional biographer tends to function duplicitously, providing contrary readings to the established meaning of the text. According to Carlyle’s narrator, the dandy is ‘a witness and living Martyr to the eternal world of Clothes’, an implicit proponent of Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy.4 The dandy’s scrupulous self-discipline has affinities with religious asceticism, recalling Brummell’s daily twohour ritual of repeatedly washing, rewashing and dressing. Despite his suggestively prophetic qualities, however, he is not a prophet but a ‘Poet of Cloth’ and ‘his body the (stuffed) parchment-skin whereon he writes’, a figure who has not only dedicated his life to dress but who has himself become a piece of cloth, merely another surface, with no substance within besides stuffing.5 Consequently, Teufelsdröckh’s musings on the religious nature of the dandy, in which their sacred books are identified as fashionable novels, their temple as Almack’s, and their worship as occurring ‘principally by night’, are interpreted by the narrator as possible satire.6 He argues, however, that if this is the case then ‘His irony has overshot itself; we see through it, and perhaps through him.’7 Of course on one level this simply demonstrates the narrator’s inability to comprehend the subtleties of Teufelsdröckh’s insights, and in doing so pre-empts the readers’ projected obtuseness. On another, however, Carlyle invokes his own rhetoric of transparency, of seeing through clothes. Teufelsdröckh and his irony

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are rendered transparent, meaning on one level that they are rendered ineffectual, false; yet on another that they become the medium through which we see, through which meaning is also rendered transparent, the pair of spectacles which enable the philosophic gaze. Teufelsdröckh’s discussion of the dandy is counterpointed with that of the Irish poor, who are constructed as the negative to the dandy’s positive: identical in almost every point and yet diametrically opposed. Like the dandy, the ‘Poor-Slave’ is identifiable by his or her costume, and indeed seems to have become a comparable agglomeration of surfaces: Of which Irish Poor-Slave Costume no description will indeed be found in the present Volume; for this reason, that by the imperfect organ of Language it seemed indescribable. Their raiment consists of innumerable skirts, lappets and iregular [sic] wings, of all cloths and of all colours; through the labyrinthic intricacies of which their bodies are introduced by some unknown process. It is fastened by a multiplex combination of buttons, thrums, and skewers; to which frequently is added a girdle of leather, of hempen or even of straw rope, round the loins.8

Where the dandiacal body has become another layer of clothes, a ‘(stuffed) parchment-skin’, the body of the ‘Poor-Slave’ is lost inside a labyrinth of garments. The body vanishes within the garments, allowing the viewer to see a misshapen heap of clothes rather than a human being. Furthermore, this ‘labyrinth’ is both a distinctively Gothic edifice, all excess and irregularity, and a shoddily stitchedtogether monstrosity recalling popular images of the poor as Frankenstein’s monster. This monstrosity, recalling Sedgwick’s Gothic conventions, is unspeakable: ‘it seemed indescribable’. If the language of Gothic is being used in this passage in order to communicate the horror of poverty, however, it also seems to defer the poor’s bodily actuality in endless layers of cloth. Both Dandy and Poor-Slave are alike in that they are conceived of as spectacle, as consisting in their clothes. The Poor-Slave, however, hardly seeks to become spectacle, while the Dandy seeks only ‘that you would recognise his existence; would admit him to be a living object; or even failing this, a visual object, or thing that would reflect rays of light’.9 Each depends on a public gaze to become the thing that it is, but while the dandy harnesses this gaze for his own ends, the Poor-Slave is objectified. For Carlyle, this opposition is symptomatic of a segregated society with an ever-widening poverty gap. The two ‘sects’ of Dandyism and Drudgism are obliquely destined, in Teufelsdröckh’s prophecy, to overthrow one another in their opposing force.

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Carlyle’s juxtaposition of the dandy with the Irish poor is nevertheless significant in a number of other ways. As Ellen Moers argues in The Dandy (1960), one of the most characteristic features of nineteenth-century dandyism was its conscious distancing of itself from the middle classes. The editor of Fraser’s Magazine, William Maginn, identified early on a concomitant tendency for the fashionable classes to form a relationship with the underclass, or ‘high life’ with ‘low life’, apparently allied in their distance from middle-class respectability: It is a favourite notion with our fashionable novelists, to sacrifice the middle classes equally to the lowest and highest. … There is a sort of instinct in this. The one class esteem themselves above law, and the other are too frequently below it. They are attracted, then, by a sympathy with their mutual lawlessness. They recognise a likeness in their libertinism. ...10

Dorian Gray’s escapades in Whitechapel later in the century, and the frequently noted absence of the middle classes in Wilde’s novel, are therefore part of a long representative tradition. Nevertheless, the key word here is ‘representative’, for while dandies identified themselves thoroughly with the aristocracy, this more often than not belied their actual social origins. As Moers’s study amply demonstrates, dandyism emerged through a variety of social configurations, from genuine aristocrats such as Bulwer-Lytton to the upper-working-and lowermiddle-class ‘gents’ of the 1830s and 1840s who dressed in cheap, ready-made, gaudy imitations of the Count d’Orsay, aspired to be like the ‘swells’ who were their social superiors, and briefly counted Dickens among their number.11 These extravagantly attired young clerks and shop assistants tend to be overlooked in critical studies of dandyism, presumably because they committed the ultimate crime of vulgarity and therefore were not ‘true’ dandies, yet they nevertheless participated in the same set of discourses. Their aspirations, as Moers documents, were betrayed in the names bestowed on the items of clothing they wore: the ‘Chesterfield’ greatcoat; the ‘Byron’ tie. According to Richard Dellamora, ‘Although some aristocrats were dandies, the “dandy” as a popular phenomenon is middle-class … Dandyism was associated with middle-class uppityism.’12 Dandyism was associated in the public mind not with ‘genuine’ aristocracy but with using superior grooming as a substitute for superior breeding: George ‘Beau’ Brummell (1778–1840), generally accepted to be the originator of dandyism, was the son of a civil servant descended from the upper servant class, but subsequently became one of the most influential figures of the Regency court. Countless other dandies, including Wilde, were to repeat the pattern throughout the century.

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Nevertheless, Dellamora’s characterisation of the dandy as middleclass is overly simplistic, and ignores not only the wide variation in masculine fashion practices, but also the way in which dandies manipulated social conventions to form new configurations of the elite. Membership of the Regency elite depended not upon breeding but rather upon an obscure internal code known as ton, which operated according to a complex series of manners and whims: the penniless Irish poet Tom Moore, for example, was an accepted guest at Almack’s, while the Duke of Wellington was barred for being seven minutes late. The Regency dandies therefore formed a new social group, based on aristocratic manners and privilege, but operating to new codes of prestige whereby appearance was more important than inheritance. This manoeuvre was to be reinterpreted by the French writers of the mid-century who were to transform dandyism into a philosophy, an intellectual pose’: Barbey d’Aurevilly and Baudelaire.13 In Baudelaire’s essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), the notion of aristocracy is gently lifted away from its literal class referent to become an abstract category defined merely through its opposition to bourgeois vulgarity. He states: Dandyism appears especially in those periods of transition when democracy has not yet become all-powerful, and when aristocracy is only partially weakened and discredited. In the confusion of such times, a certain number of men, disenchanted and leisured ‘outsiders’, but all of them richly endowed in native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to break down because established on the most precious, the most indestructible faculties, on the divine gifts that neither work nor money can give.14

For Baudelaire, then, one kind of inheritance is replaced with another, a ‘native energy’ that cannot be bought or laboured after. As in Carlyle, clothes are an outward symbol of an inner spiritual truth, but in this case the dandy is no longer a ‘Clothes-wearing Man’, bogged down in material trivialities, but rather one whose superior dress suggests a superior state of mind: ‘Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.’15 In a spectacular deflation of Carlyle’s irony, Baudelaire constructs dandyism as a spiritual quality or condition. However, it is also decisively a social phenomenon, the product of particular cultural and political systems. In France, for this reason, ‘dandies are becoming rarer

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and rarer’, the victims of democracy, while in decadent England they flourish. It is important to recognise, particularly in the context of Gothic fiction, that the emulation of aristocracy was not a nostalgic manoeuvre, but was profoundly implicated in the emerging discourses of modernity. Baudelaire is insistent that the dandy is specifically a feature of modern life, a close companion of the modern artist and the flaneur. Far from being a trivial role defined by a frivolous preoccupation with accessories, the dandy is constructed as a political entity intent on reconfiguring the structure and values of contemporary society. Nevertheless the exact political nature of dandyism is often difficult to define. As Regenia Gagnier argues: the dandies, both literary and real, were protean figures whose political shifts were as subtle as they were consistently progressive. Politically they appealed, at different times and in different countries, to both the reactionary and the revolutionary: to the reactionary through their refinement and to the revolutionary through their independence.16

Like Gothic as a literary genre, dandyism could be appropriated for opposing political ends. Nevertheless, the one consistent feature, besides the progressive nature of dandiacal politics, is its rejection of middle-class values. Unlike the novelists of the high Gothic period, who sought to confirm the values of the contemporary middling classes by evoking the horrors of the feudal past, the dandies of the nineteenth century sought to reject the horrors of bourgeois vulgarity through the foundation of a new, aesthetically motivated mode of existence. Naturally this manoeuvre tended to alienate the dandy from the bourgeois public, as well as from social critics like Carlyle. Perhaps even more disturbingly, however, it confused clear social divisions by encouraging men from a wide range of backgrounds to cultivate the outward appearance of aristocracy. Breward suggests that in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, ‘the margins within which it was possible to achieve an aristocratic appearance were very wide, inflationary even’, by one account as little as £1,000 a year.17 At the same time telegraph boys and other similar trades, who often supplemented their moderate incomes through prostitution, ‘flaunted’ their illicit earnings by dressing in costly outfits clearly above their station. Dandyism implied upper-middle-class men like Wilde being more visibly ‘aristocratic’ than the genuine aristocrats. The revolt into aristocracy is therefore not only politically suspect in itself, but also duplicitous or ‘fake’. These new ‘aristocrats’ apparently thought themselves all the more quintessential for being artificial.

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For the Victorian public, artificiality was the dandies’ greatest crime. In contrast, the ‘true’ gentleman, the Victorians’ preferred model of masculinity, was conceived as ‘natural’ in appearance, bearing and behaviour. The gentleman, as Richard Dellamora points out, is a fundamentally bourgeois myth, the male counterpart of the angel in the house. While founded in the notion of the gentry, and those who contributed to the control of the upper classes over the land, in the nineteenth century it became an increasingly permeable category, ‘validating the seizure of power from the aristocracy while cloaking the ambitions of a class in the rhetoric of a moral, even seemingly democratic ideal – since anyone, regardless of initial rank, might theoretically aspire to become a gentleman’.18 Nevertheless, the requirement that the true gentry should distance themselves from manual labour ‘introduced a contradiction into the role as experienced in nineteenth-century terms’, in which the middle-class husband was generally required to work. Dandyism exposed this contradiction, reflecting ‘a loss of balance between the dual imperatives of leisure and work incumbent upon Victorian gentlemen. The dandy is too relaxed, too visible, consumes to excess while producing little or nothing.’19 Thus as the category of the gentleman came increasingly under threat towards the end of the century, there was a corresponding need to separate the dandies from the gentlemen. For Dellamora, this resulted in a moral panic targeting homosexuality. The perceived importance of the public schools in fashioning the gentleman meant that as a series of public revelations made the illicit sexual behaviour commonly practised in such homosocial institutions more visible, it became necessary to ‘protect’ the category of the gentleman from such aspersions through a highly visible campaign of homophobic persecution, resulting in the Cleveland Street scandal and the Wilde trial. The dandy, who was perceived as suggestively effeminate, and connected more directly with homosexuality via Wilde, shared in the public opprobrium. Nevertheless, while Dellamora is surely correct in this speculation, the association of dandyism with homosexuality was a specifically fin-de-siècle development. The dandy had plagued the gentleman throughout the century, eliciting endless diatribes, particularly those of Maginn and Carlyle following the death of William IV. In these moral outbursts it was not the dandy’s sexuality that was placed under scrutiny but his clothes: he placed too much value on the surface, in his appearance, and not enough in the ‘gentlemanly’ virtues of self-restraint and so on. In the 1890s in particular, this was arguably a response to a certain mode of popular culture as much as non-standard sexual practices: dandyism drew not

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only on models of refined leisure but also on what Christopher Breward calls ‘a thriving, self-consciously virile culture of cosmopolitan masculine consumption’ associated with the gambling den and the boxing ring.20 Although dandies were frequently perceived as effeminate, this was not necessarily connected with deviant sexuality. As Jeffrey Weeks points out, homosexuality only became available as an identity with the first legal and medical discourses on the subject in the 1860s and did not become widely recognised as such until later in the century. Thus Roger Sales suggests that Regency dandyism incorporated a kind of homosocial bonding through the rituals of watching other men dressing, but this was not eroticised; indeed, while the Beau engaged in several relationships with women, his characteristic hauteur prevented him from ever becoming truly involved with any of them. Later, Edward Bulwer-Lytton was to write, ‘none but those whose courage is unquestionable can venture to be effeminate. It was only in the field that Spartans were accustomed to use perfumes and curl their hair.’21 Dandyism, therefore, consisted in a complex playing-off of manliness and effeminacy. Brummell was in many ways the perfect gentleman; his dress was immaculate rather than extravagant, and largely set the tone for masculine dress for the remainder of the century. This apparent contradiction in Brummell’s persona, his setting the precedent for dandiacal and gentlemanly dress alike, suggests the dandy’s greatest significance for later, Victorian conceptions of masculinity. He offended the gentleman not so much by his difference as by his similarity. For example, James Eli Adams demonstrates, in his reading of Carlyle’s anti-dandiacal stance, that Carlyle’s attempts to separate the dandy from what he conceives as more positive models of masculinity are ultimately doomed to failure. Adams’s reading of Carlyle stresses that despite Teufelsdrôckh’s attempts to disparage the dandy in favour of the prophet, he ultimately undermines the distinction by making each figure dependent on the same specular logic. Both dandy and prophet are conceived as spectacle, as requiring an audience in order to give their roles meaning: ‘the prophet remains uneasily similar to that other self-made man, the dandy, not only in his detachment from conventional forms of action, but in his insistent specularity. Like the dandy, the Carlylean prophet can only manifest his inspired selfhood by presenting himself as a spectacle to an uncomprehending world.’22 Furthermore, the dandy’s rigorous selfdiscipline can be compared to the asceticism of the prophet; as Adams insists, ‘Ascetic discipline dictates the presence of an audience. … The ascetic self is an observable self.’23 Under this configuration, a

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conventional surface-depth distinction collapses, for the ‘depth’ of the prophet is only available through its presentation as spectacle. As Adams argues, ‘the Carlylean hero is constantly on display even in the midst of solitude’.24 The dandy’s insistence on the surface, therefore, is not opposed to other Victorian paradigms of masculinity, whether hero, prophet or gentleman, but rather exposes their latent contradictions. Dandies can therefore be understood not, as Regenia Gagnier argues, as ‘rejections of, or counterparts to, the normative image of the gentleman’, but rather as a kind of masquerade or mimic of the gentleman.25 By drawing attention to their own performativity, the dandies both negated the category of the gentleman (which was supposed to be utterly effortless and unselfconscious) and yet exposed the necessary element of self-presentation required to enact this category. As Gagnier demonstrates, gentlemanly behaviour was in fact rigidly codified and available for mass consumption in the form of etiquette books. The gentleman, therefore, is a performance that must above all disguise its performative nature.

The Gothic Dandy The association of Gothic with dandyism lies partly in the propensity of its authors towards extravagant dress: Horace Walpole, the originator of the Gothic novel, greeted guests at Strawberry Hill wearing an elaborate cravat and a pair of gloves embroidered to the elbows that had belonged to James I. Walpole’s camp nostalgia, which led him to affect elaborate archaisms in his dress as well as collect kitsch antiquities, can be thought of as an antecedent of Aestheticism if not necessarily of dandyism proper. The association is also partly due to the genre’s perennial fascination with the Byronic hero. Both Byron and Matthew Lewis belonged to the ton Regency set, and Byron in particular, while more than simply a Clothes-Wearing Man in the manner of Brummell, was regarded by successors to be ‘on certain days’ a template for blasé dandiacal style.26 While early Gothic villains tend to be feudal overlords, banditti or religious men, in the nineteenth century they are increasingly stylish men of the world. Lord Ruthven of John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1919), a transparent representation of Byron, provides the template for these newly modish villains. Ruthven’s ‘peculiarities’ make him a feted member of society, and singularly attractive to women, despite his apparent lack of reciprocal interest. Ruthven is definitively an object of spectacle: ‘His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him.’27 In turn, the most

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distinctive feature of Ruthven’s appearance is his lacklustre gaze: ‘the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass’.28 As Ellen Moers suggests in her discussion of Brummell, the dandy’s key feature is his discriminating eye, which, according to one of Brummell’s contemporaries, instantly surveyed and summed up all the peculiarities of features, dress, and manners of those who approached him, so the weak point was instantly hit’.29 A nightmarish translation of this discerning vision, Ruthven’s gaze appears locked onto the surface, unable to pass the barrier of the visible to achieve depth of perception and understanding. He is the dandy as undead, Carlyle’s ‘(stuffed) parchment-skin’ – although interestingly the parchment-skin is displaced onto those he views rather than his own body. Ruthven’s gaze propagates a kind of contagion akin to vampirism, whereby those he looks at become as empty and deathly as he is. Ruthven clearly influenced Le Fanu’s Silas Ruthyn, explicitly a fallen Regency dandy, whose deliquescent seclusion at Bartram-Haugh recalls Brummell’s debt-necessitated exile and subsequent insanity. Silas, too, possesses a peculiarly uncanny gaze, like ‘the sheen of intense moonlight on burnished metal’, ‘almost fatuous’ with a ‘baleful effulgence’ that to Maud Ruthyn seems to hover between life and death.30 The cold shadow of the fiery youthful gaze that had redeemed his ‘refined’ beauty from ‘the suspicion of effeminacy’, Silas’s gaze is thus characterised by its liminality, its hovering on the borderline between manliness and effeminacy, youth and age, life and death.31 Collins’s Count Fosco possesses similarly ‘unfathomable’ eyes with ‘a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible glitter in them’, which Marian Halcombe remarks ‘forces me to look at him, and causes sensations, when I do look, which I would rather not feel’.32 With his oily corpulence and flamboyant waistcoats, Fosco seeks to disguise himself by paradoxically inviting the gaze, by attempting to out-perform his previous identity as renegade member of the Italian Brotherhood with another, assumed one. All three of these Gothicised dandies are also grotesque, simultaneously refined and monstrous, not merely spectacle themselves, but possessing a hypnotic power of drawing others within their circle of vision. As such they prefigure George Du Maurier’s Svengali, whose extreme pride in his own filthiness amounts to a kind of perverse dandyism, and whose mesmeric powers over the hapless Trilby are concentrated in his fiercely disturbing gaze. The literary figure that most strongly articulates the symbolic link between dandyism and monstrosity, however, is Miserrimus Dexter

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from Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875). Although ‘an unusually handsome, and an unusually well-made man’, Miserrimus is confined to a wheelchair, being ‘absolutely deprived of the lower limbs’.33 Despite this physical lack, however, Miserrimus is presented as a sexual and disturbingly virile man, who makes enthusiastic (if unwelcome) sexual advances towards the heroine, and of whom ‘a young girl, ignorant of what the Oriental robe hid from view, would have said to herself the instant she looked at him, “Here is the hero of my dreams!”’34 This is contrasted with the view of the lawyer Mr Playmore, whose account of Miserrimus’s proposal of marriage, ‘deformed as he was’, to Sara Macallan, suggestively conceals a doubt concerning his potency.35 The assorted coverlids Miserrimus uses to conceal his lack of a lower body are continually slipping off, revealing this worrying lack, in a version of the unveiling motif. The elaborate colours and textures of these veils, moreover, indicate a fetishistic disavowal of the body’s absence. In an ironic literalisation of Sedgwick’s argument, there really is nothing beneath the veil, although the fact of absence is in this case more horrible than what should be present. The ambiguity of Miserrimus’s sexual status is accordingly emphasised through his troubling gender identity, which is repeatedly constructed through his physical appearance as both extraordinarily virile and uncannily feminine: His long silky hair, of a bright and beautiful chestnut colour, fell over shoulders that were the perfection of strength and grace. … His large, clear blue eyes, and his long, delicate white hands, were like the eyes and hands of a beautiful woman. He would have looked effeminate, but for the manly proportion of his throat and chest: aided in their effect by his flowing beard and long moustache, of a lighter chestnut shade than the colour of his hair.36

Simultaneously manly and effeminate, Miserrimus’s appearance is further complicated by a flamboyant dandyism that recalls not only the Count d’Orsay’s extravagance but also Horace Walpole’s wilful eccentricity. On his first encounter with the heroine Valeria, he refuses to converse with her until his hair is ‘set to rights’, and she is compelled to witness the bizarre ritual by which Ariel, his mannish idiot cousin, elaborately dresses his hair and beard.37 Collins takes pains to describe his attire: ‘He was clothed in a jacket of black velvet, fastened loosely across his chest with large malachite buttons; and he wore lace ruffles at the ends of his sleeves, in the fashion of the last century.’38 On their second meeting, Miserrimus appears dressed in a ‘pink quilted silk’ jacket and a ‘pale sea-green satin’ coverlid, and

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adorned with antique gold bracelets. He explains this get-up as a wilful archaism: Except in this ignoble and material nineteenth century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women. A hundred years ago, a gentleman in pink silk was a gentleman properly dressed. Fifteen hundred years ago, the patricians of the classic times wore bracelets exactly like mine. I despise the brutish contempt for beauty and the mean dread of expense which degrade a gentleman’s costume to black cloth, and limit a gentleman’s ornaments to a finger ring, in the age I live in.39

Miserrimus idealises the costume and aesthetics of previous centuries even as he revels in the barbarism and cruelties of past political regimes, from ancient Britain to Revolutionary France. Like Walpole, who kept a copy of the Magna Carta and Charles I’s death-warrant by the side of his bed, Miserrimus collects antique curiosities, although of a distinctly less progressive and more macabre tendency than his predecessor. His hallway is adorned with his own sado-masochistic paintings of ‘The Passions’, while his kitchen is a veritable cabinet of curiosities: The photographs hanging on the wall, represented the various forms of madness taken from the life. The plaster casts ranged on the shelf opposite, were casts (after death) of the heads of famous murderers. A frightful little skeleton of a woman hung in a cupboard, behind a glazed door, with this cynical inscription placed above the skull – ‘Behold the scaffolding on which beauty is built!’ In a corresponding cupboard, with the door wide open, there hung in loose folds a shirt (as I took it to be) of chamois leather. Touching it (and finding it to be far softer than any chamois leather that my fingers had ever felt before), I disarranged the folds, and disclosed a ticket pinned among them, describing the thing in these horrid lines: – ‘Skin of a French Marquis, tanned in the Revolution of Ninety Three. Who says the nobility are not good for something? They make good leather.’40

Miserrimus’s collection combines the traditional memento mori (laced with a particular enjoyment in the fall of the beautiful and aristocratic, and significantly, converting the aristocratic male quite literally into a ‘parchment skin’) with a ghoulish relish in the new medical technologies that documented the criminal and insane. Divorced from their scientific role, the photographs and plaster casts become pure objects of spectacle, without recourse to the discourses of medical and legal progress in which they were originally embedded. They become equivalent ‘horrors’ to Miserrimus’s graphic paintings of animal vivisection and pagans torturing Christians. These pictures exert a

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strange fascination over Valeria, even as they ‘completely upset’ her nerves, thus producing an effect not dissimilar to that of Miserrimus himself.41 Both the man and his collection aggressively appropriate the gaze, implicating the viewer in both a sense of voyeurism and loss of control over the object of vision. He is one more curiosity in his own cabinet. He is also both a spy (watching Mrs Beauly through the keyhole) and spied upon (by Valeria and Mrs Macallan when they first call on him). Nevertheless the conflicting visual clues he gives forth frustrate Valeria’s attempts to locate Sara Macallan’s murderer: in a neat reversal of the conventional gender roles of the detective plot, it is Miserrimus who becomes the puzzling enigma and Valeria who pursues him. If Miserrimus Dexter appears to be a monstrous version of Horace Walpole, other dandies took inspiration directly from the Gothic novel. As Regenia Gagnier points out, Maturin’s Melmoth ‘became for the Romantics and Victorians an image of the most sublime (that is, Byronic) form of dandyism: omniscient intelligence, great power, deepest cynicism, extreme emotion, and extreme marginality’.42 Little attention is paid to Melmoth’s dress in the novel; what nineteenthcentury dandies seemed to find inspirational about the character was rather his intellectual pose, in the manner of Baudelaire. Dandy and Gothic hero-villain evolved in a symbiotic partnership over the course of the century: it has now become something of a biographical cliché that ‘Sebastian Melmoth’ was the pseudonym adopted by Wilde in the final years of his life. Gagnier’s notion of ‘sublime dandyism’ is suggestive although tantalisingly undeveloped. It suggests a transference from the visible to what lies beyond, external appearance being merely an indication of an ungraspable mental or spiritual power capable of inspiring awe, if not terror, in the viewer. Again, Polidori’s Lord Ruthven provides the model: ‘the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it, and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose.’43 Interestingly, it is Ruthven who initiates this transaction of looks, his own look instilling fear in those who in turn look at him. This power to instil a ‘sensation of awe’ in the viewer is discernible in Fosco’s ‘unfathomable’ gaze as it is in the ‘eerie lights and shadows’ that flicker on Silas’s ‘insidious and … terrible’ countenance.44 Similarly, Dorian Gray’s ability to make his former lovers ‘grow pallid with shame and horror if [he] entered the room’ and his ‘strange and dangerous charm’ that is only increased by whispered scandal resonate with this quality.45 Even prior to Wilde’s

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trial and imprisonment in 1895, commentators interpreted the unspeakable horror behind Dorian’s facade as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, imputing Wilde’s own homosexuality as the substance of Dorian’s crimes. It seems that contemporary reviewers were no less able to identify ‘clues’ to a homosexual subtext to the novel than twentieth-century readers. Wilde himself argued, however, ‘What Dorian Gray’s sins are no-one knows. He who finds them has brought them.’46 The playing-off of immaculate surface with a mysteriously implied depth is a feature of intellectual dandyism originally imputed by Barbey and Baudelaire. For Barbey, ‘Dandyism … is not a suit of clothes walking about by itself! On the contrary, it is the particular way of wearing these clothes which constitutes Dandyism.’47 Dandyism is not merely surface, but rather the managing of surface. The mysterious animating principle directing this management implies a superior aesthetic power. Sublime dandyism is therefore the gift of suggesting through clothing that it is more than meets the eye, the production of depth through surface. Any illusion of depth thus invoked, however, is always in imminent danger of dissolution, and likely to succumb to it at the slightest pressure.

Perilous surfaces: the dangers of Aestheticism Max Nordau’s work Degeneration (1891–92, English translation 1895) identified the dandified aesthete and his degenerate work of art as corrupting the race and perverting the morals of the young. It was a huge bestseller in Britain, where it went through eight editions in 1895 alone, possibly because it coincided with the trial of Oscar Wilde. Nordau was the disciple of Cesare Lombroso, and Degeneration was heavily influenced by The Man of Genius (1864, English translation 1891), which explored the thesis that madness and greatness are closely allied; Nordau’s deviation from his predecessor was largely that while Lombroso thought the genius beneficial to the race and harmful only to himself, Nordau believed that certain artists and their work were irredeemably dangerous and should be ruthlessly suppressed. In identifying the aesthete – and thus the dandy – as degenerate, Nordau completed the trajectory begun in Regency literature in which the highlife dandy is associated with the lowlife criminal. One of the major themes of degenerationist discourse was the identification of the criminal ‘type’ through physical appearance. Lombroso’s theory, a crystallisation of a number of nineteenth-century theories of criminal psychology and degeneration, was that criminality was a kind of hereditary insanity, a throwback to a more bestial stage of mankind’s

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development and an incurable state that threatened the general health and well-being of the race. In more extreme interpretations of the theory, the hereditary defect was thought not only to pass itself on with concentrated strength in subsequent generations, but also to be communicable to otherwise healthy members of the public who, once tainted, would pass on the defect to their own children. This defect could be detected by its correspondence to criminal ‘type’. By labelling the aesthete as ‘degenerate’, Nordau implicated him in this set of discourses. Contemporary fashion, as well as the anti-fashion of Aesthetic dress, is singled out by Nordau as symptomatic of degeneracy. For Nordau, the variety in contemporary dress-codes signals their decadence: in a healthy society, all dress alike. While male dress is less offensive than its female counterpart, it is nevertheless distinguished by its artificiality: ‘The common feature in all these male specimens is that they do not express their real idiosyncrasies, but try to present something that they are not.’ The result is a curiously Gothic sense of bodily fragmentation and masquerade: The impression is that of a masked festival, where all are in disguises, and with heads too in character. There are several occasions … where this impression is so weirdly intensified, that one seems to be moving among dummies patched together at haphazard, in a mythical mortuary, from fragments of bodies, heads, trunks, limbs, just as they came to hand.48

Nordau’s contemporaries are presented as hollow men, mannequins arbitrarily fashioned out of bits and pieces that are simultaneously corpselike and unreal. Recalling Carlyle on several levels, Nordau nevertheless medicalises Carlyle’s social invective, converting his brilliant layers of ambiguity into reactionary rhetoric: ‘The predilection for strange costume is a pathological aberration of a racial instinct.’49 For Nordau therefore, not only physical appearance, but also affectation of difference in costume, is sign of disease. The notion that crime can be detected through surface features both reflects the dandy’s preoccupation with appearance and resonates throughout the Gothic fiction of the period, including Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Dracula, for example, the vampire is described almost feature for feature as the image of Lombroso’s tipo completo, or individual predestined to crime through atavistic reversion. Despite his physical repulsiveness he is also, as Salli J. Kline argues, a quintessential aesthete, another instance of a

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suggestive link between dandyism and monstrosity. Kline perhaps exaggerates the textual evidence for seeing Dracula in London as a dandy – his assumed name, the Comte de Ville, has more significance (like that other fashionable vamp, Cruella de Vil) in its pun on ‘devil’ than its translation as ‘the Count-about-town’. His physical appearance in London does not differ dramatically from that which Jonathan Harker describes in Transylvania, either. He does, however, start sporting a goatee, a straw hat and white kid gloves and frequenting the fashionable areas around Piccadilly in search of girls with extravagant millinery. This pretension to elegance has been exploited in cinematic versions of the novel from Bela Lugosi’s immaculate Count to Gary Oldman’s chic tailoring and (historically accurate) blue-tinted spectacles in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). If the representation of the vampire in the British tradition ultimately derives from Byron via Polidori’s The Vampyre, this is perhaps unsurprising: as mentioned above, Byron was a distinguished member of Brummell’s ton Regency set and an important icon in the French interpretation of dandyism. The aesthete bears many similarities to the vampire; for Barbey, dandies undergo a curious form of self-consumption analogous to vampirism, as they ‘drink their own blood under their mask and remain masked’.50 For Wilde, however, it is the dandy’s social habits that are vampiric, expressed through the notion of ‘influence’. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the ‘influence’ that Sir Henry has over Dorian is passed on by Dorian to his protégés: Basil accuses Dorian, ‘You have a wonderful influence … They say that you corrupt every one with whom you become intimate, and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house, for shame of some kind to follow after.’51 Similarly Sir Henry declares, ‘All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view’, because ‘to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul’.52 As such Wilde appears to anticipate Nordau’s self-avowedly scientific theory of the pernicious influence of the Decadent artist over innocent youth. There is also a suggestion that the practice of fashion itself is parasitic and a form of wilful doubling: the young men Dorian influences deliberately try to fashion themselves on him: ‘His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies.’53 Dorian, of course, doesn’t have to try and is therefore only ‘half-serious’ in his pursuit of fashion. However, Dorian’s multiple doubles, by taking it all so seriously, are in a sense doomed to failure – in other words, fashion victims.

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Nevertheless if, as Kline argues, Stoker’s text owes a heavy debt to Nordau and his characters are largely motivated by a similarly reactionary fervour, Wilde’s text is strongly resistant to such notions. The portraits of Dorian’s fetid aristocratic ancestors nod to theories of degeneration by suggesting inherent corruption in his blood, but ultimately Wilde indicates that they have less immediate bearing on his behaviour than the literary characters he admires – a self-conscious and self-constructed ancestry. Dorian, Wilde suggests, is poisoned by a book, not by his bloodline. While there is much, therefore, to support a conservative reading of the aesthete/dandy as a degenerate who gets his just desserts, ultimately it is impossible to sustain such an interpretation. The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray states epigrammatically, ‘Those who go beyond the surface do so at their peril.’ Dandyism is, above all, a philosophy of the surface: the dandy’s power resides in his discriminating eye. Thus Wilde’s arch-dandy Sir Henry Wotton states, ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.’54 The dandy is not ‘shallow’ in the conventional sense but rather a philosopher of the visible; he wears his intellect on his sleeve. For Wilde, this stance leads to the elevation of the critic over the artist, the self-sufficient being who perfects himself being superior to one who merely creates other objects. Moers concludes, ‘The dandy’s intelligence, like everything else about him, is on the surface.’55 He is able to betray himself, therefore, only by falling victim to the illusion of depth. Thus Wilde’s admonitory epigram is a statement that his book bears out; as Judith Halberstam suggests, ‘Sybil Vane and Basil both die because they attempt to break through superficialities and arrive at something “real.” Sybil, of course, thinks that theatre masks life and Basil believes that art idealizes life. Each one attempts to move decisively from one realm of meaning to the other, from illusion to reality’, and in doing so, each has to pay the price.56 One might add that Dorian’s own final destruction occurs for the same reason. He attempts to reform, and virtuously restrains himself from ruining a young girl who is in love with him. He subsequently realises, however, that his motives for doing so are not the result of any deeper sense of moral purpose but merely, yet again, a striving for surface effect: ‘Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity’s sake he had tried the denial of self’57 In stabbing the painting he likewise constructs the image as ‘illusion’ and his own body as ‘real’. In attempting to destroy the surface he therefore destroys himself. Those who see the ending as Wilde’s capitulation to

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conventional morality are in fact mistaken: Dorian is punished not for being bad, but for taking himself too seriously. Nevertheless, if Wilde’s text resists a degenerationist reading, Stoker’s novel cannot be simplistically categorized as degenerationist either. As Kline points out, Stoker’s unusual twist on Lombroso’s theory is that he shows his degenerates’ appearances changing during their lifetime (or perhaps more accurately, during their passage to the undead state) as their propensities to crime become more pronounced. She describes this as a speeding up of the ‘Degeneration Hypothesis’ or ‘Morel’s Law’ which argued that the human race was in a permanent and continual state of decline. This would, however, seem to be incompatible with the idea that the criminal was born as such and unable to change. The contradictions and ambiguities present in Lombroso’s theory of atavistic reversion are thus implicitly raised. If all born criminals were instantly recognisable they would be easy to isolate and much less of a threat. It is paradoxically the invisibility of the criminal that is the source of anxiety. As in the earlier Sensation fiction, this invisibility is inextricably bound up with class anxiety: the notion that the degenerate working class might be able to pass, to conceal their origins and secretly be among us, like Dracula visiting Piccadilly and the zoo in broad daylight. David Punter suggests ‘both Dorian and Hyde “go native”, they both renounce the repressive morality of the dominant culture, but all they achieve is an assimilation to the apparently even worse “morality” of the lower classes’.58 Like Lady Audley before him, however, Dorian does already contain the secret taint of the lower (or at least the vulgar) classes: his father was ‘a mere nobody … a subaltern in a foot regiment, or something of that kind’.59 As Kline indicates, Stoker’s characters repeatedly practise a kind of amateur physiognomy where they attempt to ‘read’ countenances, for instance in Mina Harker’s description of Van Helsing.60 However, this is not an unproblematically reassuring activity: external appearances can be seen to be inexplicably misleading or enigmatic, as Lucy writes of her flirtation with Dr Seward: He has a curious habit of looking one straight in the face, as if trying to read one’s thoughts. He tries this on very much with me, but I flatter myself he has got a tough nut to crack. I know that from my glass. Do you ever try to read your own face? I do, and I can tell you it is not a bad study, and gives you more trouble than you can well fancy if you have never tried it. He says that I afford him a curious psychological study, and I humbly think I do.61

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As Kelly Hurley suggests, the new sciences in the late nineteenth century problematised the relation between external appearances and internal reality: ‘The human being was not the distinctive being it appeared to be on the surface’, as scientific examination of the minutiae of the human body revealed the indelible traces of its lowly origins: ‘For the Victorians, evolution seemed to have the same uncanny effect as a supernatural event: evolution theory presented a bodily metamorphosis which, even though taking place over aeons and over multiple bodies, rendered the human body in a most basic sense … unstable.’62 Thus Lucy’s careful self-scrutiny contains more of the uncanny than mere narcissism or vanity: it suggests that her own body seems curiously alien; that she is unable to readily ascribe meaning to her features. Similarly, Basil Hallward is disturbed by the inscrutability of Dorian Gray’s body that, after his miraculous wish, resists interpretation: ‘Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People sometimes talk of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.’63 In this passage the human countenance is constructed as a kind of palimpsestic text across which different meanings can be written, again recalling Carlyle’s notion of the dandy’s body as a ‘(stuffed) parchment-skin whereon he writes’. Dorian, in reply to Basil’s accusation, states, ‘I keep a diary of my life from day to day’, suggesting that his portrait is a self-authored text which he keeps writing over, reworking.64 This contradicts Basil’s deterministic notion that sin ‘writes itself; Dorian clearly demonstrates that he is doing the sinning and, therefore, he is doing the writing. The question of agency is reflected through Wilde’s own fashion practices in this period. According to Kaplan and Stowell, he had by the time of Dorian Gray’s publication proved himself ‘a proponent of multiplying personalities through dress’, by means of a series of dramatic and highly public image changes from ‘aesthetic’ to ‘French bohemian’ to ‘rational’, before embracing the world of fashion itself through the pose of the dandy.65 Through this playful experimentation with image, Wilde highlights the way in which the production of the fragmented, multiplicitous individual is always attributable to human agency. This in turn resonates through Dorian Gray. As Wilde suggests in the novel, ‘insincerity … is merely a method by which we may multiply our personalities’.66 Thus Chris Baldick points out, ‘Wilde’s world has little that can be transgressed against: the standard of “Nature” has been abolished by Wilde’s insistence that this world is a thoroughly artificial one. … [T]he novel is less about the “nature” of

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Good or Evil than about the artificial manufacture of human personality’67 This insistence that personality is a result of human agency and not pre-programmed at birth or fatally contracted through harmful influence thoroughly undermines the notions propagated by Nordau and his predecessors. Wilde’s tale parodies the notion of influence, because it is never clear just exactly who is influencing or ‘making’ whom. On the most overt level, Sir Henry influences Dorian and Dorian influences his various protégés. Dorian, however, tells Basil his soul is ‘your own handiwork’, and it is Dorian who ‘makes’ Basil as a painter.68 Finally, Dorian is far from an innocent victim in the story of his ruin but takes an active delight in watching this story unfold on the canvas, which he, in this sense, creates. It is not Sir Henry whom he considers to be most dangerous to him but ‘the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament’.69 As such there can be no ‘villain’ of the story in the conventional sense, only survivors and non-survivors, those who have manufactured a self or been manufactured more successfully than others. The surface-and-depth critic, by restoring a unitary ‘meaning’ to the text, merely falls into the same trap as Sybil, Basil and Dorian. Sir Henry Wotton, however, who ‘survives’ the text, sustains his philosophy of the surface and consistently resists the induction of depth, directing his discriminating eye purely at the visible.

Wearing the trousers: cross-dressing and colonialism The dandy’s feminine counterpart was the cross-dressed woman: references to women in conventionally masculine attire abound m finde-siècle fictions, from Marjorie Drake in Bram Stoker’s The Mystery of the Sea (1902) – who seems to revel in her recurrent disguise as a footman – through Victoria Cross’s sexily moustached heroine Theodora, to Trilby’s disguise as a peasant boy in the eponymous novel by George du Maurier. Cross-dressed women also featured in the immensely successful serials by G. W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London (1844–6) and The Mysteries of the Court of London (1854–56), and were therefore a recognisable convention of popular fiction, exploited for the sensational titillation they provided but seldom treated as an occasion for anxiety. Richard Marsh’s horror novel The Beetle (1897), on the other hand, presents a more negative and disturbing view of female cross-dressing. The elegant and spirited heiress Marjorie Lindon is kidnapped by the troublingly androgynous Beetle, a supernatural creature from Egypt, and ‘consciously or unconsciously – paraded through London in the tattered masculine

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habiliments of a vagabond’.70 Marjorie’s cross-dressing does not accord her the freedom of walking the urban streets unobserved, as did that of George Sand and her imitators, but is shameful and coerced. It compromises her in terms not only of gender but also of class, suggestively aligning gender transgression with the ‘filth’ of the tramp’s garments. Her disguise, enforced by the Beetle in order to spirit her out of the country, paradoxically makes her a spectacle as she is ‘paraded through London’. Recalling the Gothicised dandies of the texts discussed above, she is linked with monstrosity through the influence of the androgynous Beetle. In fin-de-siècle fictions there is a marked consciousness of femininity being embodied in surface accoutrements, making it easily available for disruption. Something as subtle as cropped hair can cause semantic turbulence in the text. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story ‘The Copper Beeches’ (1892), for example, contains an uncanny moment when the governess Violet Hunter apparently discovers her own shorn hair in a locked drawer. This is echoed by a similar moment in The Beetle. A group of men seeking the missing Marjorie Lindon discover a plait of hair underneath the floorboards of a vacant house, ‘cut off at the roots, – so close to the head in one place that the scalp itself had been cut, so that the hair was clotted with blood’.71 In both texts the Victorian fixation with women’s hair becomes curiously disembodied, the fetishistic braid replacing the actual presence of the woman it should belong to. Recalling the Victorian custom of keeping a lock of hair in memory of the deceased, the shorn braid becomes chilling, a signifier of death. Itself ambiguously living and dead, part of the body yet easily detached from it, hair seems to mark an interface between life and death in Victorian culture, as in the legend of Elizabeth Siddal’s hair still growing out of her exhumed coffin.72 Indeed, the braids of hair discovered in these two texts have, in a sense, been buried. The plait locked away in the drawer reflects the imprisonment (like the Gothic trope of ‘live burial’) of the girl it once belonged to, Alice Ruscastle, while its discovery both initiates Violet’s curiosity over her employers’ secrets and prefigures Alice’s escape. Similarly, Marjorie’s buried braid, with its associations with the ‘savage’ practice of scalping, is taken by its discoverers to represent the burial of Marjorie’s dead body. Its uncanniness in fact derives, however, from its ambiguity: in Conan Doyle’s tale Alice’s braid both is and is not recognisably Violet’s; while in Marsh’s novel Marjorie’s hair cannot definitively indicate either her life or her death but rather suggests her initiation into the ambiguous state of the transvestite. In both texts, the value of hair as a signifier of

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femininity is also at stake. As late as 1925, Steven Zdatny points out, physiologists were warning that women cutting their hair short violated nature and would not only cause baldness but also stimulate the growth of facial hair.73 The shearing of woman’s ‘crowning glory’ in Violet’s case represents her liminal status as a governess, both independent of male support and yet emasculated by the necessity of servility to her employers. In Marjorie’s case, it is part of a more complex network of associations with female deviance, representing her punitive castration as a masculine ‘New Woman’, the suggestion of male shaving evoked by the blood on the roots, and sensational colonial fears of the revenge of the scalp-tearing savage, represented in the amalgam of ‘primitive’ and Orientalist traits, the loathsome Beetle. The conjunction of Marjorie’s cross-dressing with the Oriental and ambiguously gendered Beetle is not a coincidence. As Marjorie Garber amply displays, there is a long tradition of cross-dressing associated with the colonial garment: both the flowing robe (which the Beetle customarily wears) and the so-called Turkish trousers. However, while this tradition has been in existence in the West for several hundred years – witness the heroine’s titillating appearance in Turkish fancydress in Defoe’s Roxana (1724), for example – it acquires a particularly dense range of connotations in the late nineteenth century, bound up with the period’s intense fixation on both colonial and gender politics. In the last two decades of the century, Jann Matlock notes, there is a proliferation of references in European medical texts to the practice of female cross-dressing. This pathologisation reflects, Matlock argues, not necessarily an increase in the practice itself – she cites the general acceptance of women in male dress such as George Sand and Sarah Bernhardt earlier in the century – but rather, a reactionary movement in response to increased agitation from feminist activists and the ubiquitous phenomenon of the New Woman. In 1851, when Mrs Amelia Bloomer launched her infamous ‘Turkish-style’ trousers for women, a new range of signification became attached to the bifurcated garment: to exotic erotica and colonial chic were added American new-fangledness, practical health and comfort, women’s rights, and an explicit reconfiguration of gender roles in the eyes of the popular media. While Bloomer herself insisted that her loose trousers were extremely decorous and ladylike, and her very modest garments would scarcely indicate transvestism to a modern viewer, her innovation generated numerous cartoons portraying women in trousers drinking, smoking and proposing to submissive men. Later in the century, trousers were associated with the new-fangled sport of bicycling, thus becoming a signifier of

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modernity, and specifically of modern femininity, mobile, healthy and independent. Despite cartoons depicting the unsophisticated mistaking lady bicyclists for young men, it should be stressed that trousers did not invariably signify masculinity in women. The Beetle makes female cross-dressing central to the plot and places it in a sensational frame of reference that signals class travesty as well as gender. The eponymous creature’s entire project in harassing society belle Marjorie Lindon appears to be to destroy her immensely fashionable clothes and coerce her into wearing the filthy cast-offs of a male tramp. Marjorie’s first meeting with the Beetle, after charitably bringing the disturbed vagrant, Robert Holt, into her home, instils in her a curious desire to get rid of her up-to-the-minute garb, to the extent of mangling and destroying it: I tore off my clothes. I had on a lovely frock which I had worn for the first time that night; I had had it specially made for the occasion of the Duchess’ ball, and – more especially – in honour of Paul’s great speech. I had said to myself, when I saw my image in the mirror, that it was the most exquisite gown I had ever had, that it suited me to perfection, and that it should continue in my wardrobe for many a day, if only as a souvenir of a memorable night. Now, in the madness of my terror, all reflections of that sort were forgotten. My only desire was to away with it. I tore it off anyhow, letting it fall in rags on the floor at my feet. All else that I had on I flung in the same way after it; it was a veritable holocaust of dainty garments.74

It is the same gown that the group of men subsequently find stashed beneath the floorboards of the mysterious house on Convolvulus Avenue. Augustus Champnell, the ‘Confidential Agent’, states: It was a woman’s clothing, beyond a doubt, all thrown in anyhow. … An entire outfit was there, shoes, stockings, body linen, corsets, and all – even to hat, gloves and hairpins; these latter were mixed up with the rest of the garments in strange confusion. It seemed that whoever had worn these clothes had been stripped to the skin. Lessingham and Sydney stared at me in silence as I dragged them out and laid them on the floor. The dress was at the bottom, – it was an alpaca, of a pretty shade in blue, bedecked with lace and ribbons, as is the fashion of the hour, and lined with sea-green silk. It had perhaps been a ‘charming confection’ once – and that a very recent one! – but now it was all soiled and creased and torn and tumbled.75

This description is notable for its intense attention to detail, in contrast to Marjorie’s concern with the emotional resonances and general aesthetic effect of the dress. Champnell, an exemplary

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detective, enumerates surface features in order to identify clues. As Lawrence Rothfield argues in Vital Signs (1992), ‘The body the detective studies is not an organized totality of qualities woven biologically into a person … but a corpus of isolated, discrete elements, a congeries or consilience of particulars. … For the detective, it is the shoes rather than the man who stands in them that signify.’76 Marjorie is recognisable not through her person but rather through the garments she has shed. The precision of the detective gaze, in its evocation of fabric, tint and ornament, comes intriguingly close to camp. In this particular instance, however, the precise description of shade and trimmings makes overt the latent fetishism of this procedure: a recital of femininity in the face of its threatened disruption. Somewhat in the manner that Sherlock Holmes in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891) refers to Irene Adler as ‘the woman’ in the face of his defeat through her cross-dressing,77 the evocation of the language of the fashion publication becomes a way in which the men can enact a kind of verbal masquerade, resurrecting the prized (and fantasised) category of femininity, perhaps in an attempt to ward off its travesty, but also in order to experience it vicariously and sadistically This is evident in the retrospective descriptions of the cross-dressed Marjorie contained in the shocked reactions of the men: Atherton, for instance, exclaims, ‘Marjorie, the most retiring, modest girl on all God’s earth [a description the reader knows to be a wilful exaggeration] walk about in broad daylight, in such a costume, and for no reason at all! my dear Champnell, you are suggesting that she first of all went mad!’78 Elsewhere she is ‘the daintiest damsel in the land! … rigged out in Holt’s old togs!’79 Despite the men’s initial surmise that Marjorie has been murdered, it is rather her clothing that has been done violence to, the external signs both of her femininity and of her social status, travestied in her subsequent get-up as a tramp. It is precisely this combined assault on gender and class stereotype that so riles her male admirers: Champnell himself inwardly remarks, to a witness’s description of her disguised appearance, ‘Miss Marjorie Lindon, the lovely daughter of a famous house; the wife-elect of a coming statesman’, underlining the class stake involved.80 In a prescient reflection of Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, the Beetle seeks to revenge herself on Paul Lessingham by destroying his fiancee’s fashionable clothes. Not only is Marjorie disguised as a tramp, but her cross-dressed attire in itself has lower-class connotations: Judith Walkowitz argues that ‘Adopting the clothes and/or the life-style, work, mental disposition, or manner of the opposite sex was generally associated with female

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proletarian behavior, but it gained some devotees among middle-class women bent on freeing themselves from the constraints of their own sex.’81 Marjorie’s attire is therefore threatening in terms of both gender and class. As Anne McClintock demonstrates in her exploration of the fetishistic discourses of the working-class Hannah Cullwick, Victorian cross-dressing was very much about class, about ‘passing’ as a lady or a maid as often as ‘passing’ as a man. For Marjorie, the ‘lovely daughter’ and ‘wife-elect’, the appearance in the filthy clothing of the vagrant unemployed symbolically suggests the inactivity and dependence of the middle- and upper-class woman. For Judith Halberstam, a major element of The Beetle’s subversiveness lies in the fact that the Beetle herself, as a masculine woman, remains ‘unpunished’ by the text, as her ultimate death in a railway disaster is plainly a fortuitous accident and does not involve the punitive rape conventionally doled out to the masculine woman. However, this interpretation is extremely contentious in that it blatantly ignores the utterly conventional punishment, in intent if not form, of Marjorie Lindon as a New Woman. Augustus Champnell’s tale of two of the former victims of the cult of Isis is instructive: ‘young, adventurous, and … foolhardy’, they insist, despite the advice of their elders and betters, on spending an evening rambling through Cairo’s native quarter, unchaperoned except for their younger brother.82 Similarly, Marjorie insists on accompanying her ‘brother’ Sydney on his search for the Beetle, and subsequently remaining unchaperoned in the mysterious house on Convolvulus Avenue. Her other suggestive transgressions consist of ‘speechifying’, being rather headstrong, defying the commands of her father, and – like Lucy Westenra – attracting the love of three men at once. Although in actual fact women’s rights activists often dressed in an absolutely conventional feminine manner, as a deliberate ploy not to alienate their male audience, the female public speaker was frequently presented in contemporary fiction not only as masculine but also as wearing male clothes. For instance, Rhoda Broughton in Dear Faustina (1897) suggests of the social activist Mrs Vane, ‘Were it not for a slight condescension in the matter of petticoats, it would not be obvious to a stranger that this is not a slender man that is preparing to address the little group, so austerely masculine is the just-grey-touched thick short hair parted on one side, the coat, the tie, the waistcoat.’83 Marjorie, as we know from her discarded clothes, is highly fashionable and conventionally feminine in appearance. The panic that her crossdressed episode occasions her pursuers and their frenzied ejaculations of horror and disbelief seem to suggest more than mere anxiety over

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her well-being. Their retrospective appraisals of Marjorie’s behaviour indicate a disavowal of already latent ‘masculine’ tendencies within Marjorie herself. In Gothic terms, the fear again is that clothes will literally make the man, but of precisely what should under the dominant cultural ideology be least like a man – a woman. The Beetle itself does not appear in trousers, but rather in an amorphous Oriental robe, which, as Marjorie Garber demonstrates, is equally associated with transvestism in Western culture. The chief defining element of this costume is its perceived fakeness, the sense that it disguises not only gender but also racial identity, at the same time becoming a kind of amalgam of Oriental difference. As the inventor Sidney Atherton describes it: His costume was reminiscent of the Algerians’ whom one finds all over France, and who are the most persistent, insolent and amusing of pedlars. … This individual was like the originals, and yet unlike, – he was less gaudy, and a good deal dingier, than his Gallic prototypes are apt to be. Then he wore a burnoose, – the yellow, grimy-looking article of the Arab of the Soudan, not the spick and span Arab of the boulevard. Chief difference of all, his face was clean shaven, – and whoever saw an Algerian of Paris whose chiefest glory was not his well-trimmed moustache and beard?84

Curiously, although Atherton represents the Beetle as an inferior copy of the ‘originals’, these originals are in themselves regarded as somehow inauthentic, their national identity placed in quotation marks, as if they are merely French imitations of other, real Algerians, who presumably live in Algeria. The French Algerians appear somewhat theatrical, being ‘gaudy’, ‘spick and span’, and invariably sporting the ‘well-trimmed moustache and beard’. There is an implicit suggestion that they are both sanitised by their residence in Europe (note the emphasis on cleanliness), and enacting a stereotyped role of ‘Algerianness’ that perhaps affords them a livelihood, as the most ‘amusing’ of pedlars. However, it is the Beetle’s dinginess and grime – which links it to the apparently ‘authentic’ Arab of the Soudan – that the Westerner regards as suspect. Finally, the mark of gender identity – the suspect clean-shavenness – is perceived as a mark of (an implicitly suspect) racial identity. In this confusion over the representation of racial difference through costume, ‘race’ always appears to be a kind of masquerade, a putting into play of visual signs that are always at one step removed from ‘real’ identity. Reports of the appearance of the Beetle once on the run are always that it is ‘Arab like’ (my emphasis); indeed the

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‘Confidential Agent’, Augustus Champnell, declares that the creature is ‘probably no more an Arab than I was’, without being able to precisely state what he does think the creature is.85 Finally this is confirmed by Robert Holt’s description of the Beetle’s wardrobe: ‘It was full of clothing, – garments which might have formed the stock-intrade of a costumier whose speciality was providing costumes for masquerades.’86 Much of the Beetle’s horror in fact derives from representations of itself rather than its own actual presence, images that uncannily possess the semblance of life. The Oriental carpet in the Beetle’s London hideout, for example, is woven ‘with such cunning skill that, as one continued to gaze, one began to wonder if by any possibility the creatures could be alive’.87 Similarly, the enigmatic image of itself the Beetle leaves as a calling card is vivid ‘even to the extent of seeming to scintillate, and the whole thing … so dexterously done that the creature seemed alive’.88 The Beetle itself becomes inextricable from these inanimate objects: at one point hidden in the bed, at another described as wearing ‘one of them dirty-coloured bed-cover sort of things’ recognised from the West Brompton exhibition, it seems interchangeable with items of furniture and its power is apparently commensurate with icons of itself89 Merely a single utterance of ‘THE BEETLE!’ possesses a kind of totemic power that evokes its presence. The ultimate horror of the Beetle, therefore, does not lie in its gender indeterminacy or its Oriental origin, but in the way its identity lacks inner substance, leaking instead into the range of surfaces surrounding it: clothes, furniture, images, language. When the final destruction of the Beetle occurs in the rail accident at the culmination of the novel, all that remains is a number of particularly unpleasant stains, and scattered ‘pieces of what looked like partially burnt rags, and fragments of silk and linen’.90 The stains are attributed variously to human blood heated to a great temperature, animal blood, or to the ‘deposit of some sort of viscid matter, probably the excretion of some variety of lizard’.91 Kelly Hurley interprets this as evidence of the Beetle’s resistance to scientific analysis and classification.92 It is also implicitly a feature of what she describes as the creature’s abject, liminal status. This denies, however, the disturbing way in which the Beetle apparently stages its disappearance. As Champnell indicates, ‘others affirm that it is not blood at all, but merely paint’.93 This is not the interpretation privileged by the narrative, which implicitly substantiates the viscous deposit; nevertheless, the possibility is raised that these are not the Beetle’s remains at all, but rather an imitation of them. Champnel’s final suggestion, as he imputes to the Beetle

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demonic agency, is ‘it cannot be certainly shown that the Thing is not still existing’.94 If the Beetle has been destroyed, then its body has vanished, dispersed into fragmented bits of fabric and blood which, if not paint, are paint-like. If it has escaped, the suggestion is that it has staged its own disappearance with paint and torn fabric. Either way, its body is replaced by pieces of costume and grotesque stains or marks in a way that both indicates its presence but denies its substance. All that is left of the Beetle is an array of surfaces, endlessly deferring the resolution of its mystery. What unites The Beetle, therefore, with the preceding texts in this chapter is not so much their redefinition of Gothic through degeneration theory as a redeployment of degenerationist concepts of the body through the characteristic Gothic preoccupation with the surface. Dandyism and female cross-dressing, connected through their parallel negotiations with existing gender roles, constitute the specific fashion technologies through which the Gothic surface is articulated. Nevertheless, as is abundantly clear, not only gender but also class and colonialism are implicated in the attendant narratives. The crossdressed woman, like the dandy, is juxtaposed with a monstrous double, so that the lovely Marjorie Lindon is suggestively aligned with the hideous Beetle, just as Dorian Gray’s perfect image is reflected back to him as his ‘loathsome’ portrait. This fictional duality, however, is mirrored in the ‘true’ story of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. The dandy and the freak provided the twin identities through which Merrick’s subjectivity have been constructed.

The elephant’s new clothes: unmasking Joseph Merrick At the same time that Dorian Gray was supposedly traversing the streets of Whitechapel, the area was also home to one of the most celebrated medical cases of the nineteenth century: that of Joseph Merrick, popularly known as the ‘Elephant Man’. Merrick was immortalised by surgeon Frederick Treves’s account of their relationship, published in 1923; he did also, however, leave a purportedly autobiographical account of his life, produced as publicity for his fairground act. Merrick achieved a fair degree of financial prosperity from exhibiting himself until public intolerance led to the closure of his act and his ‘rescue’ by Treves in 1886. Freakshows have been a feature of Western culture for hundreds of years, but achieved maximum exposure during the nineteenth century due to the improved communication networks that led to the discovery and display of human anomalies, many of which were from or pretended to be from

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the far reaches of the globe, such as the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, or the so-called ‘Aztec Children’, actually microencephaletics. By the end of the century, furthermore, the freakshow was able to generate custom through the new techniques of publicity and hype developed by the likes of P. T. Bar num. The prohibitive mechanisms that led to the closure of Merrick’s show were at least partially a response to the popularity of these forms of entertainment. Just as the dandy emerged from an increasingly visual and commercial culture based around the specular pleasures of looking and display, the freak was consolidated as a culturally constructed identity in the age of the Chicago World’s Fair and Barnum and Bailey’s. David Lynch’s film of 1980, The Elephant Man, is based very closely on Treves’s account, and is particularly interesting here in that it emphasises and elaborates on the Gothic implications of Treves’s narrative. Lynch’s is not the only retelling of Merrick’s story, which has also spawned a number of plays, volumes of poetry, and even children’s books, but it is the most well-known and arguably the most overtly Gothic. Critics have repeatedly noted the Gothic strain in Lynch’s oeuvre, manifested in claustrophobic environments, a fascination with the grotesque and macabre, and a pervasive sense of a dark underworld beneath the innocuous surfaces of American life. The Elephant Man is in many ways atypical of Lynch’s work in that it is set in England rather than smalltown America, and is based on a historical narrative. Nevertheless, its Gothicisation of Merrick’s story is particularly relevant here in view of its fascination with masks, veils and theatricality. Indeed, Lynch’s retelling is in itself duplicitous, a narrative that masquerades as a sentimental tale of humanist redemption while secretly proposing a postmodernist construction of subjectivity, based on surface and performance rather than depth. Lynch’s film represents a ‘reading’ of Treves as well as a rewriting and therefore performs a similar function to what Linda Hutcheon in a literary context calls historiographie metafiction, self-consciously foregrounding the way in which the earlier narrative has been constructed, particularly through its highlighting of spectatorship and performance. Joseph Merrick’s historical residency at the London Hospital in Whitechapel from 1886 to 1890 coincides with the Jack the Ripper murders and the fictional Gothic narratives of both Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It has become commonplace to point out the way in which speculations over the Ripper’s identity reflected the representation of Henry Jekyll’s double nature, by focusing on prominent public figures (including the doctors

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of the London Hospital where Treves was caring for Merrick). However, representations of the Elephant Man also invoke the trope of a double nature, a Jekyll and Hyde or Dorian Gray in reverse, where a monstrous exterior conceals a refined and gentle interior. Frederick Treves’s account culminates in a description of Merrick’s spirit as embodied in ‘the figure of an upstanding and heroic man, smooth browed and clean of limb, and with eyes that flashed undaunted courage’. 95 In their study of representations of Merrick, Articulating the Elephant Man, Graham and Oehlschlaeger point out, ‘Treves’s reminiscence … ends by polarizing the inner man and his outer image. Stressing the gap between surface and substance, beastly flesh and aspiring spirit, Treves romanticizes Merrick.’96 Lynch makes more explicit the resemblance to Jekyll and Hyde’s doubleness by an incident in which Merrick, pursued by a crowd, roughly knocks down a little girl in a manner reminiscent of Hyde’s ‘Juggernaut’ episode. This act, however, is in keeping only with the public’s reading of him as an ‘elephant’, his mishap recalling the elephant that apparently knocks down his mother in the film’s dreamlike opening sequence. The inner Merrick, it is revealed, is not a thick-skinned elephant but a sensitive, gentle person. In witnessing the emergence of Merrick’s inner self, the cinema audience is called on to witness a series of ‘unveiling’ images, in which the exposure of the Elephant Man’s body is gradually transformed into a means of exposing his soul. An early scene in The Elephant Man shows Treves performing an operation on a man who has been harmed in an industrial accident. ‘Abominable things machines – you can’t reason with them,’ he remarks. The nightmarish image of industrial machinery endlessly grinding recurs throughout the film, and particularly in a dream sequence of Merrick’s in which the trumpeting and trampling of elephants blurs into a huge industrial loom being pushed back and forth by a row of workers. On one level this image seems merely to represent the menace of the industrialised city, recalling Dickens’s description of the Coketown steam-engines in Hard Times (1854), working ‘monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’.97 On another it suggests the objectification of the Elephant Man himself, his treatment as an animal or a machine rather than as a being who can be reasoned with. The superstitious tale of maternal impression that seeks to explain his origin is juxtaposed with a vision of the docile body, endlessly disciplined by the frameworks of industrial capitalist society. As the ‘freak’ perpetually under scrutiny Merrick would seem to epitomise the

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docile body, constantly under the surveillance of the general public, the police and the medical establishment. The repeated accusations that under Treves’s care ‘he’s only being stared at all over again’ and Treves’s own subsequent self-doubts seem to confirm this: Merrick is unable to escape the surveying gaze. Yet Lynch’s film also repeatedly problematises a Foucauldian reading by showing the hospital to be a place of human relationships and acts of grace which transcend the imperative to classify and regulate, continually juxtaposing the Foucauldian disciplinary narrative with a humanist one. Nevertheless, the operating scene is of more significance than it initially appears, as in this tale of inner and outer it offers a bridge between the two, a visceral literalisation of the narrative’s internal and external divide. However, the internal here has undergone a medicalisation – it is seen purely in terms of organs and flesh – an object of reason rather than a being to be reasoned with. The visual rupturing of the boundary between the two – the passing of what should be inside to the outside – seems to suggest in Gothic terms what Sedgwick describes as the characteristic violence that occurs when the barrier separating the inside and the outside is breached. The opening of the body to reveal the inner organs is also the ultimate act of unveiling, in Mary Shelley’s terms the act of ‘pursuing] nature to her hiding-places’.98 This motif is to recur throughout the film in a variety of guises. At the beginning of the film, the appearance of Merrick is generally preceded by the drawing back of a curtain, whether that of Bytes’s improvised stage show or the surgical screen in the hospital’s lecture theatre. This is symptomatic of Lynch’s recurrent preoccupation with curtains, which John Alexander identifies as ‘Lynch’s metaphor for surface. We look behind the velvet curtain seeking meaning in the Lynch film, but there is no guarantee we will find it.’99 In fact many of the curtains thus invoked are stage curtains, revealing only a performance, another form of artifice. This remains significant in The Elephant Man as Merrick’s own existence is continually circumscribed by the imperative to perform, to be on show, whether for the freakshow audience or the society guests to his hospital rooms. Lynch defers the sense of revealment, however, by continually frustrating the audience’s desire to see Merrick in the flesh. As Holladay and Watt suggest, ‘The topography of the opening, with its winding passageways leading to Merrick’s secluded tent, is crucial in reinforcing the expectation of a hidden spectacle.’100 Treves, with whom the film opens, stands in for the viewer in his search for the Elephant Man, but is first prevented by the police closing down the show, then is required to travel through yet more dark, run-down streets and passageways to

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reach Bytes’s hideout. His first glimpse of the Elephant Man is a poorly lit, partial view, and abbreviated by Lynch by cutting to Treves’s reaction rather than the Elephant Man in close-up. This is followed by the arrival of Merrick at the hospital completely enveloped in a cloak and mask with only a single, sinister hole to see out of. Treves, disconcerted by his failure to get a reaction from the creature, begins to undress him in order to examine him but again Lynch defers revealment by cutting to the lecture theatre, where Merrick appears only in silhouette behind a screen. He is not fully revealed until safely ensconced within the hospital, when the nurse’s scream at coming upon him unprepared reflects the audience’s own shock. In all these forms of concealment, the Elephant Man’s body becomes more horrible through the fact that it is not seen. As his developing relationship with the young nurses shows later in the film, familiarity overcomes fear. Recalling the Burkean sublime, what is obscure naturally provokes greater terror than that which is clearly visible, because the imagination amplifies it. Thus on one level Lynch’s veiling of the Elephant Man is a standard horror trick. However, it also throws the emphasis on the viewer, foregrounding their own position as spectator. Just as later in the film Merrick will build a model of St Philip’s church, completing the building in his imagination from a glimpse of its spire above the rooftops, the audience is forced to produce an imaginative vision of Merrick’s body through a series of glimpses and suggestions. Thus, Lynch implies, it is impossible to perceive the objective reality of Merrick’s body, only a series of constructs produced by the viewer. Not least of these constructs is Merrick’s own self-image as represented through interpreters like Treves. Merrick’s tale appears frequently to have been read as a parable of the superiority of mind over body, not least by Merrick himself, in his autobiographical narrative. Lynch’s film initially appears to comply with this reading, presenting itself as a fable of humanist horror and redemption, in which Merrick progresses from a near-animal state of poverty and humiliation to gradually establish a meaningful sense of self. ‘I am not an elephant,’ Merrick finally asserts, rejecting the identity constructed for him, ‘I am a human being.’ This selfrealisation is presented as profoundly affecting to all those who come into contact with him, not least the cinema audience. Lynch, however, undercuts the conventional Hollywood (or Victorian) sentimentality of such a narrative by presenting each feature of Merrick’s inner life as an already overdetermined performance. Despite Merrick’s apparent transcendence of his external deformity revealing a superior inner being, that inner being is itself revealed to be constructed out of

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surfaces. Those objects and experiences of the most intense emotional significance to Merrick, such as the photographic portrait of his mother or the visit to the pantomime, are always already representations, staged through a fixed set of conventions. The theatre in particular places Merrick in the position of spectator where he has always been on show: it does not, however, break the performative dichotomy. Even his death is constructed as an imitation of a pre-existing image: the picture of a child sleeping hung on his bedroom wall. The most striking way in which Lynch presents Merrick’s inner life as a masquerade, however, is through clothing, and specifically through the accoutrements of the nineteenth-century dandy. Lynch’s vision of a gaslit London shot in grim black and white is connected stylistically by John Alexander to David Lean’s films of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). Graham and Oehlschlaeger have extended the comparison of Lynch’s screenplay with the narrative of the latter, suggesting that Merrick would almost certainly himself have read and enjoyed Oliver Twist. Oliver Twist, of course, is a story of innate goodness concealed by poverty and illtreatment and then rediscovered, the very narrative that Treves tells about Merrick. Great Expectations, however, tells a story that is equally significant: that of a boy of humble origins who learns how to be a gentleman, not least through adopting the appropriate costume. Great Expectations is a narrative of self-fashioning, which pits clothing against inner worth in the process of constituting the gentlemanly subject. In The Elephant Man, Merrick’s assumption of gentlemanly garments is a direct reflection of his sense of self-worth. His naked self is not only shameful and repulsive to others, but in its connection with elephants, is suggestively primitive, even atavistic. Clothed, the Elephant Man is ‘civilized’; like the subjects of asylum photographs, he is brought back within the realms of bourgeois respectability. Visual representations of Merrick from the period reflect this dichotomy. On the one hand, medical photographs such as those taken on his admission to the London Hospital in 1886 (figure 3) present Merrick as all ‘beastly flesh’, little more than the sum of his bodily parts, an object of scientific knowledge, laid open for systematic scrutiny. Utilising the codes of scientific objectivity, the images are stripped of contextualising details: his naked body is the repository of scientific truth, but not of an active subjecthood. In contrast, in a portrait of Merrick taken circa 1889 he appears clothed, dressed in his respectable Sunday best (figure 4). The Sunday suit imposes familiar limits and shape upon his amorphous body; through clothes he becomes recognisable as ‘human’. This to a certain extent fulfils John

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Figure 3 Joseph Merrick on his admission to the London Hospital in 1886

Conolly’s theory of moral management through costume, given visual enactment in photography of Hugh Diamond and others. As in the portraits of the insane discussed in Chapter 3, in this image, clothing has given Merrick a subjectivity. In its use as a carte de visite, this presumably reflects Merrick’s chosen public image. As such, however, it is located on an uneasy boundary between the discourses of celebrity and freakishness: cartes de visites were not only produced for actresses and other celebrities (and, indeed, private individuals) but also, particularly in America, by professional freaks for the purposes of sideshow publicity. In late nineteenth-century photography, still an emerging discipline, the borders between discourses of medicine, celebrity and bourgeois respectability are frequently indistinct. Thus it seems appropriate that according to Treves’s account, the subjectposition to which Merrick aspired was one that was as founded in spectacle as that of the sideshow-exhibit: that of the dandy. According to Treves, Merrick fantasises about being a dandy, ‘the Piccadilly exquisite, the young spark, the gallant’, ‘the real swell’ or ‘knockabout Don Juan of whom he had read’.101 Just as his idea of women is mediated through the romances he avidly consumes, so is

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Figure 4 Joseph Merrick in his ‘Sunday best’ c. 1889

his notion of himself as subject. Like Dickens’s Pip, Merrick is a working-class boy suddenly removed into a higher social circle, and like Pip he places a huge investment in appearance as a means of expressing the new-found role of gentleman. Thus he asks Treves for a Christmas present of a ‘silver-fitted dressing-bag’, a symbol of the elegant dandy, although ironically his deformity means that he is unable to use the items within it. For Treves, this is merely a childish form of dressing up: Just as a small girl with a tinsel coronet and a window curtain for a train will realize the conception of a countess on her way to court, so Merrick loved to imagine himself a dandy and a young man about town. Mentally, no doubt, he had frequently ‘dressed up’ for the part. He would ‘make-believe’ with great effect, but he wanted something to render his fancied character more realistic. Hence the jaunty bag

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which was to assume the function of the toy coronet and the window curtain that could transform a mite with a pigtail into a countess.102

As Graham and Oehlschlaeger suggest, Merrick appears to be attempting to emulate the class of gentlemen he now finds himself among, particularly those of the fashionable set whom Treves invited to call on him. He clearly entertains fantasies of upward mobility that, characteristically for his time, are expressed through dress. Unlike the criminals and middle-class dandies discussed earlier, however, there was no chance of Merrick passing as a gentleman, for the signs of his difference were written too plainly upon the surface of his body. In emulating the gentleman, therefore, he becomes a grotesque parody. Hence Treves rather patronisingly compares his aspirations to the dressing-up games of a child, as ‘make-believe’. This suggests what Holladay and Watt have identified as Lynch’s positioning of Merrick as a child, thus evading his adult sexuality. The idea of Merrick really being a ‘knockabout Don Juan’ cannot be entertained by Treves and therefore he infantilises Merrick’s desires. His recounting of Merrick’s daily ritual of laying out the contents of the dressing-bag upon his table, however, with the comment that ‘such is the power of selfdeception that they convinced him he was the “real thing’”, suggests that for Merrick the imagined ritual of dressing was an important component of his inner sense of self.103 Lynch’s film dramatises this incident, showing Merrick playing with the dressing-set, cigarette holder and silver-topped cane while the Night Porter arranges an illicit viewing for the patrons of the local pub. Merrick is positioned in the privacy of his room, beyond the gaze of all except the cinema audience, suggesting a moment in which he is active in determining his own identity rather than being defined by the habitual gaze of others. The irony, however, is that even in this moment of privacy, Merrick can conceive of no mode of selfhood other than performance, constructing an imaginary audience from the portraits beside his bed, and furthermore one which is explicitly defined through external appearance: the role of the well-groomed gentleman. When the Porter breaks in on him, he significantly comments, ‘You look lovely darlin’ – You look like the bleeding Prince of Wales!’ The combined signifier s of effeminacy and aristocracy are precisely those of fin-de-siècle dandyism, and neatly outline Merrick’s aspirations even as they are placed in inverted commas by the irreducible fact of his misshapen body. If the dandy is always already a kind of parody, a mimicry or masquerade of gentlemanliness, then Merrick is a parody of a parody: in Bakhtinian terms, a figure who re-

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enacts the classically perfected dandiacal body as grotesque excess. In doing so he makes explicit the dialogue between dandyism and monstrosity that shadows late nineteenth-century Gothic texts. The other chief incident concerning clothing on which Treves dwells and which Lynch correspondingly adapts is the transportation of Merrick across Mile End Road from the freakshow to the hospital. Treves significantly compares him to ‘the Man in the Iron Mask’, and makes a detailed description of his ‘disguise’: It consisted of a long black cloak which reached to the ground. Whence the cloak had been obtained I cannot imagine. I had only seen such a garment on the stage wrapped about the figure of a Venetian bravo. … On his head was a cap of a kind never before seen. It was black like the cloak, had a wide peak, and the general outline of a yachting cap. … From the attachment of the peak a grey flannel curtain hung in front of the face. In this mask was cut a wide horizontal slit through which the wearer could look out. This costume, worn by a bent man hobbling along with a stick, is probably the most remarkable and the most uncanny that has as yet been designed.104

Merrick’s disguise has an undeniably theatrical quality to it, incorporating the black cloak of a stage Venetian bravo. Even while avoiding the public gaze he nevertheless elicits it through costume, merely substituting one kind of performance for another. However, Merrick’s outfit is ‘uncanny’ because while it emulates a recognisable human shape, it prevents the viewer from assessing the source of its difference. It indicates the human body beneath while concurrently absenting it. The mask permits Merrick to move within the world while simultaneously cutting him off from it. This recalls Bakhtin’s description of the mask’s function, as Warwick and Cavallaro summarise: ‘Bakhtin talks of the mask as an involvement shield, whereby individuals protect their privacy at the same time as they commune with others, for example in the eminently social contexts of carnivals and masquerades, and hence manage to isolate themselves, yet simultaneously project intended identities on to the external world.’105,106 Merrick, unlike the other freaks in Lynch’s imagined show, does not have a performative ‘mask’ which he adopts before the audience: his whole being is implicated in performance. His extreme difference, which makes him stand out even among the other freaks, means that he is unable to stop being on display. Hence his mask does not offer him a projected identity, but rather a lack of identity. It is a temporary escape from the invasive gaze of the public. However, it

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offers nothing instead beside a blankness, a featurelessness, which Lynch matches in the film with a persistent silence. In his mask, Merrick is not an elephant, but he is not a human being either; he is rather a performative absence. In his rewriting of Treves, Lynch thus overturns the conventional reading of the naked body as ‘innocent’ and the clothed one as fallen. Merrick’s clothed body in its gentlemanly suit is privileged as the ‘authentic’ self; his naked body, on the other hand, is a mask disguising the true beauty of his inner being. In this reading, flesh is the veil, while clothing unveils. Any insight, however, this process of unveiling can provide is partial and contradictory, constructed as it is through fixed conventions of sartorial display. Ultimately, any access the contemporary spectator may seem to have to the Elephant Man’s inner self is an illusion: merely an array of surfaces.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Hurley, The Gothic Body, pp. 5–6. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 208. Barbey, Dandyism, p. 31. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 207. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., p. 207. Cited in Moers, The Dandy, p. 173; no reference provided. Critical examinations of dandyism, excepting Moers’s, tend to privilege forms of dandyism represented in ‘high’ cultural discourse which frequently stress the philosophy of dandyism over its actual modes of practice, presumably partially because information is easier to access. However, this tends to erase the range of practices that can be classified under dandyism, focusing only on the literary or social elite at the expense of those lower down the social scale. Christopher Breward’s The Hidden Consumer (1999) provides a recent corrective to this. Dellamora, Masculine Desire, p. 198. Moers, The Dandy, p. 263. Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, p. 21. Ibid., p. 420. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, p. 68. Breward, Hidden Consumer, p. 60. Dellamora, Masculine Desire, p. 197. Ibid., p. 199. Breward, ‘The Dandy Laid Bare’, p. 231. Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham, p. 94. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, p. 34.

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

FASHIONING GOTHIC BODIES Ibid., p. 35. Ibid. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, p. 52. Barbey, Dandyism, p. 47. Polidori, The Vampyre, p. 3. Ibid. ‘Personal Reminiscences of Beau Brummell’, Chambers’s Journal (Edinburgh, 4/21–28/1866); cited in Moers, The Dandy, p. 37. Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, pp. 255, 256. Ibid., p. 9. Collins, Woman in White, p. 197. Collins, Law and the Lady, p. 173. Ibid., p. 214. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid. Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., pp. 247–8. Ibid., p. 231. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, p. 85. Polidori, The Vampyre, p. 3. Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, pp. 348, 349. Wilde, Writings, p. 153. Mason, Oscar Wilde, p. 81. Barbey, Dandyism, p. 31. Nordau, Degeneration, p. 9. Ibid., p. 318. Barbey, Dandyism, p. 64. Wilde, Writings,?. 161. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 64. Moers, The Dandy, p. 37. Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 65. Wilde, Writings, p. 213. Punter, Literature of Terror Volume 2, p. 8. Wilde, Writings, p. 72. Stoker, Dracula, p. 235. Ibid, p. 76. Hurley, Novel of the Gothic Body, p. 45. Wilde, Writings, p. 159. Ibid, p. 162. Kaplan and Stowell, Theatre and Fashion, p. 12. Wilde, Writings, p. 154. Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, p. 149. Wilde, Writings, p. 161. Ibid., p. 136. Marsh, The Beetle, p. 215. Ibid., p. 220. See also the sentimental fashion for jewellery and ornaments woven from human hair. Hair jewellery or ‘hair work’ was initially associated with

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74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

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mourning practices; later in the century it became dissociated from its original signified and became purely a fashion accessory. Zdatny, ‘The Boyish Look and the Liberated Woman’, p. 369. Marsh, The Beetle, pp. 161–2. Ibid., p. 219. Rothfield, Vital Signs, pp. 135–6. Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, p. 3. Marsh, The Beetle, p. 240. Marjorie does eventually go mad: just as in the earlier Sensation fiction, wearing inappropriate garments for one’s position in society suggestively indicates an unstable mind. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid., p. 243. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 62. Marsh, The Beetle, p. 250. Broughton, Dear Faustina, p. 13. Marsh, The Beetle, p. 62. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., pp. 72–3. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 273. Ibid., p. 274. Hurley, The Gothic Body, p. 134. Marsh, The Beetle, pp. 273–4. Ibid., p. 277. Treves, ‘The Elephant Man’, p. 187. Graham and Oehlschlaeger, Articulating the Elephant Man, p. 59. Dickens, Hard Times, p. 65. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 314. Alexander, Films of David Lynch, p. 22. Holladay and Watt, ‘Viewing the Elephant Man’, p. 874. Treves, ‘The Elephant Man’, pp. 182, 183. Ibid., p. 182. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid, p. 173. Warwick and Cavallaro, Fashioning the Frame, p. 130.

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Cosmo-Gothic: the double and the single woman

Beat defeatism. Visualise an ‘ideal you’ who’s mentally and physically content. What makes her tick? How does she deal with tricky situations? Mentally go through what it’s like to live as her and practise this every day for three weeks until you feel able to deal with problems as she does. (’101 Fab Ways to Transform Your Life!’, 19, May 1999)

Doubles and individuals The doppelgänger or double is a frequently noted feature of Gothic fiction. It is usually associated with texts labelled as ‘male’ or sometimes ‘paranoid’ Gothic: texts that focus on the psychology of the villain rather than the heroine and deal with masculine angst rather than feminine imprisonment. These range from early examples such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), through Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ (1839), to classic fin-de-siècle manifestations of the theme such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The ascription of the label ‘male’ to these texts is partly due to the Freudian model of masculine paranoia as repressed homoerotic desire through which they are often read, and partly to the fact that the main characters and their doubles are almost invariably men (though not necessarily their authors, as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) demonstrates). Female doubles are relatively thin on the ground in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts, and have accordingly been overlooked by critics. Doubles in general remain a surprisingly underexplored topic, but the female doppelgänger is even more undertheorised than her male counterpart. This is particularly surprising in that the female double has become increasingly predominant in the twentieth century, from Daphne du Maurier’s

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Rebecca (1938), to Emma Tennant’s postmodern rewritings of earlier ‘male’ Gothic texts from a female perspective, The Bad Sister (1978) and Two Women of London (1989). The following chapter seeks, therefore, to provide a corrective to this trend, by offering some suggestions as to why the female double is comparatively late to emerge and how she can be interpreted. In folklore the doppelgänger is traditionally regarded as a harbinger of death, but in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature is usually interpreted as performing a more complex psychological function. Karl Miller’s book Doubles (1989) is the most significant work on the topic, but while it presents a broad sweep of literary history from Shakespeare to Martin Amis, it is largely concerned with detecting ‘duality’ in the authors’ biographies rather than their fiction. The place of Gothic as a genre in the literary tradition of the double is given minimal consideration, although substantial space is allotted to Hogg, Poe and Stevenson. According to Miller, the doppelgänger is primarily a feature of male literature: only men have doubles (Sylvia Plath being the exception that apparently proves the rule). This argument seems wilfully to overlook Gilbert and Gubar’s seminal The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), which presents a convincing argument for the presence of literary doubles in the writings of Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, and others. However, this apparent oversight on Miller’s part may in fact reflect the historical conditions surrounding the emergence of the double in Western literature. The rise of the double is clearly initially due to the emergent notion of the individual in modernity. It is only when value is invested in a unique, coherent subjecthood that fear can be generated through its duplication or disintegration. As Paul Coates argues in his study The Double and the Other (1988): ‘Paradoxically, the Double enhances the ideology of individualism: it puts the self in the place of the other.’1 Thus, if women within patriarchal society have not been allowed access to a unified subject-position, it follows that the representation of doubles will be proportionately less. As the notion of woman as a unified speaking subject has become more stable within the twentieth century, female doubles have become more prevalent in women’s writing. Arguably, the characterisation of these doubles is precisely bound up with the formation of the feminine subject through discourse, and specifically through the discourses of fashion. For the striking thing about doubles is, of course, that in most cases they look alike – they share surface features, clothing, mannerisms. From nineteenth-century texts such as Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a prevalent Gothic trope has been that by which one character

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‘steals’ the identity of another or, alternatively, becomes trapped in an alien identity by wearing (or recreating) their clothes. Gil-Martin, the demonic double of Hogg’s religious fanatic Robert Wringhim, informs his protégé that: If I contemplate a man’s features seriously, mine own gradually assume the very same appearance and character. And what is more, by contemplating a face minutely, I not only attain the same likeness, but, with the likeness, I attain the very same ideas as well as the same mode of arranging them, so that, you see, by looking at a person attentively, I by degrees assume his likeness, and by assuming his likeness I attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts.2

In this passage, it is one’s outward appearance that is privileged over internal thoughts in the constitution of identity. Furthermore, it is the act of looking, of ‘contemplating a face minutely’, that gives access to this identity. By ‘looking at a person attentively’ Gil-Martin is able to replicate himself in their image. Identity is therefore apparently constituted out of surface signs. This is consonant with the Eve Sedgwick’s theorisation of Gothic in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions as constructed purely out of surface mechanisms. For women, this bears an added significance in that the formation of femininity has always been bound up with the mechanics of appearance. In contemporary Gothic texts the doppelgänger trope can be interpreted through the prescriptive femininity and politics of individual fulfilment expressed in women’s fashion magazines. Although women’s journals have existed since the seventeenth century, they were first issued in the form recognisable to a contemporary reader between the First and Second World Wars. Throughout the twentieth century, Ballaster et al argue, magazines have offered to their readers a profoundly ambivalent model of femininity in which ‘there is a clear gap between what is and what the magazine claims she “ought” (to desire) to be. Femininity, therefore, becomes both a source of anxiety and a source of pleasure because it can never be fully achieved. The magazines perpetuate this myth of femininity and offer themselves as a solution.’3 If this ‘myth of femininity’ is established early on in the century, with the introduction in Britain of the domestic or ‘service’ weeklies Woman’s Own in 1932, Woman in 1937, and Woman’s Illustrated in 1936, it is no less predominant in the titles introduced from the late 1960s onwards, such as Cosmopolitan. The combination of a concentration on physical appearance with an ideology of the individual is a

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distinctive feature of these magazines and therefore is particularly appropriate for contextualising the female double. As Janice Winship argues in Inside Women’s Magazines (1987), the titles from the 1960s and 1970s promote an ideal of self-expression through consumer choices (fashion, interior decorating) that appear to offer an illusion of individuality while simultaneously limiting it to the domestic sphere. Furthermore, this ethic of choice often spills over into the myth of the ‘superwoman’, the woman able to ‘have it all’ to whose lifestyle the ordinary reader is implicitly supposed to aspire. Thus the imperative to ‘be oneself is both circumscribed by consumer choices and necessarily tied into the notion of attempting to be like someone else – a superior model of the self. The texts discussed in the following chapter bring out the doubleedged nature of this ideology. Fashion is presented as entrapping the protagonists, both in that they feel alienated from the myth of ideal womanhood the culture demands they aspire to, and in that the choices they make frequently turn out to be no real choices at all, but replicated by their sinister doubles. Thus in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) the double is an image of perfected femininity which diminishes the protagonist’s own identity and, at the crucial scene at the fancy dress ball at the centre of the text, threatens to usurp it altogether. In Emma Tennant’s novella The Bad Sister (1978), however, the double takes on an even more sinister role as that which threatens the protagonist’s ‘singularity’, their uniqueness in a culture dedicated to personal pleasure and self-expression. This position is reiterated by Barbet Schroeder’s film Single White Female (1992), which is in many ways the apotheosis of the female doppelganger narrative. The protagonist Allie’s advertisement for a ‘Single White Female’ flatmate implicitly just like herself culminates in the nightmare scenario of her new flatmate’s attempt to steal her identity, by fashioning herself in Allie’s image – much as Gil-Martin steals Robert Wringhim’s identity by assuming his appearance. Existing interpretations of this film have tended to read it psychoanalytically, regarding both main characters’ preoccupation with their appearance (and their reflection in mirrors) as a symptom of narcissism and repressed lesbian desire. In this they implicitly reference a tradition of representation whereby female narcissism has been blurred into lesbianism, the ‘kiss in the glass’ becoming a kiss in the flesh.4 Following Sedgwick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, however, Single White Female is, in common with many other Gothic texts, arguably less interesting when read according to a psychoanalytic surface-and-depth model than when attention focuses primarily on surfaces. To perform such a reading it is useful to investigate the role of

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the discursive context provided by women’s fashion magazines in the production of Allie and Hedy’s doppelganger relationship. While psychoanalytic readings of the film are not necessarily refuted, they can arguably overlook a crucial aspect of the way in which its central characters’ relationship is constructed, and thus read the film as providing a less sophisticated commentary on contemporary femininity than it actually does. In Rebecca, The Bad Sister and Single White Female, finally, clothing provides a primary mechanism through which the exploration of the doppelganger theme is produced.

Between women The key critical text to theorise male doubles in Gothic literature is Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985). While Sedgwick’s discussion of male relationships is extremely convincing, however, her characterisation of those between women is substantially less satisfying. Sedgwick adopts Claude Levi-Strauss’s term ‘homosociality’ to explore the function of male bonding under patriarchy. Thus she argues that the doubles featured in what she calls ‘paranoid Gothic’ express the relationships between men in a homophobic society in which male bonding is nevertheless a mechanism of power. The relationships between men in these texts are not necessarily representative of homosexual desire, but rather of the kind of mechanisms, usually intensely homophobic, through which patriarchy consolidates its power and women become objects of exchange. For instance, of Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner she writes: even motifs that might ex post facto look like homosexual thematics (the Unspeakable, the anal), even when presented in a context of intensities between men, nevertheless have as their first referent the psychology and sociology of prohibition and control. That is to say, the fact that it is about what we would today call ‘homosexual panic’ means that the paranoid Gothic is specifically not about homosexuals or the homosexual; instead, heterosexuality is by definition its subject.5

Sedgwick uses the motif proposed by René Girard of the ‘erotic triangle’ to describe this relationship, in which two men fixated on the same love object form a rivalry that eventually takes precedence over the relationship with the beloved. According to Sedgwick, ‘In any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved.’6

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Thus while women are frequently if not invariably the object of exchange which enables this relationship, the apex of the ‘erotic triangle’, they are seldom presented as rivals within it themselves. For Sedgwick, this is not only due to the fact that under patriarchy, men symbolically hold the positions of power, but also due to the different quality of male and female homosociality. In Sedgwick’s discussion of male homosociality, the homosocial and the homosexual exist on a continuum, but the visibility of this continuum is radically disrupted for men in modern Western society. Female homosociality, she argues, suffers no such disruption and ‘the adjective “homosocial” as applied to women’s bonds … need not be pointedly dichotomized as against “homosexual”; it can intelligibly denominate the entire continuum’.7 Thus the concepts of ‘women-loving-women’ and ‘women-promotingthe-interests-of-women’ are not radically dissevered but participate in the same set of discursive practices. This interpretation, reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s notion of the ‘lesbian continuum’, is problematic, as it erases the way in which in contemporary society, the assumption of lesbian identity is for the majority a conscious choice which suffers an equivalent, if differently inflected, stigma to that of gay men. Female homosociality may not suffer the same dichotomous break from homosexuality as its male counterpart, but the continuum is nevertheless riddled with smaller gaps and divisions, visible in different ways to different subjects. What occurs ‘between women’ may not be the same as that which occurs ‘between men’, but it is certainly not a Utopian zone of undifferentiated sisterhood. If, as Sedgwick argues, the presentation of a doppelgänger narrative necessarily expresses a relationship between men, then twentieth-century female doppelgänger narratives equally indicate an interrogation of the relationships between women. In du Maurier’s Rebecca, for example, or Tennant’s The Bad Sister, the doppelgänger relationship veils an erotic triangle in which the female relationships are defined through a third, male character: Maxim de Winter; Tony Marten. In Single White Female the same function is performed by the character of Allie’s boyfriend Sam. Similarly, in all three texts, the relationship between the female character and her doppelgänger overtakes that with her male partner. However, the way in which these relationships are depicted also turns upside-down Sedgwick’s idealised notion of the mutual supportiveness of relationships between women. For Sedgwick, the continuum between ‘women loving women’ and ‘women promoting the interests of women’ has an ‘apparent simplicity’ and ‘intuitive force’.8 Yet in Rebecca, The Bad Sister and Single White Female, the pairs of female rivals seek alternately to become and

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destroy one another. In Single White Female in particular, the two points of the continuum are brought together but in a terrifying, oppressive way: Hedy’s attempts to promote Allie’s interests – for example after she has been sexually harassed by an employer – become a sinister means of emotional control. To some extent these texts are radical in that they foreground the relationships between women, which gradually erase or replace heterosexual relationships with men, and in that they invert conventional ‘homosocial’ relations in which women are the object of exchange. However, on another level they are conservative in that female same-sex relationships are ultimately seen as dependent on male definition and are unable to exist outside the context of heterosexual relationships.

Rebecca: ’nothing but clothes’ Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca sets the blueprint for the twentieth-century novel of the female double. The plot has its roots in Jane Eyre (1847), bringing the latent doubling between Jane and Bertha Rochester to the fore by depicting its nameless heroine as haunted by Rebecca de Winter, her new husband’s previous wife. Du Maurier readily acknowledged Brontë’s influence, yet the contrast between the two novels is instructive. As Alison Light argues in her study of femininity and conservatism between the wars, Forever England (1991), ‘Rebecca … is no longer the madwoman in the attic of the Gothic novel, but inside the mind of bourgeois woman and trying to get out.’9 Unlike Bertha, who poses a physical threat to Jane and does not literally resemble her, Rebecca’s threat is purely psychological, and she increasingly seems to transfer her own likeness to the heroine as the novel progresses. With this internalisation of the double comes a more complex and explicit threat to the heroine’s sense of self. Rebecca’s power over the nameless heroine is due not to her objective existence, but to the symbolic sway she holds over the heroine’s fantasies and neuroses. She is not a hideous madwoman, but a glamorous image of social and sexual sophistication. Her absolute perfection torments the heroine by highlighting her perceived inadequacies, providing a model she is expected to live up to and cannot. This oppressive image of flawless femininity is by no means only a product of modernity, yet in du Maurier and her successors takes on a form which seems specific to the twentieth century, and specifically to the development of the woman’s magazine. There is only one direct reference to women’s magazines in Rebecca: when the heroine imagines her employer Mrs Van Hopper’s

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bed ‘littered with the separated sheets of the daily papers folded anyhow, while French novels with curling edges and the covers torn kept company with American magazines’.10 Naturally not all American magazines are women’s magazines, but significantly, America led the fashion for women’s journals in the early part of the century. This untidy profusion of texts is a direct comment not only on Mrs Van Hopper’s slatternly nature but also on her unseemly lack of taste. The daily newspapers are, in Rebecca, an intrusive and vulgar incursion of the public into the private, while the connotations of French novels need no explanation. While the heroine implicitly rejects these texts as vulgar by association, their invocation early in the narrative sketches the parameters of her fictional world. Significantly, when Hitchcock filmed the novel in 1940, he chose to emphasise the aspirational role of magazines in the heroine’s life by having her order a sophisticated evening dress from a fictional publication entitled Beauty: A Magazine for Smart Women, shown in lingering close-up. Penny Tinkler’s study of girls’ magazines from this period indicates the ambivalence with which femininity was presented in popular publications, recalling the comments by Ballaster et al. cited above: Magazine representations of femininity, in terms of appearance, were full of contradictions and tensions. On the one hand, a feminine appearance was described by these papers as natural; girls were innately feminine. On the other hand, romance magazines in particular, devoted considerable space to information on what constituted a feminine appearance and how to create it. In fact, appearing feminine was generally portrayed as an art form to be acquired by girls, rather than as a natural endowment.11

Rebecca’s nameless heroine spends the majority of her time either labouring to master the ‘art form’ of femininity, or feeling hopelessly inadequate in her perceived inability to do so. Ironically, it is Rebecca’s apparently flawless femininity that turns out to be unnatural – ‘not even normal’ – while the heroine’s naïveté, her lack of proficiency in femininity as spectacle, is what attracts her husband to her.12 However, there remains a perpetual gap between the woman the heroine hopes and expects herself to be and the woman she is, which is fed not by the demands of her husband, who is satisfied merely by her difference from his first wife, but by her own fantasies. These fantasies are clearly a source of anxiety but also, perversely, of pleasure. Although the novel has been called by Alison Light among others an ‘anti-romance’, it is nevertheless commonly perceived as belonging

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to the romance genre, the genre most favoured by the women’s periodical, and certainly evokes its conventions even if to overturn them. Ballaster et al. describe the three major features of women’s magazines as domesticity, beauty and romantic fiction. The anonymous heroine is preoccupied with all three: she continually imagines herself as the heroine of a romantic novel, frets over the housekeeping, and worries about her clothes. Nevertheless her life consistently fails to live up to her romantic expectations; she is an unnecessary fixture at Manderley as the servants are perfectly capable of running the house on their own; and her clothes are extremely ordinary, even shabby. Clothing is perhaps the prime index of the heroine’s difference from Rebecca. Dressed in a raincoat she realises belonged to Rebecca, she notes, ‘She who had worn the coat then was tall, slim, broader than me around the shoulders, for I had found it big and overlong, and the sleeves had come below my wrist.’13 Traces of Rebecca’s body remain present through her clothes, providing a model the heroine struggles to fit. Symbolically, the clothes are too big due to both the heroine’s perceived inadequacy and Rebecca’s larger-than-life quality. They also seem, however, to retain the echoes of her sartorial insouciance, allowing the heroine to invest in an imaginary image of the original wearer: ‘Some of the buttons were missing. She had not bothered then to do it up. She had thrown it over her shoulders like a cape, or worn it loose, hanging open, her hands deep in the pockets.’14 This is an imaginative projection on the heroine’s part, but is derived from an accurate detection and piecing together of surface signs. The lipstick and perfume on the monogrammed handkerchief that identify the coat as Rebecca’s are like the bodily traces read as clues in the detective narrative. Rebecca’s clothes remain invested with her identity long after her death, symbolised by the azalea scent which according to Mrs Danvers, continually signified her presence: ‘I would always know when she had been before me in a room. There would always be a little whiff of her scent in the room.’15 This is the scent that the narrator finds ‘tarnishing the silver dresses and the brocade’ within the wardrobe, still an active presence despite having ‘turned stale … faded and old’.16 The body which is claimed to be Rebecca’s, in contrast, is spectacularly free of identity: ‘There was nothing on the body when it was found … her beautiful face unrecognizable.’17 Of course, part of the reason that this corpse is not recognisably Rebecca is that it is not, actually, Rebecca’s corpse at all. Nevertheless, the ease of the confusion between the two bodies suggests that Rebecca’s identity lies not in her physical features, but in the array of signs accumulated at Manderley: ‘her scent … her

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favourite flowers … her clothes … her brushes … her shoes … her nightdress’.18 Thus, despite her physical death, her presence lingers on as a series of glittering surfaces. When the heroine suggests she doesn’t mind what she wears, Maxim states, ‘Most women think of nothing but clothes.’19 The implication is that he is measuring all women by Rebecca, who from the evidence of her wardrobe thought of little else, but the remark is also ironic, for the heroine, despite her protestations to the contrary, does in fact think of clothes all the time. It is doubly ironic in that the heroine, like most of the rest of the world, thinks of nothing but clothes when she thinks of Rebecca, in that she judges the outward appearance without regard to what is hidden beneath the surface, and in doing so she is being just as shallow and superficial as Maxim suggests Rebecca was. Nevertheless, Mrs Danvers’s account of Rebecca’s relationship with her clothes presents a different picture, of a woman who dresses entirely for herself without regard for convention. As Mrs Danvers indicates, ‘Everyone was angry with her when she cut her hair … but she did not care. “It’s nothing to do with anyone but myself,” she would say. And of course short hair was much easier for riding and sailing.’20 Rebecca dresses for her own pleasure; others’ reaction means little to her beside her own ease and comfort in pursuing the activities she enjoys. Nevertheless, she is clearly extremely glamorous, the more so for apparently not trying: ‘She could wear anything, stand any colour.’21 Maxim’s revelation of Rebecca’s secret depravity, however, suggests a carefully controlled and constructed masquerade, a woman who conceals her ‘true’ nature and desires beneath a veneer of social sophistication. His picture presents a radical contrast with Mrs Danvers’s image of a woman perfectly at ease with her body, untroubled by social pressures to conform and yet able to do so without effort when she desires. Rebecca’s mastery of the technologies of femininity thus presents the illusion of effortlessness, a masquerade that conceals the processes of its own construction. As in the magazines described by Tinkler, femininity is presented as simultaneously natural and artfully acquired. This contradiction is misunderstood by the heroine, who regards Rebecca’s femininity as natural, without perceiving the labour that produces it, as indeed Rebecca intends. In contrast, the effort she puts into acquiring proficiency in femininity is either too obvious or goes unnoticed. Accused by Maxim of wearing a ‘grubby skirt’ and not attempting to overcome her shyness when paying social calls, the heroine protests: ‘“Of course I didn’t call on her in my old skirt, I wore a frock. … I try every day, every time I go out or meet anyone new. I’m

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always making efforts. You don’t understand. It’s all very well for you, you’re used to that sort of thing. I’ve not been brought up to it.’”22 Class privilege, it turns out, is an essential feature in the successful production of femininity. Although she professes to have little interest in clothes, the heroine is painfully aware of the paucity of her wardrobe, and continually describing what she is wearing or imagining herself in something else more sophisticated: I can remember as though I wore it still my comfortable, ill-fitting flannel suit, and how the skirt was lighter than the coat through harder wear. My shabby hat, too broad about the brim, and my lowheeled shoes, fastened with a single strap. A pair of gauntlet gloves clutched in a grubby hand.23 I wish I was a woman of thirty-six dressed in black satin and a string of pearls.24

In the latter quotation, the heroine is already imagining herself as a woman such as Rebecca. From wishing to be a more experienced, more glamorous woman to wishing to be Rebecca is only a tiny leap. If Rebecca had not already existed, she would have invented her. The heroine’s actual clothing, as distinct from that which she imagines for herself, produces evidence not of sophistication but rather of her gaucherie and inadequacy in integrating with her social environment. She is not only ashamed of her shabby outfits, but is constantly drawn into embarrassing scenarios centring on the exchange of clothes, which highlight her lowly social status. Newly installed at Manderley, she catches the housemaid, Alice, fingering her underwear, and learns her deficiency in the minutiae of class status: ‘She looked almost shocked, as though her own personal pride had received a blow. I had never thought about my underclothes before. As long as they were clean and neat I had not thought the material or the existence of lace mattered.’25 In the upper-class world of Manderley, a different code of public and private exists to that of the bourgeois environment the heroine is used to. The presence of servants within one’s domestic environment shifts the boundaries between public and private, yet requires them to be even more rigorously policed. The quality of the material and the existence of lace are of vital importance in separating ‘upstairs’ from ‘downstairs’, and failure to maintain this boundary is an affront to those underneath: who wants to be given orders by someone not discernibly above them? The heroine’s ambiguous social status as companion to Mrs Van Hopper, paid for her services yet not quite a servant, is reflected in her acknowledgement that at Manderley she is

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‘like a between-maid’, and her own maid Clarice’s remark that ‘It’s not like being with a lady … it’s like being with one of ourselves.’26 Nevertheless, she snobbishly distances herself from the kind of women she imagines would be attracted to Jack Favell, ‘Girls in sweet shops giggling behind the counter, and girls who gave one programmes at the cinema.’27 When he looks her up and down she states with disgust, ‘I felt like a barmaid.’28 Class here is sexualised: to be made to feel like a sexual object is to be made to feel like a lower-class woman. Both the sexualisation of class and the heroine’s ambivalent placement on the class boundary are underscored close to the beginning of the novel in an incident in which the dressmaker, Blaize, approaches the heroine with a commission for bringing Mrs Van Hopper to her shop. The heroine, ‘scarlet with embarrassment’, notes that she ‘had been aware of that sick, unhealthy feeling I had experienced as a child when turning the pages of a forbidden book’.29 Having just constructed a sentimental fiction around Blaize, imagining her threading needles with tired eyes while her consumptive son wastes upon the sofa, she uncomfortably finds herself implicated in a more worldly and mercenary narrative, and aligned with what she envisages as a lower social class. The incident is also, however, given an unhealthy sexual tinge through the comparison to the forbidden reading. Blaize’s offer of a free dress – which the heroine is clearly in need of – becomes a moral temptation which does not so much tempt the heroine as taint her through her being in the position to receive it. She is faced with two options: she can move up the social scale by marrying Maxim, or she can stay with Mrs Van Hopper and thus eventually move down. The first option is implicitly represented by Rebecca, the second by Blaize, who offers a kind of shadow double to the heroine: what she could turn into were the novel to take the opposite direction. Maxim tells her that if she stays she ‘will either have to give in, and become a sort of Blaize yourself, or stay as you are and be broken’.30 However, the options he offers are only superficially better, for she is hardly able to ‘stay as she is’ in her new position as Maxim’s wife; Rebecca merely replaces Blaize as a model of behaviour. Maxim’s later comparison of Rebecca’s knowledge to that found in ‘forbidden … books’ emphasises the parallel.31 His threat, that the heroine will ‘be broken’, is ironic in that it is her marriage which will in fact split her in two: into her self-image and the image of Rebecca. The fundamental split – the perpetual straining to be a woman other than what she is – is the rift that produces the double. However, this double is inflected not only with the dividedness of gender, but also with that of class: it carries the freight of class

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aspiration. Rebecca is a vision of class fantasy as well as of femininity perfected: she has the ‘breeding’ to enable her to fulfil the social duties required by residence at Manderley with polished ease. The increasingly common critical tendency to read a lesbian romance into Rebecca, particularly into Rebecca’s relationship with Mrs Danvers, tends to deflect attention from the class preoccupations of the novel. Mrs Danvers fingering Rebecca’s underwear is on one level simply an extension of Alice examining the heroine’s. Where the heroine’s disappoints, Rebecca’s evidently dazzles expectations. To the heroine, underwear signifies intimacy, but this is a false intimacy: Rebecca’s underwear is clearly designed to be shown. The adulation Mrs Danvers feels for Rebecca is not necessarily sexual but an unhealthy extension of the mistress/maid relationship within which, as suggested above, the boundaries between public and private become most threatened and therefore most heavily codified during the ritual of dressing. As Mrs Danvers tells the heroine, ‘I did everything for her you know. … We tried maid after maid but none of them suited. “You maid me better than anyone, Danny,” she used to say, “I won’t have anyone but you.’”32 Mrs Danvers, as housekeeper, is taking a significant drop in status by ‘maiding’ for Rebecca. Yet Rebecca turns it into a privilege, a mark of preference, and in doing so disrupts the fixed hierarchy of the household. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik have argued convincingly for Rebecca’s disruptive effect on the heterosexual romance plot through the very indeterminacy of her desires: As her dark double, Rebecca moves from functioning simply as a binary opposite of the second wife’s character, to indicating the multiple possibilities inherent in female sexual identity. Thus the element of lesbian desire in the text (commented on by several critics) does not necessarily indicate the ‘true’ sexual identity of Rebecca (nor that of the narrator nor that of the author). Rather, Mrs Danvers’ love for Rebecca and Rebecca’s own diverse sexuality function to destabilize the heterosexual desire which drives the plot and which the text (read as woman’s romantic fiction) seems overtly to celebrate.33

While this is an astute assessment of the threat Rebecca’s sexuality poses within the text, such a reading tends nevertheless to replace class with sexuality, and overlook the way in which class inflects Rebecca’s sexuality: for example the disgust both Maxim and the narrator feel at her relationship with the ‘vulgar’ Jack Favell. The unseemliness of this relationship is partially due to the way in which overt sexuality is associated by the narrator with the working classes – the shopgirls and

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barmaids that she feels herself unpleasantly aligned with by Favell’s unsolicited gaze. Rebecca’s ability to traverse and manoeuvre around class boundaries constitutes a significant part of her menace. This is highlighted by the fancy-dress ball at Manderley; as Horner and Zlosnik again point out, the Caroline de Winter costume allows Rebecca ‘to assume, through mimicry, a “legitimate” place in the de Winter household, foreshadowing her supposed future role as a bearer of Maxim’s sons, the inheritors of the Manderley estate’.34 This masquerade is flawless from the point of view of the visitors at the ball, but to Maxim, who finally murders Rebecca when she tells him she is expecting not Maxim’s but Jack Favell’s child, it is a painful reminder of how Rebecca has usurped the privileges of his family. For the narrator, the costuming as Caroline de Winter has a radically different meaning which Horner and Zlosnik identify as embodying Luce Irigaray’s notion of masquerade. Her enactment of femininity is designed purely to please Maxim; the pleasure she derives from it stems from the anticipation of this expected result. As such, she demonstrates her alienation from herself, and this is represented through her uncanny ‘possession’ by Rebecca, in which Maxim’s first wife is apparently resurrected through the medium of his second wife’s body.35 Of course, the Rebecca she resembles is also in fancy dress, already masquerading as someone else. Nevertheless, Rebecca’s presence is so strong that even in costume, it is she who becomes the ‘authentic’ version and the heroine the copy. In fact, the heroine actually finds her features altering upon assuming her disguise: ‘I did not recognise the face that stared at me in the glass. The eyes were larger surely, the mouth narrower, the skin white and clear? The curls stood away from the head in a little cloud. I watched this self that was not me at all and then smiled; a new, slow smile.’36 As Angela Carter suggests, fancy dress performs a liberatory function, allowing ‘a relaxation from one’s own personality and the discovery of maybe unexpected new selves’.37 Dressed like Rebecca, the heroine literally becomes Rebecca to the extent of taking on her features and aspects of her personality. Like the nameless corpse buried as Rebecca, the heroine’s own identity is sufficiently weak to provide a blank canvas on which Rebecca can be projected. Nevertheless, this loss of her own identity is on some level profoundly desired by the narrator; she states more than once that ‘I wished I could lose my own identity.’38 The fancy-dress ball is not the only place in the narrative in which the heroine seems implicitly to become Rebecca. Fantasising about Rebecca at the dinner table, she realises that ‘in that brief moment, sixty seconds in time perhaps, I had

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so identified myself with Rebecca that my own dull self did not exist, had never come to Manderley’.39 As when wearing the fancy-dress costume, this is registered in a subtle change of physical appearance: Maxim tells her, ‘you did not look a bit like yourself just now. … You looked older suddenly, deceitful.’40 Finally, at the end of the novel, when Rebecca’s mystery has been exposed and her threat apparently dissipated, the heroine dreams of writing invitations in Rebecca’s handwriting, before looking in the mirror and seeing Rebecca’s reflection instead of her own.41 This is clearly a reprisal of the fancydress experience in dream form. If the narrator has by this time found a liberating new self, a competent adult self able to deal with her husband’s terrible revelation and ensuing crisis, she has apparently only moved from imprisonment to exile, which is in one sense only another form of imprisonment – and is, furthermore, a return to where she started at the beginning of the novel. It seems she will never be liberated from Rebecca.

The Bad Sister, sinners and slimmers Emma Tennant’s novella The Bad Sister (1978) is a rewrite of Confessions of a Justified Sinner from the perspective of a female protagonist. It is a self-consciously feminist and metafictional text, which deliberately exploits the contrast between the glossy world of feminine consumerism and the burgeoning feminist movement in the relocation of the narrative to the 1970s. The Bad Sister is a text that pushes at the limits of feminine masquerade to dissolve all essentialist notions of identity. ‘Who’ exactly Jane Wild and her many doubles are, or indeed whether she is determinately female, is left unresolved by the narrative, which ends with the discovery of an anonymous ‘hermaphroditic’ corpse.42 The only clues to her identity are, ultimately, her clothes. The novella is divided between London and the Scottish Highlands, and the bulk of the narrative professes to be the journal of Jane Wild, the illegitimate daughter of a Scottish aristocrat, from the days leading up to the unsolved murder of her father and her legitimate sister. As in Hogg’s novel, Jane’s own narrative is sandwiched between the interpretive reports of a fictional editor, and as with Robert Wringhim, Jane is tormented by a series of doubles including her legitimate sister, Ishbel; her boyfriend Tony’s ex-lover, Miranda; a fantasy character, Marie; and a mysterious male figure she is instructed to call K or Gil-Martin. Gil-Martin also bears curious resemblances to Gala, Jane’s best friend; to Meg or Margaret, a kind of occult guru who

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appears to have Jane in her power; and to Mrs Marten, Tony’s obnoxious mother. The shifting identities of these characters and the way in which their resemblances fleetingly merge and then separate is part of the sinister tone of the novel. Jane, along with the reader, is unable to keep track of their sliding identities. The mysterious Gil-Martin himself, who is the central focus of these continual transformations and Jane’s desires, is the embodiment of this indeterminacy: ‘His head, blindingly clear at one moment in the flashes from the sun, would vanish, and then change again.’43 Nevertheless, he remains ‘extraordinarily’ similar to Jane, the only incident in the novel which directly invokes the Freudian uncanny: ‘I felt that sense of recognition and disbelief which jars at the sight of an unexpected mirror: the thing before you that is too familiar and too strange.’44 His extreme similarity and yet difference from Jane is the key to her own numerous transformations; her own identity which seems coherent at one moment and then dissolves into alternative personae: an androgynous being in jeans and denim jacket; an Irish servant girl called Jeanne; her former childhood self. Finally, she becomes her own negative image: ‘I am the double, now it’s me who’s become the shadow … a grey replica of my vanished self.’45 Significantly, she loses her shadow: if you are a shadow you can’t cast one. This radical instability at the heart of character is given a psychiatric explanation by the fictional editor, who, after submitting Jane’s manuscript for analysis, suggests she is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with ‘acute problems of sexual identity’.46 Meg and GilMartin are explained as ‘projections of the patient’s lover Tony Marten and his mother Mrs Marten’; the other doubles are implicitly projections of the patient’s self, ‘an example … of the inherent “splitness” of women.’47 The psychoanalytic reading of itself the text provides, however, seems insufficient to explain events fully, an attempt at self-containment that inevitably fails. The editor’s voice problematises the psychiatric explanation, commenting that the psychiatrists have taken inadequate account of the political factors in the case, and that the recent discovery of Jane’s body, in circumstances that apparently confirm the events of her narrative, invalidates their interpretation. Hogg is even invoked as a precedent, as if the confession of Robert Wringhim was his authentic discovery rather than a literary invention. Although the editor’s narratives and the psychiatric report embedded in them are patently attempts to impose a rational explanation on a definitively irrational text, they are themselves strangely punctured by irrationalism: the editor’s belief in the objective,

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historical existence of Gil-Martin, his/her treatment of Hogg’s novel as a factual account, and his or her instinctive association of Mrs Marten with Meg. Jane’s testimony remains uncontainable by reason, forever in excess of any interpretation that may be put upon it. This critical discussion, therefore, must also to a certain extent remain inadequate. The editor’s disparaging remarks about an interpretation that centres on ‘the inherent ‘splitness’ of women’, however, suggestively mask Tennant’s deliberate investigation of the nature of feminine identity. A similar manoeuvre occurs in Tennant’s subsequent novel, Queen of Stones (1982), in which the editor-narrator pompously states: ‘Thus, perhaps, will the psychopathology of the developing female be more fully comprehended, as also the mythology sustaining our concept of the feminine in society.’48 At the same time, the psychoanalyst’s reports on Bess Plantain prove inadequate to explain the fantasy role-playing games she and her friend Laurie indulge in: the investigation of the unconscious (in a paradoxically Lacanian move) neglects to notice what is most obvious – conscious, deliberate fantasy. Similarly, the irrational elements of Jane’s narrative are intentionally set up against the editor’s ineffectual attempts to subordinate them to rational control, thus animating (but deliberately failing to resolve) the struggle between the two poles of patriarchal dichotomy. Jane’s transformation into her ‘other’ self, or entrance into the ‘other world’ as she herself terms it, is signalled by a rejection of conventional femininity signified through clothes. At the commencement of her narrative, Jane is returning early from a party she has been attending with her boyfriend, and is dressed according to a masculine fantasy of femininity, a garb that she finds overtly oppressive and uncomfortable: As I walked on I could feel myself falling apart. I was in a frenzy of impatience to become another person. My rump was soft and divided under my clinging silk dress as men photographers would have it divide: ripe, ready for a mouthful to be taken out. My legs were thin and perched in high-heeled sandals, the pale tights making them all the more ridiculous and vulnerable. My breasts, unshielded, nosed the air for potential attacks like glow-worms swimming always a few inches in front of me.49

In this passage Jane appears to feel a level of disgust towards her female body based on its construction through the male gaze. In a sense she already is ‘another person’ as she is alienated from herself through the intervention of ‘men photographers’, an object ready to be consumed, ‘ready for a mouthful to be taken out’. Her body is literally ‘falling

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apart’ in that it is itemised through its sexual attributes – rump, legs, breasts – and is acting as if independently of her – her breasts ‘nosed the air … swimming always a few inches in front of me’. Her flat is littered with discarded clothes, on one level an evocation of the stereotyped feminine practice of trying on numerous outfits before going out, but on another a symbol of the new selves she has already tried and discarded. In the ensuing transformation she dons an androgynous straight denim jacket and jeans, and cuts her hair like a man’s, a conventional rite de passage but also suggestive of Joan of Arc, who similarly had visions and altered her identity by assuming a masculine appearance (Joan, like Jeanne, being a variant of the name Jane). The jeans and jacket are accorded a special significance due to their utter ordinariness: ‘magic garments, which make you invisible because everyone wears them, which transcend sex and wealth and individuality’.50 In these clothes Jane’s gender and class and unified subjecthood become radically indeterminate. Furthermore, this external covering appears to actually alter the shape of the body within. Jane states that ‘My breasts were tiny now, and the bra that had once contained them looked large and empty’, while later her boyfriend comments of the denim separates, ‘They’re not yours, are they? They looked far too small.’51 Jane’s body apparently has no essential identity outside her clothes. As with Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Jane’s ‘evil’ self is physically smaller than her ‘good’ one. However, this smallness no longer signifies a stunted moral growth or degenerate subspecies, but rather a boyishness which constitutes freedom on one level from the oppressive constructs of conventional femininity and from the physicality of the adult female body, and on another from those of objective reality. When inhabiting her alternative body, Jane ‘travels’ through fantastic environments – a port, a Jacobean manor house, a forest – that are overlaid onto the everyday urban landscape and in places wear thin so that ‘Sometimes, underfoot, there is a fleeting glimpse of tarmac, a hardness through the thin shoes of broken concrete. In the fresh, untainted grass there lies a soft-drink can.’52 This environment, like her ‘other’ body, both is and is not real, exists within the real world but strangely apart from it. In the incident in which Jane shoots a sailor in a bar and then spends the night dancing with his companions, it is suggested that she has undergone a sea-change: ‘the rime of green under my fingernails that tells how long I have been under the sea, hair growing upward, sucked by the bubbles, waving like weed in the cold green current’.53 In this distorted environment the body is overlaid by numerous fantasy selves – a ‘mermaid’, a ‘young stevedore’, ‘the siren

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with a cracked voice’, ‘the forgotten woman and half-man who make up the Angel of Death’.54 These metaphorical selves both do and do not pertain to her identity: they are fantasy constructions that she inhabits only momentarily, ‘travels’ through, and yet they contain temporary significance. Throughout the narrative Jane is haunted by representations of femininity. Her flat is situated opposite a battered women’s refuge and a lesbian nightclub. These two edifices represent the opposing extremes of women as victims and women who choose to live without men. The other significant feature of the street is a supermarket, a site where women are both consumers and objects of consumption (the glossy figures in advertisements). Passing the supermarket, she deplores the emptiness of the consumerism that takes place inside, embodied by ‘Cardboard women, shown to be beautiful for their sojourn there, and in their cardboard surrounds, at least, bathed in colour.’55 It is both the inanity and the inanimacy of these models that is disturbing. In contrast, while Tony looks like ‘a husband in an ad’, Jane feels alienated from the scenario she sees reflected in the kitchen window: ‘They’d never let a woman with hair like that on the screen. And what were we advertising? Certainly not the quality of our life together.’56 Jane’s double Miranda, on the other hand, looks like ‘a hostess in a TV ad’.57 She ‘is the definition of that vague thing, womanhood. … Men like her because she is so finite.’58 As in Rebecca, the double is imagined as femininity perfected, in contrast to which the protagonist remains forever inadequate. Like the inanimate cardboard women, however, Miranda’s appeal is that she remains ‘finite’, possible to label and contain. The messy array of selves that make up ‘Jane’, on the other hand, resists that form of definition and control. Nevertheless, the image of the woman on the advertising poster remains an integral part of Jane’s identity, having been an essential part of her identity formation as a child: I saw for a moment the posters in the Underground where I had passed, every day as a woman child, the alluring figures of other women, who I must become or emulate but was forbidden to love. … And I had tried to become the woman of the posters and yet not to love her … to be myself and her, and to please the world.59

The poster posits woman as an object of desire, yet demands that only men desire her; women must rather desire to be her, to be desired. This somewhat illogical demand creates the ‘inherent “splitness” of women’ that the editor invokes. Jane, continually attempting to be a woman

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other than herself, a perfected woman, has ended up literally becoming two women, ‘myself and her’. As in John Berger’s classic formulation:

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Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.60

Berger, however, does not allow sufficiently for the specificities of the female gaze, that of women watching other women. He does not allow, for example, for desire between women, such as that the young Jane feels for the women on the posters. This desire may or may not be overtly lesbian: it is simply that which exists outside of conventional heterosexual, patriarchal relations. On an individual basis, Jane appears less bothered by the gaze of the two major male characters, Tony and Stephen, than by that of Miranda, the figure constantly watching Jane from the shadows, and whom in turn she obsessively watches. When Jeanne and Marie attack their mistress and her daughter, they pluck out their eyes. This obsession with watching women is undoubtedly related to unacknowledged desire, the ‘forbidden … love’ the young Jane tries not to feel for the poster women. As a result she takes up contradictory relationships of both attraction and repulsion towards her doubles: while she derives sexual satisfaction from imagining Miranda’s humiliation and destruction, the uncrowning of the perfect woman, with her fantasy sister Marie she participates in an incestuous sexual union. Meg and Mrs Marten also conform neatly to the attraction/ repulsion pattern. Meg, who appears dressed variously as a witch, a gypsy and a vampire, is the antithesis of the upper-class, impeccably groomed Mrs Marten, and Jane harbours as strong a feeling of hatred towards the latter as she does love towards the former. Meg, the leader of a radical feminist commune, is also directly opposed to Mrs Marten, the apotheosis of femininity as consumption. Impeccably groomed and dedicated to a lifestyle of pleasure – parties, restaurants, the theatre – she represents a class and gender archetype from which Jane is doubly alienated. Jane notes that, ‘Once Mrs Marten would have been considered a sinner. Now she merely slimmed. … I could see Mrs Marten as disposable. The only sign of her non-existence would be an inscription on a board in her upholstered shrubbery: For Sale. It had been her motto, now it could be her epitaph.’61 If Meg the witch, vampire and political radical is a sinner in the old-fashioned sense, Mrs Marten the slimmer is her modern counterpart. Where once her

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devotion to pleasure would have been conceived as sinful, now it is merely trivial. Her menace has been defused by the forces of consumerism, and she has become as ‘disposable’ as the objects she consumes. Nevertheless it is she who seems the more sinister and grotesque character. Dressed all in white with ‘sockets dark with eyeliner and mascara’ she is like a cosmeticised death’s head, a memento mori out of Vogue.62 The momentary inhabitation of alternative selves through the adoption of different clothes culminates with the fancy-dress ball at the climax of Jane’s narrative. As in the fancy-dress ball in Rebecca, the heroine is tricked into wearing the wrong garments: Mrs Marten dresses Jane in a ballerina costume that belongs to her own dead sister. Jane’s fear, that she has become someone else’s double, is thus realised. Furthermore, this outfit is as excessively feminine as the jeans were androgynous, a costume as stereotyped as those of all the other women at the party. Observing a witch talk to a period coquette, Jane asks, ‘What happened to women, that they were forced into these moulds?’63 Even in fancy dress, the party-goers seem to reflect their roles in real life. Stephen, the priest, is dressed up ‘in purple ecumenical robes’, while Tony ‘has made no concession at all’ although ‘he looks just as irritating in his suede jacket and white polo neck as the other guests in their wild gear’.64 The nightmarish atmosphere derives from the fact that some guests have come dressed as themselves while others appear to parody them, or indeed to parody themselves. Thus ‘there are some real Arabs in evidence … and some stupid young English journalists in Arab headdresses’.65 Similarly, Stephen seems to ‘parody his faith’ while Jane, who has become a sort of vampire, meets a fancy-dress vampire with ‘fangs of white cardboard down to his chin, and strokes of black eye pencil on his face to suggest wickedness’.66 The guests, reflected in the numerous mirrors, ‘faded as ghosts in the antique glass’, furthermore seem to blend with the portraits on the walls of ‘men in breeches and long coats … a lady in a crinoline dress.’67 Spatial boundaries shift and dissolve in a dream-like way that indicates the disintegration of Jane’s own sensory capacities. At the party’s climax, Jane meets and kills her double, the perfect Miranda, by biting her neck and sucking her blood. In doing so she finds she has lost her reflection in the mirror: ‘My non-existence there is almost concrete … unreflected I feel heavier, as abandoned as a new corpse.’68 Through the dissolution of her identity in the eyes of the external world, the loss of her image, she appears to gain substance, become ‘heavier’. Miranda, ‘standing in front of the mirror quietly contemplating herself, is no longer able to watch her although Jane

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herself continues to watch; Jane has finally achieved the advantage over her double. However, the price of this supremacy is implicitly death, erasure of the self: her ‘terrible absence’, the sensation of being ‘abandoned as a new corpse’. The death of the double is also her own death. In her death, however, Jane seems finally to have transcended the oppressive gender categories that have haunted her throughout her narrative. At the exhumation of the body presumed to be Jane the fictional editor notes, There was no way (and the uncertainty was not caused by the results of decomposition) in which it was possible to tell the sex of the corpse. There was something completely hermaphroditic about it, but I can’t explain what that quality was. The face was completely blank and smooth, and the eyes were closed.69

Dressed ‘strangely, in blue denim trousers and a pink top, strapless, such as ballet dancers wear’, Jane’s corpse perfectly combines the masculine and feminine elements of her identity.70 More importantly, however, unlike the living Jane at the commencement of the narrative, her excessively feminine body vulnerable and unshielded from the male gaze, Jane’s corpse resists interpretation or appropriation by its onlookers. It remains unclear whether she has escaped into the ‘other world’ she dreams of or whether she has become a victim of delusion or manipulation, but the very indeterminacy of her fate appears to be registered onto her physical body to cause ‘discomfort’ and ‘unease’ in those viewing it, ‘a sudden realization of the uncanny’.71

Single White Female: Cosmopolitan Gothic For Paul Coates, the double becomes banal in the world of multinational capitalism. He argues: the multiplication of reflecting surfaces, mirrors and plate glass in modern architecture enhances the self-consciousness of society, the sight of one’s own image ceases to harbinger death or trigger a devastating flash of self-knowledge but pops up fleetingly and irritatingly wherever one walks, a slow seepage of identity. The appearances of one’s own image become a banal and casual punctuation of everyday life.72

This passage aptly describes Barbet Schroeder’s film Single White Female (1992), which is set in contemporary Manhattan, and in which the protagonist’s flatmate gradually transforms herself into her

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doppelgänger. Hedy, the doppelgänger, is a continual irritating presence for her new friend Allie, the two girls are continually caught and framed in ubiquitous mirrors, and the narrative takes place within the everyday urban environments of apartment block, laundry, hairdresser and clothing boutique. However, the ‘slow seepage of identity’, the banal double who ‘pops up … irritatingly wherever one walks’ is shown to carry her own terrors. Furthermore, in the case of Allie and Hedy, these terrors are gender specific, in that they are profoundly implicated in the discourses of contemporary femininity. Single White Female, although situated in this resolutely contemporary context, makes numerous gestures towards earlier Gothic texts. If, as Chris Baldick has argued, Gothic is evoked through a necessary combination of claustrophobic space and the oppressiveness of history (whether social or psychic), these two qualities are conveyed by the labyrinthine block of apartments in which Allie resides and Hedy’s secret obsession with her dead twin. The Victorian apartment-block is rent-controlled and therefore desirable to the young white professionals who inhabit it, but riddled with sound-carrying air-vents, antiquated lifts and a cavernous cellar. The environment is continually emphasised through vertiginous shots of the building’s exterior, or atmospheric views of the apartment in deep shadow. The apartment provides the story’s raison d’être, as when the protagonist Allie (Bridget Fonda) splits up with her boyfriend Sam, she advertises for a roommate to prevent her having to live alone. It is also a significantly domestic space in which the ensuing problematisation of feminine individualism is to be played out. Significantly, however, the first image provided by the movie is not the apartment (which supplies the background to the opening credits) but a pair of pre-pubescent twins adorning themselves with lipstick. This image both invokes the secret in Hedy’s past (the death of her twin sister in childhood), and provides an emblem of Hedy and Ally’s incipient relationship. Significantly, one twin is foregrounded as the active partner as she first applies the lipstick while looking in a mirror, and then applies it to her sister. She is therefore doubled not only in her twin but also in the image in the mirror. Hedy’s search for her ‘missing twin’ is embodied both in her infatuation with Allison and in a desire to distance herself from her own image, to project as ‘other’ the image in the mirror. During her final showdown with Allison, she is looking in a mirror as she says, referring to herself, ‘No-one’s seen her. She’s not on the lease, there’s not even a fingerprint of hers here, I’ve been cleaning like crazy.’ In adopting the identity of her flatmate, Hedy has attempted to erase her own existence. While she remains an

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active subject (‘I’ve been cleaning’), to the external world she does not exist, because she no longer looks like herself. Appearances have not only replaced but also erased the person. The film’s title implicitly suggests the threat of the double to the construct of the ‘single’ woman, a historically specific category of femininity brought into being by magazines like Cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan, which was originally founded in New York in 1886 as a serious literary magazine, was relaunched to enormous success in 1965 (and in Britain in 1972) under the editorship of Helen Gurley Brown. Brown had achieved celebrity status through the publication of her massive bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, and convinced the Hearst Corporation that the book’s philosophy could form the basis of a profitable magazine. Brown’s radical new formula set out to ‘advise girls on how to get the best from their lives, how to improve themselves and their careers and how to live their own lives – not through a man’.73 As Janet Winship indicates, ‘Less sexually bold than might be imagined, the book was more significant, at a time when any unmarried woman over 25 already felt herself stigmatised “the spinster”, for its celebration of being single.’74 Thus Cosmopolitan, and its many subsequent imitators, offered a pseudo-liberated lifestyle for the young white professional woman heavily based on an ethic of self-improvement. These magazines tended to advocate personal fulfilment through sex and shopping, and reiterate stereotypes of heterosexual romance and the frenzied consumption of clothing and cosmetics, even as these stereotypes were repackaged for a generation in which women were expected to attend the workplace, live on their own and have numerous sexual partners before marriage. Equality was refigured as ‘independence’, and made compatible with more traditional aspects of femininity. As Ellen McCracken argues, ‘the magazine allows women the impression of a pseudo-sexual liberation and a vicarious participation in the life of an imaginary “swinging single” woman’; however, ultimately it tends to reinforce conservative values and even ‘disguise women’s lack of real power in contemporary society’.75 The film’s title initially appears to refer to Allie’s marital status: it is after breaking up with her fiancé Sam that she decides to advertise for a roommate. However, the word also takes on the connotations of ‘singular’ and ‘unique’ when, ironically, Hedy turns herself into Allison’s double. This dual meaning is also implied in Cosmopolitan’s espousal of the ‘single girl’ who is implicitly one of a kind, her own woman. The emphasis on fulfilling one’s own potential – what Winship terms ‘aspirational feminism’ – suggests a projected self-

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realisation, a self-fashioning: ‘being a woman involves constantly adjusting one’s own image to fit time and place in an ever-changing game of images’.76 Paradoxically, however, the way in which this selfactualisation is to be achieved is regulated and standardised, and the end-product a universalised icon. This icon, the ‘super-woman’, also suggests a potentially alienating gap between aspiration and achievement. To Hedy, Allie is the embodiment of this kind of woman: attractive, successful, confident and well groomed. As she is quick to point out, Allie is (ironically, regarding the title) unlikely to remain single for long. With this in mind, it becomes clear that Hedy, in imitating Allie, is performing the same kind of self-improvement based on images of other women that is promoted by the likes of Cosmopolitan, and espoused by Allie herself. Hedy’s first attempts to look like Allie are couched within the terms of the conventional ‘makeover’, a common feature of women’s magazines and also of films with a female target audience, from teen films such as Clueless (1995) and She’s All That (1998) to blockbusters such as the Sandra Bullock vehicle Miss Congeniality (2001). Hedy admires Allie’s sophisticated style of dress (’It’s just so New York’) and Allie responds by damning with faint praise (’I think you look very comfortable’). The pair embark on a shopping spree in which Allie tutors Hedy in which ensembles look good together. By taking her in hand she is performing a role not unlike that of the ‘elder sister’ that Helen Gurley Brown envisaged for herself.77 Similarly Hedy, by replacing her own image with Allie’s, is performing the role of the magazine’s ideal reader. As Ellen McCracken argues of fashion magazines in general: Ideal images of the future self encountered on the front cover are multiplied and reinforced in feature after feature. Free to indulge in a narcissism based on fantasy, one can, for a moment, forget one’s actual appearance in the mirror, replacing that memory with the magazine’s concrete examples of ideal beauty. Ostensibly, these images are positive projections of the future self.78

Where Hedy departs from ‘normal’ behaviour is that her replacement of her own reflection with Allie’s is literal rather than merely fantasy and is sustained for longer than the ‘moment’ of identification McCracken describes. In Hedy, the ‘normal’ feminine subject-position becomes pathological. This seems to be the most crucial element of the film, and that which complicates the conservative ‘good girl/bad girl’ division that commentators such as Hart and Hollinger criticise. Single White Female suggests that femininity itself is pathological, that the

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practices attendant on ‘normal’ femininity are in themselves deviant. For while Allie is clearly the character with which the viewer is expected to identify, and there is little room for sympathy with the pathological Hedy, Allie’s behaviour in fact mirrors Hedy’s: the two are insufficiently distinguished (and this is significantly what allows Hedy to imitate Allie so completely). As Stella Bruzzi indicates, both girls indulge in similar behaviour: ‘it is Allie … who instigates a shopping trip and admires Hedy as she tries on new clothes that happen to look just like her own, and who later sneaks round her flatmate’s room dabbing on her perfume and trying on her earrings’.79 For Bruzzi, this suggests Allie’s ‘unarticulated narcissism’ through which ‘she becomes fascinated with someone who is fascinated with her’.80 However, this narcissism is implicitly contained within the ‘normal’ practices of femininity as defined by the film. Allie’s concern with maintaining her striking appearance is presented as normal, that required of a professional New York female, yet when replicated by Hedy it becomes more disturbing. When Hedy, sporting a new haircut identical to Allie’s, gazes in the bathroom mirror exclaiming ‘I love myself like this!’ her behaviour is only strange due to the attendant context: the fact that the image in the mirror is virtually indistinguishable from Allie.

‘Worse things than being on your own’ Single White Female is saturated with fashion discourse. Allison’s job is designing fashion software, and her relationship with Hedy is determined in terms of clothes right from the outset. When Hedy first arrives at the flat she is dressed in a diluted version of the grunge wear popular in the early 1990s: long, shapeless dresses, leggings, baggy tshirts, floppy hats. Allison, on the other hand, is immaculately groomed. Hedy is forced to remove her clothes when a tap bursts over them both, and implicitly to borrow some of Allie’s while her own things dry. This innocuous incident is typical of the way in which the girls’ relationship is cemented in terms of bonding over clothes, and also of the way in which the ‘sharing’ of clothes and subsequently identities takes place within a normalised discourse of femininity. It is ‘normal’ for flatmates to borrow each other’s clothes. While shopping together, Hedy and Allie admire the same pair of black stilettos, and Hedy says, ‘You take ’em – I’ll just borrow them when I want to.’ Subsequently, it is Allie who first invades Hedy’s territory by going into her room and trying on her perfume and her earrings. This activity is presented as a sign of the increasing intimacy between the two girls,

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which causes discomfort, but which is viewed as embarrassing rather than out of the ordinary. The two women are continually framed by mirrors in the same way as the twins in the opening sequence. For Stella Bruzzi, Hedy and Allie’s ‘preoccupation with checking and rechecking their image is … a sign of weakness’.81 However, while Bruzzi is correct about the way this indicates both characters’ need for reassurance (a point this chapter will return to) this interpretation leans uncomfortably towards the stereotype of concern with appearance being a characteristically weak, feminine trait. It also fails to distinguish between the different ways in which the characters use the mirror. As Karen Hollinger argues: Single White Female employs [the female gaze] to delineate the normal woman from the insane one. … Allie is always portrayed looking straight ahead at the mirrored surface, while Hedy is often shown gazing at Allie with a mixture of desire, identification, and concealed malice. These mirror shots dichotomize the female gaze between Allie’s ‘healthy’ and Hedy’s ‘unhealthy’ ways of looking.82

In other words, for Hollinger, the film constructs as ‘unhealthy’ Hedy’s evident desire for Allie. Lesbian sexuality is demonised and pathologised. While there is undeniably an element of truth to this, however, the film does not promote heterosexual desire as a ‘healthy’ alternative, as Hollinger and also Hart have suggested. Rather, it suggests that dependence on another individual belonging to either sex is a weakness. The voice of reason within the film is Allie’s gay friend Graham, who inhabits a flat on the floor above and who provides advice and emotional support during her crises. Early on in the film, when he and Allie discuss her split with Sam, he insists on the importance of independence: ‘What is this – a song cue? You’re nobody till somebody loves you? … There are worse things than being on your own, you know.’ Echoing the self-help discourses of women’s magazines, he insists on the precedence of career over relationships and when Allie tells him, ‘You’ll find someone again’, he rejoins, ‘Maybe I will – why not? But the point is, if I don’t – I don’t.’ Allie is punished by the film not for straying from a heterosexual relationship to a female friendship, but for her weakness in needing a continual companion in order to establish a sense of self. Ironically Graham is right and she really is nobody until somebody loves her. After her reconciliation with Sam, she reiterates the bland consolation she offered Graham to Hedy, telling her that she too will ‘find someone’. Here she is playing into Hedy’s discourse of need for a partner rather than Graham’s insistence on self-help. This weakness,

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her fear of being single, is in some ways the mirror image of Hedy’s. The difference is, her need is constructed through a normalised heterosexual dependence on a male partner, while Hedy’s search for her lost twin is viewed as pathological. Singleness is also implicitly experienced differently by different women: as Hedy reminds her, Allie’s attractiveness means it is unlikely she will ever be without a partner for long. The two girls’ faces are contrasted in the mirror frame: Allison auburn-haired, groomed, and implicitly desirable; Hedy dark, small and dowdy. Hedy tells Allison, ‘Why don’t you look in the mirror – look – you’re in a different league.’ However, the repetition of the word ‘look’ and the foregrounding of the shared gaze indicates that the difference Hedy identifies lies primarily on the surface, in their appearance. As Hedy begins to manipulate her appearance to resemble Allie, the ‘difference’ between the two women is thrown into a dizzying state of collapse. An early commentator on Cosmopolitan suggested that ‘Sex for the Cosmo Girl is attainment of desirability, not through the quality of her existence as a woman, but through collecting the symbols of sex: perfumes, clothes, figure, atmosphere.’83 The accoutrements of femininity, rather than any intrinsic quality, constitute her sexual identity. This complies suggestively with the theories of Joan Riviere and Judith Butler concerning femininity – and indeed gender – as masquerade.84 In Single White Female, however, it is not only femininity that is shown to be a performance but identity in general. Significantly, the cheque cashier assumes Hedy is an actress because of her changes in appearance, but says of her ‘Allie’ look, ‘I just thought [it] was more you.’ Ironically, Hedy as Allie is more herself than her ‘real’ incarnation, undermining the audience’s assumption that the original Hedy was the ‘authentic’ one. By taking on the surface signs of Allie’s personality, Hedy is able to become her. Allison first sights the transformed Hedy – newly coiffed in imitation of Allison – in a hairdresser’s mirror. Shortly afterwards she tells Graham, ‘It’s like looking at myself.’ Subsequently, after Sam’s murder, Allie tells Hedy, ‘I know you weren’t yourself when you did this thing.’ Hedy replies, ‘I know. I was you.’ Single White Female, therefore, completes the trajectory begun over fifty years earlier with Rebecca, and appears momentarily to close the gap between aspiration and achievement, in that Hedy’s identity does merge with that of the idealised feminine figure towards which she aspires. In doing so, it reveals the problematic basis of this fantasy. In the process of achieving her desire, Hedy becomes a monster. Her deranged performance as Allie is an ironic enactment of ‘having it all’,

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even when the ‘all’ belongs to someone else. Furthermore Allie herself, the icon of perfected femininity, is revealed to be intrinsically flawed, exchanging roles with her imitator in order to become her victim. Thus if all three narratives assault the myth of the ‘superwoman’, Single White Female does so by betraying her as an illusion, existing only in the eye of the beholder. All three narratives, furthermore, offer a radical departure from Sedgwick’s notion of the placid ‘continuum’ of relationships between women. In these texts, the concepts of ‘women-loving-women’ and ‘women-promoting-the-interests-of-women’ evoked by Eve Sedgwick are radically dissevered. Despite the evidence of homoerotic desire evinced in the relationships between the protagonists and their doubles, this leads not to solidarity, but to each seeking the other’s destruction, in relationships of reciprocal animosity. ‘Perhaps I haunted her as she haunted me,’ realises the heroine of Rebecca; similarly, Allie of Single White Female is forced to kill or be killed.85 Indeed, if these narratives foreground relationships between women at the expense of those with men, these relationships are a complex mixture of attraction and repulsion, loathing and desire. Ultimately, relationships between women are presented not as supportive but as destructive; in each of these three narratives of double-ness, there is finally only room for a single woman.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Coates, The Double and the Other, p. 2. Hogg, Confessions, pp. 101–2. Ballaster et al, Women’s Worlds, p. 24 . See Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, p. 152. Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 116. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid. Light, Forever England, p. 180. Du Maurier, Rebecca, p. 43. Tinkler, Constructing Girlhood, p. 157. Du Maurier, Rebecca, p. 269. Ibid, p. 119. Ibid. Ibid, p. 169. Ibid, p. 168. Ibid, p. 169. Ibid., p. 231. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 168.

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COSMO-GOTHIC 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

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Ibid., pp. 168–9. Ibid., pp. 143, 144. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 161. Ibid., pp. 28, 29. Ibid., p, 29. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 167. Horner and Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier, p. 125. Ibid., p. 118. It is frequently noted that the fancy-dress scene draws on the conventional Gothic trope of the moving portrait. Contagion occurs: through the narrator’s costume what should be inert (the portrait, Rebecca) is brought to life, while the onlookers are suggestively made inanimate: ‘like dumb things … like dummies, like people in a trance.’ (Du Maurier, Rebecca, p. 211). Maxim’s face is ‘ashen white … His eyes were the only living things in the white mask of his face’ (ibid., p. 212). The revival of the dead suggestively communicates death to its audience. Du Maurier, Rebecca, p. 210. Carter, Shaking a Leg, p. 106. Du Maurier , Rebecca, p. 255. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 375. Tennant, Travesties, p. 173. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid. Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., pp. 169, 170. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., pp. 41, 49. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 126. Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 47. Tennant, Travesties, p. 142. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., p. 161. Ibid., p. 160.

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158 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

FASHIONING GOTHIC BODIES Ibid., p. 161. Ibid., pp. 161,162. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 173. Ibid. Ibid. Coates, The Double and the Other, p. 35. Braithwaite, Women’s Magazines, p. 96. Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines, p. 106. McCracken, Decoding Women’s Magazines, pp. 159, 162. Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines, pp. 106, 101. Braithwaite, Women’s Magazines, p. 96. McCracken, Decoding Women’s Magazines, pp. 135–6. Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema, p. 142. Ibid. Ibid. Hollinger, In the Company of Women, p. 221. Moore, ‘The Cosmo Girl’, p. 86. Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’. Du Maurier, Rebecca, p. 231.

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Undead fashion: 1990s style and the perennial return of Goth

Gothic and Goth: new interventions At the end of the 1970s, a new youth subculture emerged from the fragmenting Punk scene, commonly known as Goth. Goth seemed to take the trappings of Gothic literature and film and convert them into a symbolic form of resistance to a suburban Britain (and subsequently America, Australia and elsewhere) perceived as stupefyingly dull and small-minded. The relationship between Goth subculture and the Gothic literary tradition is not straightforward: the translation of literature into street style has been treated with bemusement or simply ignored by the majority of academics.1 Nevertheless the two are intimately linked, precisely through the medium of fashion. Goth quite clearly depends on a spectacular style or set of styles for its identity, and as such represents another manifestation of the Gothic preoccupation with clothes. The influence of Goth style, however, has also altered the way in which clothing is represented in Gothic discourses. In the 1990s, ‘Gothic’ clothing was specifically that which recalled the clothing worn by participants in Goth subculture. This chapter will attempt to untangle some of the ways in which Goth style has permeated contemporary Gothic discourses, from the vampire fiction of Brite and Rice to the representation of Goth girls in teen movies. In doing so, it hopes to foreground the dialectic between individual participants in the subculture and representations of Goth in a variety of media, from fashion journalism to fiction. While certain Goths may compete to be the most ‘authentic’ (it is possible to buy a tshirt proclaiming Tm the Goth that’s Gother than all the other Goths’2), this book does not seek to distinguish between ‘genuine’ and ‘false’ depictions of Goth. Rather it aims to understand how Goth is discursively produced through the media, and the way in which this reflects and supports a preoccupation with the millennial.

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In the music and style press, Goth is seldom treated sympathetically: in Britain, it tends to be viewed comedically, as a justified target for humour and derision. In the United States, where its demonic associations are regarded as more threatening by the Christian far right, it is more frequently constructed as a folk-devil, as the media frenzy surrounding the Columbine High School shootings in April 1999 demonstrates. Although the two students involved were not Goths in the sense that most members of the subculture understood it, the media labelled them as such and sparked a moral panic that incited American Goths to a good deal of spin-doctoring in fanzines, websites and local press. The present study is based on a survey of the British media, which is clearly influenced by American sources (the novels of Brite and Rice, the music of Marilyn Manson and other American bands, Hollywood movies, and so on) but which draws on a subcultural tradition imbued with a specific sense of British cultural identity. (Many isolate post-Punk Britain circa 1979–83 as the locus classicus of Goth, and while the subculture spread very quickly around the globe, it is arguable that Goths elsewhere looked to the British music scene of this period for inspiration.) The British media, therefore, are simultaneously more tolerant of and more sceptical towards Goth than their American counterparts. The analysis of subculture necessarily exists in an uneasy relationship with its object: as Caroline Evans points out, ‘There are several distinct discourses of subculture, all of which, by the very process of defining, describing or reporting it, have changed the nature of subculture.’3 While certain forms of discourse, notably fanzines and Internet sites, are integral to the operation of subcultures, and to differing degrees represent the voices of those involved with them, academic and journalistic discourses appropriate these voices for a variety of ends. Thus, for Evans, even the most apparently benign analysis of subculture is an exercise of power that, by releasing knowledge, ultimately threatens the exclusivity of the group studied. Following on from Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures (1995), she is particularly concerned with the role of the lifestyle magazine in disseminating and even formulating subcultures: the gap between formation of a subculture and reporting on it has become so narrow that in some cases magazines like i-D and The Face actually play a part in producing the group, or initiate ‘scenes’ in the relentless need to generate copy. She states: In part this is because such journalists participate, to varying degrees, in the subcultures they describe and reify. Whereas academic

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discourse is typically produced by ‘outsiders’ (the friendly anthropologist who loves travelling in exotic cultures), journalistic discourse provides a new kind of self-scrutiny, as it is often read (occasionally written) by the very people it describes.4

Academic discourse is less frequently consumed by the subcultures it comments on than reports in the music press or style magazines, and even if academics participate to a greater or lesser extent in a given scene, they remain distanced from it by their academic training: the ‘cultural capital’ of their socially sanctioned knowledge. There is not the space here to construct a postmodern ethnography of Goth, one that would enable a dialogue between individual participants in the subculture and the academic institution. This study does not possess the scope to determine how members of the subculture actually consume Goth images, beyond what has been already printed in the few (fan-based) surveys of the topic such as Mercer’s Gothic Rock (1991). Neither is there room to explore here the innumerable Goth sites on the Internet that offer comment and appreciation of Goth music and culture. It is with caution, therefore, that this study seeks to make any definitive statement about Goths themselves. Ultimately, this can only be a partial and limited account, one in which the author’s presence should be assumed even when it is not foregrounded. The discussion remains conscious of the problematic nature of the exercise: while it attempts to examine the representation of Goth rather than Goths themselves, it is all too aware that it offers only one more interpretation. This chapter therefore takes a number of directions. It seeks to explore the kind of critical investments made in contemporary depictions of Goth, in particular constructions of the subculture as middle-class, Taking it’, and gendered feminine. It also examines the recycling of Goth style in mainstream fashion and haute couture, questioning why throughout the 1990s, the Gothic look always seemed to be coming back.

Refashioning the millennium: the future of Gothic criticism Towards the end of the twentieth century, the critical discourses surrounding Gothic demonstrated a marked shift away from psychoanalytical modes towards historicism, in doing so exhibiting a heightened self-consciousness about the processes of critical and textual production. In their essay ‘Gothic Criticism’ (2000), Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall identify the tendency of twentieth-century

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theorisations of the Gothic to emphasise the irrational, the subversive and even the spiritual at the expense of accurate historical analysis.5 These strategies frequently constitute a kind of idealisation of Gothic as a genre, privileging it as a site for whatever transgressive purposes the critic particularly subscribes to. Arguably, this process of critical appropriation and canonical rehabilitation accelerated with the advent of the millennium celebrations. Gothic, we are told, has a tendency to resurface at the fin de siècle, and as the fin to end all siècles swiftly approached, Gothic fervour reached a peculiar peak. As Christoph Grunenberg wrote: We are living in particularly dire times – in a Gothic period of fear, horror, moral disintegration, and indulgence in perverse pleasures. ‘Gothic’ has become the quid pro quo for somber and disturbing moods, sites, events and cultural by-products of latter-day America. … Though few expect the world to end with the turn of the millennium, a true fin-de-siècle spirit of cultural pessimism and spiritual malaise permeates society today.6

Part of this resurgence of interest in the Gothic focuses on its mutation into an autonomous youth subculture at the end of the 1970s. Led by post-punk bands such as Bauhaus, the Birthday Party, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Sisters of Mercy, adherents to ‘Goth’ style combined the nihilism of Punk, the perverse sexuality of fetish wear and the graveyard exoticism of nineteenth-century mourning costume to create a macabre aesthetic. Garments were predominantly black, accessorised with ‘vamp’ makeup and memento mori motifs. Although Goth’s main period of popularity spanned the 1980s, it has proved a remarkably long-lived subculture, persisting through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century with no sign of imminent extinction (indeed, at the time of writing its popularity if anything appears to be increasing). In the mid- to late 1990s, however, cultural commentators began heralding a ‘Gothic revival’, pointing out not only the huge popularity of Goth-influenced bands from Marilyn Manson to Garbage, along with their black-clad acolytes, but also the resurgence of Gothic influences in haute couture, ‘literary’ fiction, film, fine art and genres of popular music as diverse as techno and hip-hop – not to mention the increasing prominence of the Gothic literary tradition within the academic establishment.7 Nevertheless, critical material on Gothic as a part of late twentieth-century popular culture demonstrates a marked similarity to the kind of literary criticism Baldick and Mighall describe, in several ways. First, there is a significant emphasis on the irrational, and its

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liberatory potential within an oppressively standardised, globally branded society. This ‘new’ focus on the irrational is seen as both a product of and a solution to a dominant spiritual malaise. Rather than an aggregation of surface effects, as Eve Sedgwick describes it, millennial Gothic is supposed to perform a deep spiritual function, predicating psychological depth and expressing deep-rooted cultural anxiety. What is more, as this anxiety is attributed primarily to the approaching millennium, it is defined precisely through the categories of history and the past that Baldick and Mighall identify. The notion that millennial Gothic is defined through a future moment – the end of the twentieth century – obscures the fact that a vital element of the Gothic narrative is the past returning, and that constructions of the past in Gothic fiction are usually veiled images of the present. This chronological confusion is made explicit in a discussion by Paul Jobling of ‘Apparitions’ and ‘Veiled Threats’, two fashion shoots that appeared in The Face in December 1984 and January 1985 respectively. He states that, ‘On the surface, each of these shoots appears to be nothing more than a hollow masquerade that trades on a mock gothic [sic] sensibility, and whose purpose is to revive a romantic interest in the style of past fashions.’8 While the editorial of ‘Apparitions’, however, evokes ‘echoes of country house gatherings of a distant time and the gothic imagination of Edgar Allen [sic] Poe’, ‘Veiled Threats’ offers a more complex relationship with the past that contains a ‘veiled’ criticism of contemporary politics. As Jobling continues: the rhetoric of ‘Veiled Threats’ paradoxically appears to be concerned with customising past styles in terms of self-empowerment, as a way of defying destiny and of resisting the idea of turn-of-the-century degeneration: ‘Do it your own way – progress on your own terms, fin de nothing … keep it moving ahead.’ Indeed, the entire text of this piece appears to be a thinly disguised metaphor that encrypts youth culture’s opposition to the prevailing Thatcherite dogma. Hence the references to ‘dusty artefacts of European decline and Anglo-Saxon lyricism’, and to the contention that: ‘an ill wind carries the secret of reinventing the tired style of spent wealth and opulence.’9

The imperative to ‘keep it moving ahead’, however, also corresponds to the fashion world’s need to keep reinventing itself in order to shift more products. This is evident, for example, in a fashion shoot from the November 1995 edition of Marie Claire entitled ‘Future World’ which trades heavily on the Gothic look. Marie Claire is a particularly interesting location for this kind of feature, as it is targeted at the

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mainstream, moderate-income female consumer and is minimally concerned with the esoteric or avant-garde. In the sequence the wintry Iceland tundra doubles for a post-apocalyptic wasteland, in which pale, dark-eyed women wander dressed in the combination of Mad Maxstyle cyberpunk wear and tattered black cobweb-garments beloved of the contemporary Goth. Like much dystopian science fiction, the apocalyptic or postapocalyptic can be interpreted as a Gothic mode, as despite its apparently future setting, it deals not with the development of civilisation (as in the majority of science fiction) but with its posited decline and fall, thus creating a situation in which its protagonists constantly live either with the shadow of the past within a hostile present environment, or with the prospect of a dystopic society’s imminent collapse. Thus the ‘Future World’ these models inhabit is one in which their garments suggest mourning and degeneration rather than progression, one image in particular marrying an approximation of the 1890s silhouette (indicating a degenerate fin-de-siècle civilisation) with the leather and chains of the biker jacket (indicating a contemporary barbarism). The historical confusion generated by these garments is resolved by relocating them to an imaginary future space in which remnants of the past are apparently recirculated and happily coexist outside of historical reference. However, the commercial underpinning of the chronological play is expressed in the conventional phraseology of the accompanying caption, which insists, ‘Jet is the colour of this season’s cobweb-knit dresses.’10 The uneasy conjunction of past and future that the clothes and their setting evoke dissolves into the mainstream fashion world’s perpetual concern with the now. Similarly, while other individual articles covering the Gothic influence in fashion take different angles, all have an uneasy relationship with temporal issues, embodied in the currency of words like ‘revival’ and ‘primitivism’. Frequently, the need to invest millennial Gothic with depth leads to a representation of earlier phases of ‘Goth’ subculture as a kind of barbarous past, from which millennial culture offers a Utopian freedom.

Le Freak, c’est chic: the identity politics of Goth As Baldick and Mighall point out, recent criticism has been overly preoccupied with claiming Gothic as ‘subversive’, often in direct contradiction to the literary and historical evidence. The relative subversion or lack of it entailed by Goth subculture has exercised its commentators, who on the one hand make claims for the radical

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resuturing of identities offered by Goth role-play and fantasy, and on the other belittle its flamboyant angst as the empty posturing of pampered middle-class teenagers. Nevertheless in a sense this debate misses the point. Goth deliberately appropriates transgression in a variety of coded forms (focused around the taboos of sex and death) as part of its internal iconography. To enjoy a discourse of transgression, however, is not necessarily the same thing as being transgressée. These codings are frequently formulaic and repetitive, deliberately reanimating (and often revelling in) literary and cinematic cliché. They are subversive only in a culture that constructs such signs as a threat: hence the very different status of Goth in right-wing Christian communities in America compared to secular 1990s Britain. This is not to diminish the pleasure or personal satisfaction felt by Goths in the appropriation of a discourse of transgression; on the contrary, this symbolic resistance is a fundamental element of subcultural identity. Perhaps one of the problems when discussing Goth subculture is that its close relationship with Punk and its emphasis on dramatic visual style has led it to be considered as a spectacular subculture, when it is also a fan culture. Fan communities have so far usually been considered in relation to media texts such as Star Trek, but there are many similarities between the communities described by Henry Jenkins in Textual Poachers (1992) and the practices of Goth. For Jenkins, fan communities actively build their own cultures from scraps and fragments scavenged from the media; he refers to this process of creative appropriation as ‘textual poaching’, after Certeau. Similarly, Goth as a subculture is specifically geared towards consumption: not only of the conventional subcultural commodities, music and clothing, but also of literary and cinematic narratives. Just as fans of television series like Star Trek or Doctor Who construct their identities around their love for these programmes, Goths suture their identities from complex networks of literary and cinematic affiliations, incorporating the various characters and archetypes they encounter into their fantasy life and playing them out through costume. While some Goths may be more literate than others in the tradition of Gothic representations, all have to a greater or lesser extent constructed themselves, Frankensteinlike, from the scraps and fragments of that tradition. This process of identification is illustrated, for example, by Tim Burton’s early short film Vincent (1981), in which seven-year-old Vincent Molloy imagines himself to be Vincent Price and conducts himself accordingly. This fan tribute to Price’s oeuvre is not dissimilar in attitude to the kind of fan fiction produced around science fiction and fantasy series.

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This is not to say that Goth is a fan culture in a straightforward way: it would be quite possible to be a fan of Gothic novels or of horror films without being a Goth. Rather, Goth combines the elements of fan culture and spectacular subculture to create a monstrous hybrid between the two, one in which symbolic resistance is enacted not only through spectacular style but also through appropriation of narratives perceived as dangerous and outside the norm. The construction of Gothic as an anti-canonical, marginal genre thus bolsters Goth’s sense of resistance to a cultural hegemony of the bland. The fact that many of the texts thus appropriated are in fact bestsellers or box-office hits does not decrease the aura of transgression they are thus invested with. As Sarah Thornton argues, such acts of self-definition entail the concurrent definition of a ‘mainstream’, constructed as other by the subculture itself. This fantasised mainstream may or may not bear any relation to ‘reality’, but is produced by the subculture out of a desire for difference. Thornton writes: Vague opposition is certainly how many members of youth subcultures characterize their own activities. However, we can’t take youthful discourses literally; they are not a transparent window on the world. Many cultural critics … have been insufficiently critical of subcultural ideologies, first, because they were diverted by the task of puncturing and contesting dominant ideologies and, second, because their biases have tended to agree with the anti-mass society discourses of the youth subcultures they study.11

In other words, while the formulations of power within a particular subculture are a potentially fertile topic of investigation, to invest the subculture thereby with a particularly subversive or transgressive potential within the wider culture is problematic. Some of these problems can be illustrated by Trevor Holmes’s essay ‘Coming out of the Coffin’, which seeks to supply Goth subculture with the transgressive potential of a ‘queer’ identity: goth [sic] punk identities, by no means as stable as many would like them to be, exist by suturing the canonical and anti-canonical, the cynical and the romantic, the high and the low, the straight and the queer, most often via the index of the Gothic tradition in general and through one of its figures in particular: the vampire.12

This is in many ways an accurate evocation of Goth, capturing the complexity of its many poses, and rescuing the subculture from the dismissive or simplistic attitudes of the majority of commentators.

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Despite his insistence on fluidity, however, Holmes’s judgment tends to fix Goth identity around the figure of the vampire, which is by no means always the case. An engagement with vampire literature is a prominent but not essential part of Goth subculture, and in recent years vampirism has developed into a distinct subcultural identity in its own right. More significantly, in his endeavour to read transgression into the subculture, Holmes overestimates its fluidity: teenagers dressed as vampires are not always as subversive as they intend to be (if, indeed, they always intend to be subversive: it is possible simply to enjoy Gothic imagery for its own sake). Inhabiting a stock literary and cinematic image is sometimes just that. The negotiation of identity through the figure of the vampire or other literary reference points is a rich site for study, but one that is as often dependent on formula, convention and mass-market images as it is a radical gesture against the norm. It is evident, for example, that many of the personal narratives collected by Ramsland, Page, Thorne and others play out a discourse of secrecy and confession that derives from the Gothic tradition in general but more specifically from Rice’s bestselling Interview with the Vampire (1976), in which the vampire protagonist’s deviant subjectivity is discursively constructed through extended confession to a journalist. To designate subversion to Goth wholesale is to oversimplify the discursive role transgression plays within the subculture itself. The problems of ascribing transgression also apply to discussions of subcultures and class. The British music press has traditionally castigated Goth for its lack of subversiveness, for a middle-class namby-pambyism set in opposition to the supposedly working-class outrage of Punk. For example Johnny Cigarettes, in a polemical piece entitled ‘But for the Grace of Goth’ appearing in the August 1997 edition of music magazine Vox, writes: ‘a nice, totally unspectacular middle-class upbringing is just not interesting enough, so they have to get into lots of pretend-nasty stuff, pretend to be tortured and selfdestructive, and slack around on the dole all day.’13 Cigarettes is here resorting to the same kind of dismissal of Goth for its apparently superficial qualities that Eve Sedgwick identifies in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions as characteristic of certain literary critics discussing Gothic literature. This manoeuvre is repeated in a more academic context by John Gianvito’s essay on Gothic in contemporary film, ‘An Inconsolable Darkness’ (1997). According to Gianvito: the contemporary popularization of Gothic found in the likes of … heavy metal music, represents, by and large, little more than Gothic

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posturing, draping itself in the surface trappings of the genre in a kind of ‘Gothic chic’ but devoid of the elements that initially inspired and continue to comprise the heart of the Gothic psyche.14

As Michael Bracewell somewhat more wittily puts it: ‘The soul is not so much bared as reduced to wandering about in its dressing-gown.’15 Gothic is yet again communicated through recourse to sartorial metaphor. James Hannaham’s essay ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either’ (1997) makes a similar point. Tracing the popular musical trajectory from simply having the blues to fetishising the blues (and, therefore, from black to white culture), Goth becomes the culmination of the trend of staging otherness, not only glorifying suffering but also distancing it through its conscious theatricalisation. As Hannaham argues, ‘The requisite adornment that goes hand in hand with a “Gothic” aesthetic, as rock and roll defines it, calls the sincerity of the wearer into question. They’ve dealt with their feelings of alienation from society by reinventing themselves as “monsters”.’16 The consensus among these various essays appears to be that Goths are ‘faking it’ – they’re not black or working-class therefore they can’t really be miserable, and their clothing is a pretence, ‘Gothic chic’ rather than an authentic expression of the ‘Gothic psyche’. Whether or not Goths really are miserable or middle-class is unfortunately beyond the scope of this study. What is of concern here is the resort to Gothic clichés in order to describe them. As Baldick and Mighall suggest of Gothic literary criticism, the bourgeoisie or middle class are positioned as the ultimate enemy, conservative and deprived of agency. Goths, furthermore, are cast in the role of Frankenstein, with the significant development that they constitute both creator and created, becoming monstrous through the processes of self-fashioning. Hannaham wonders whether such artifice ‘doesn’t in fact cancel out the sincerity of the wearer by further obscuring his or her identity’.17 Such a suggestion, however, assumes that there is an original, sincere identity that is being obscured – that the making monstrous of the self is artificial because it involves conscious and active self-fashioning. As Caroline Evans suggests: one could argue that such identities are not ontologically distinct, or pre-existent, but are brought into being, constructed or replayed through everyday actions, dress, adornment and other cultural practices. So for example, I am not a skinhead before I get the clothes and haircut; rather, I constitute myself as a skinhead through the process of dressing and acting as one.18

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If all subcultural identities are based on this process of ‘making monstrous’ – fashioning themselves as different from mainstream culture – Goth thus foregrounds this process by situating itself within a significatory space in which metaphors of monstrosity abound.19 Recent Goth-oriented fiction dwells on freakshows and monstrosities. The ‘Goth’ musician Nick Cave’s novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989), is narrated by a mad, hunchbacked mute as he drowns in a swamp. Poppy Z. Brite’s short tale, ‘A Georgia Story’, describes a Goth artist who is discovered by an old friend to be working as a geek in a travelling sideshow: ‘Blood was on his eyelashes, on his eyelids like makeup. He had painted his lids black, purple, gold before, to touch our gigs with glamour; now they were forever gory crimson.’20 Although the narrator now finds his friend’s appearance monstrous, where he previously found it beautiful, Brite implies that both incarnations are actively self-produced and thus exist along the same continuum. ‘The tracings along the floor of the cage were no accident,’ the narrator insists. ‘The intelligence still glittered in his eyes. … Still there.’21 The difference is that the geek has now become trapped in his identity, locked in a cage and repeating the same drawings over and over again, while the narrator is defined primarily in terms of movement, taking to the road in that particularly American enactment of the outsider role. Nevertheless, Brite indicates that this is in itself a form of entrapment, as he locks himself into his car: ‘the ribbon of highway rolled away from Rockville, and in its dwindling brightness I saw all the miles and all the years of the rest of my life’.22 For both characters, the process of creating identity – making drawings, taking to the highway – is deceptively fluid, like a record locked in a groove. As Polhemus argues, the appeal of subcultures to mainstream fashion has always been the fetishised concept of ‘authenticity’, ‘the street’.23 Goth, however, has always been about dressing up, theatricalising, as Mick Mercer argues: How many of what we may reasonably refer to as ‘Goth’ bands have used onstage what we can only describe as wholly manufactured images, which are essential to their art?. … About one hundred percent. … The imagery, totally dramatic, has to be there. … It is a facade, true, but a glorious one. Why else do the audiences constantly find it necessary to plunge or wriggle into skintight nothings, or to encase themselves in voluminous cascades of cloth?24

The music, furthermore, frequently dwells on this sense of performance. Bauhaus’s ‘She’s In Parties’ (1982) uses the film industry as a metaphor for the female protagonist’s alienation from the social

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scene, while the theatrical narrative of ‘Spirit’ (1983) ends with the sinister chant, ‘We love our audience’.25 The Cure’s ‘Dressing Up’ (1983) is even more explicit in that it describes being unable to take off the fancy dress no matter what the activity: ‘I’m dressing up to dance all week / I’m dressing up to sleep.’26 Finally, The Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Alice’ (1983) declares that ‘in illusion comfort lies’ as it depicts its eponymous heroine in her ‘party dress’, searching for answers through occult means: dress, trance, crystals and tarot each part of the same flimsy masquerade – albeit one that the narrator can see through.27 For Mercer, clothing is pre-eminent as a means of defining the subculture, not merely as a means of shared identity, or of rebellion, but as a form of fantasy that often involves dressing as literary and aesthetic archetypes. He insists: ‘I don’t think they see it as rebellious…. They consider what the imagery means to them. Not other people.’28 Indeed the intellectual pretensions of the subculture, which encompass not only the obvious literary and cinematic narratives, but also music built around influences as diverse as Camus (The Cure, ‘Killing an Arab’), Artaud (Bauhaus, ‘Antonin Artaud’) and even Bishop Berkeley (The Sisters of Mercy, ‘When You Don’t See Me’), often lead to its dismissal as pretentious or contrived by outside commentators. British music journalism, enshrining the ‘authentically’ working-class anti-intellectual stance of 1970s Punk, has a tendency to construct such self-conscious intellectualism as art-school selfindulgence, again reiterating the ‘inauthentic’ middle-class cliché. This becomes more evident if Goth is compared to mainstream music culture during the 1980s, Goth’s main period of activity. As Steven Connor suggests in Postmodernist Culture (1989), the manufacture of rock music in this period functioned around the intensely fetishised concept of the ‘live’ performance. The production and transmission of this performance was inevitably fraught with paradox; for example Bruce Springsteen’s appearances on his 1985 world tour made sure that no member of the vast audience could escape the slightest nuance of music or voice. Behind him, an enormous video screen projected claustrophobically every detail of his agonized facial expressions in a close-up which at one and the same time abolished and re-emphasized the actual distance between him and his audience.29

While the appeal of stadium acts like Springsteen and U2 depended on the communication of ‘real’ suffering on a vast scale, Goth wore its suffering on its sleeve. If the ‘authentic’ identity of Springsteen or Bono

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was kept in place by a sophisticated series of representations, from the recording as commodity to publicity shots, it becomes meaningless to talk of the Goth musician as ‘obscuring’ his or her identity through her self-construction. In fact, as Hannaham himself suggests later on, the subjectivities constructed in Gothic lyrics demonstrate a high degree of awareness and control over the representation of suffering: ‘Goths, by turning death, madness and violence into archetypes, de-personalize their connection to horrific events. They position themselves as reporters or tour guides to the macabre, rarely its victims.’30 He might add that a high proportion of these bands exhibit a strong sense of irony and black humour, generically absent from stadium rock during the 1980s. For Hannaham, an American writer, the emphasis on staging angst appears to manifest itself in a limited knowledge of British cultural history. Describing Joy Division, not a Goth band in the strictest sense, as ‘the only atmospheric post-punk band that managed to combine the ideals of blues-style confessional of which legends are made with the bleak vision of Goth’, he proceeds to quote from Jon Savage’s biography of singer Ian Curtis, citing the specificity of Manchester in 1979 as depressed, postindustrial and on the brink of Thatcherite government.31 While this is undeniably true, it is unclear why he raises the historical and cultural context at this point in the essay and not when referring to the other bands in the article. Joy Division are no more specific about political and social realities in their lyrics than any other Goth musicians; their difference consists in the fact that they did not cultivate a theatrical image and that their lead singer committed suicide, thus suggesting an ‘authenticity’ absent from the theatrics of Peter Murphy or Siouxsie Sioux. Goth’s initial phase of cultural production, however, corresponds exactly to Thatcher’s period in power, and in 1980s Britain was associated geographically with Leeds, another northern city similarly depressed in economic terms.32 For Michael Bracewell, the Goths’ ‘tribal attempt to become the Living Dead’ was a kind of masquerade as ‘Thatcher’s teenage victims’, and was implicitly a product of 1980s suburban angst: ‘Goth took hold as both a suburban and provincial cult. … [A]nd the movement as a whole could be likened to the vast garden cemetery at Brookwood, in Surrey, where the London Necropolis Corporation laid out a suburbia for the dead in the middle of the nineteenth century.’33 In fact The Sisters of Mercy’s second official album Floodland (1987) could be described as a consummate expression of the Thatcherite era, with the internal financial machinations of band leader Andrew Eldritch and lyrical references to the Cold War (‘Mother Russia’), the decline of empire

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(‘Lucretia My Reflection’), the worship of power (‘Dominion’) and selling out (‘This Corrosion’). The issue of social class in relation to Goth is further complicated by the dynamic through which subcultures are produced. The notion of class is intimately bound up with the formation of subcultures, but the model of working-class rebellion against the dominant culture is excessively simplistic. For example, as Angela Carter observes, ‘the style of the late seventies binds the underprivileged and the overprivileged in the same visual category’.34 Subcultures tend to create their own codes of prestige that supplant those of the ‘parent’ culture, in other words what Sarah Thornton refers to as ‘subcultural capital’.35 By ‘being in the know’, possessing the right dance moves, clothing, musical discernment, and so on, the subject signals belonging and status within the subcultural group, although that knowledge may be irrelevant to their status elsewhere in society. Thornton continues: subcultural capital is not as class-bound as cultural capital. This is not to say that class is irrelevant, simply that it does not correlate in any one-to-one way with levels of youthful subcultural capital. In fact, class is willfully obfuscated by subcultural distinctions. … Subcultural capitals fuel rebellion against, or rather escape from, the trappings of parental class. The assertion of subcultural distinction relies, in part, on a fantasy of classlessness.36

Subcultures in general and Goth in particular encompass a specific set of manoeuvres around class boundaries. On one level, as Carter recognises, those engaged in financially remunerative creative occupations such as musicians or designers, or the hip and idle rich, become virtually indistinguishable from the working-class no-hoper, on the visual axis at least; on the other, the subculture constitutes a rejection of the dominant culture’s values which deliberately negates the meaningfulness of class signification. For Goth in particular, the frequent engagement with vampire lore ironises definition through class as it functions through a myth of decadent aristocracy. The Dracula of the popular imagination is a predatory, strangely thrilling aristocrat (deriving more from Byron and Varney than from Stoker’s novel) bent on seducing middle-class virgins. This fantasy of aristocratic predation and bourgeois submission, whether linked to vampirism or not, underlies many Goth representations. This is clearly illustrated by one of the outfits chosen to represent the Goth look in the Victoria and Albert’s Street Style exhibition: worn and donated by singer Dave Vanian from The Damned, it is a fantasy recreation of the late nineteenth-century

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dandy.37 If the dandy, as argued in Chapter 3, was based in a bourgeois fantasy of aristocracy in the first place, then the wearing of such an ensemble constitutes a kind of double masquerade. Goth also appropriates the archetype of the loner: the wanderer or damned soul doomed to wander the earth forever alienated from mankind. As such the relationship between not only Goths and outsiders but also between individual Goths and the wider subcultural group is not a straightforward one. The subculture here appears to draw again on literary precedent, in particular a notion of subjectivity implicitly derived from Romantic individualism, in which a unique subjectivity can be forged through original self-expression. The original desire for difference that attracts the individual to the subculture in the first place leads to a desire for further fracturing within the scene itself, in which each individual Goth is regarded as an exclusive self-creation. This is confirmed by the testimonies of individual Goths in Mick Mercer’s Gothic Rock (1991): an interviewee named Hemlock states, ‘whilst some people see us and say we’re all the same because we all wear black, you’d be hard pressed to find a few Goths looking exactly the same as each other’.38 Similarly a Goth named Lorraine insists, ‘each Goth is different – even though to outsiders they may all look alike. It does annoy me when I hear people who dress differently – but not “Gothickly” being called Goths!’39 This desire for difference is echoed in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, z series of novels that has become iconic for many members of the Goth and Vampire communities. Interview with the Vampire (1976) in particular anticipates the conflict between individualism and group identity in its portrayal of vampires Louis, Lestat and Claudia. Published before the advent of Goth, Interview nevertheless articulates a similar set of sartorial concerns. The narrator Louis states of his mentor, ‘Lestat thought the best color for vampires at all times was black, possibly the only aesthetic principle he steadfastly maintained, but he wasn’t opposed to anything that smacked of style and excess.’40 Lestat enacts the persona of the dandy, but does so not through aesthetic principle, intellectual intention or response to social context but rather through sheer sensual indulgence. Lestat drains dandyism of its cultural import, reduces it to an abstract process of consumption and display. Lestat’s straightforward sensual indulgence in fashion contrasts with the Romantic individualism of Louis and Claudia: once they reach Europe, they explicitly reject shared dress codes or a group identity. This marks a common pattern in Rice’s work, whereby vampires seek to differentiate themselves from their kind, mark out

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their difference among the different. Her vampires simultaneously long for and disdain companionship, finding solace in one or two chosen companions rather than a larger community. Despite Louis and Claudia’s desperation to meet others of their kind, once they reach the Théâtre des Vampires they are shocked by the conformity that the Parisian vampires display. Needless to say this is expressed through clothing: And meanwhile, the vampires around us talked on, Estelle explaining that black was the color for a vampire’s clothes, that Claudia’s lovely pastel dress was beautiful but tasteless. ‘We blend with the night,’ she said. ‘We have a funereal gleam.’ … And I realized what must have been obvious, that all of them had dyed their hair black, but for Armand; and it was that, along with the black clothes, that added to the disturbing impression that we were all statues from the same chisel and paint brush.41

The French vampires are following a script, acting the part of vampires just as they perform their blood-drinking rituals as sensational drama in front of an unwitting audience. Their sense of their own reality can only be achieved through masquerade. Unlike Claudia the American individualist, expressing herself through fashion, the French vampires are mere slaves to style, mindlessly following a system, only one step up from the vacant monsters of Eastern Europe. Their subculture is less like a family than a Masonic lodge, with elaborate punishments meted out to those who betray its precepts. The theme is reprised in the second novel in Rice’s Chronicles, The Vampire Lestat (1985). Lestat’s rebellion from conventional vampire lore is, paradoxically, by looking normal, by refusing the codes of difference on which the coven insists. As Lestat pronounces, ‘Try to see the evil that I am. I stalk the world in mortal dress – the worst of fiends, the monster who looks exactly like everyone else.’42 Rice’s third vampire novel, The Queen of the Damned (1988), however, goes on to explore the power of the monster who looks like all the other monsters, examining the pleasures of conformity to archetypes as well as those of iconoclasm. The ancient vampire Khayman, newly awakened after hundreds of years, rediscovers his identity by dressing in the style of Bela Lugosi. As Rice states: In Paris, he went to ‘vampire’ movies, puzzling over what seemed true and what was false. … The Vampire Lestat had taken his garments from these old black and white films. Most of the ‘creatures of the night’ wore the same costume – the black cloak, the stiff white shirt, the fine black jacket with tails, the black pants. … He bought the vampire comics and

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cut out certain pictures of beautiful gentlemen blood drinkers like the Vampire Lestat. Maybe he himself should try this lovely costume; again, it would be a comfort. It would make him feel like he was part of something, even if the something didn’t really exist.43

Khayman desires the vampire costume precisely for the same reasons of community and belonging that pertain to Goth subculture, despite the fact that he is isolated from any others of his kind. Indeed, the clothes, and the fan-like practices of watching films and cutting out pictures from comics, are a substitute for an absent community, ‘make him feel like he was a part of something’. Once Khayman has adopted the Lugosi outfit, he notices a dramatic improvement in his performance as a vampire: And immediately in the streets of London people adored him! This had been the right thing to do. They followed him as he walked along smiling and bowing, now and then, and winking his eye. Even when he killed it was better. The victim would stare at him as if seeing a vision, as if understanding. He would bend – as the Vampire Lestat did in the television songs – and drink, first, gently, from the throat.44

The improved performativity is precisely a result of putting on a performance – hamming it up – to fulfil a media-created role. It is the response from humans – who are presented with an image of vampirism they can ‘understand’ – that gives him such pleasure. Vampire paraphernalia such as the coffin become cosmetic accessories rather than essential items and are treated with a certain degree of bathos: ‘He even bought a coffin, but he did not like to get inside. … But still, being a vampire, he thought he should have it and it was fun. Mortals who came to the flat loved it…. And the coffin gave them something to sit on in a flat that contained nothing else.’45 Goth performances – whether as vampire, dandy, demon child or femme fatale – inhabit precisely this space that Rice sets up, between the pleasures of being different and those of acting a recognisable role. The problem with reviving archetypes, however, is that they often seem at best incongruous, at worst archaic, when read alongside contemporary gender politics. Femininity in Goth is a particularly contested category, and the representation of Goth women is the theme this chapter will take up next.

‘She looked good in ribbons’: fashioning Goth femininity The Sisters of Mercy’s track ‘Ribbons’, from the Vision Thing album (1992), encapsulates a certain view of femininity within Goth culture.

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It is a love song addressed by an intellectually articulate male to a promiscuous muse, tortured by his desire for her despite her incapacity to understand him: ‘I tried to tell her about Marx and Engels, God and Angels / I don’t really know what for / but she looked good in ribbons.’46 The woman’s point of view is reduced not only to the clothes she wears but to the most trivial of accessories. On one level, the song appears sexist to the point of self-parody; however, the singer Andrew Eldritch’s laconic vocal style introduces ambiguity into the direction of the sarcasm. Was it no use telling the woman of politics and religion because she was uninterested or incapable of understanding, or were the narrator’s own hopeless communication skills to blame, rendered inarticulate by the force of desire? Does he desire a stupid woman, or does desire make him stupid? Were Marx and Engels perhaps simply inappropriate as pillow talk? He clearly wishes the relationship to continue despite his better inclinations, as the tortured desire expressed in the remainder of the song illustrates. The song encapsulates a fundamental problem of one of the major strands of Goth subculture: it places a romanticised vision of the female at its creative centre, relegating her to the position of muse, and in doing so denies the female subject access to the tortured sensibility of the male. At the same time, however, it exposes that sensibility as pretentious, woefully inadequate and open to self-parody. A similar manoeuvre is made by The Cure’s early track, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, which directs its sarcasm unflinchingly at itself: ‘I try to laugh about it / Cover it all up with lies … Cos boys don’t cry.’47 The Cure, like The Sisters of Mercy, often use the image of the anguished female to bolster the image of the male artist’s racked sensitivity, as in their adaptation of Penelope Farmer’s novel Charlotte Sometimes, or the melancholy ‘Catch’, in which it is not the girl’s constant falling down that is the source of angst, but the male narrator’s failure to catch her.48 Discussing gender in relation to Goth subculture is a tricky subject, as clearly Goth is a large entity composed of many different participants with different cultural influences and, indeed, sexual orientations. It is clear, however, that not only do women participate in Goth more visibly than in many equivalent contemporary subcultures, but they are avid consumers of the presentations of tortured masculinity discussed above: Andrew Eldritch and Robert Smith both qualify for pin-up status in the Goth community, as do a legion of other male artists. Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber suggest that consumption of such images is often substituted for more streetoriented subcultural activity by young women, due to their restricted

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sphere of activity, and this has led to their erasure from conventional subcultural research.49 If young women have been increasingly mobile and streetwise since McRobbie and Garber first published this research in the 1970s, there is nevertheless a domestic element to Goth that perhaps resonates with their argument. Despite the importance of clubs, gigs and other public spaces (such as graveyards), the cultivated pallor functions better in an interior space than it does outside on the street. What is particularly striking about Goth, however, is that regardless of the opinions of its actual acolytes, it is frequently gendered as feminine by cultural commentators. Emma Forrest, for example, in an article entitled ‘Grimly Fiendish’ that appeared in the November 1996 issue of The Face, regards Goths as definitively female: ‘For adolescent girls, the pull towards all things black velvet and mystical is especially strong. … Teenage girls are doomed romantics. Goths are just girls being true to their inner selves.’50 Besides the conventional gender stereotypes this draws upon (feminine mysticism, intuitiveness, romanticism, sentimentality) this judgement also manifests itself as physical stereotype: ‘Goth women are generally either wasted and skinny or quite large.’51 The body of the Gothic girl is defined in terms of excess and marginality: she is at either extreme of the weight scale, definitively removed from the ‘average’ or ‘normal’ teenage body and suggestively associated with either anorexia and drug-use (’wasted’) or with excessive eating habits. Significantly, young women are also primarily constructed as consumers: Garbage’s Shirley Manson encapsulates ‘goth you could buy off a hanger’, ‘Mall-chicks … are sporting the same look’, and the Manic Street Preachers’ female fan base wear ‘black rubber bracelets and cuts on their arms’ as if both are similar forms of accessory.52 This confirms Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber’s point that ‘within the repertoire of subcultural representations … girls and women have always been located nearer to the point of consumerism than to the “ritual of resistance’”.53 If these accounts are to be believed, the Goth look in the 1990s is specifically consumed by women, and for these women their ‘inner selves’ are specifically expressed through consumption. For Forrest, Goth’s reliance on ‘pantomime dress-up’ for its identity finally becomes a means of trivialising it as a subculture and as a specifically female preoccupation: ‘Goths … are self-destructive, as opposed to Punks who are energetic and outward. Whatever extrovert qualities a goth [sic] might have only ever manifests itself in their clothes.’54 Again this gendered distinction (’almost exclusively … pallid teenage girls’) falls into sexual stereotype: masculine Punks as active,

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feminine Goths passive. Besides being a dubious distinction in the first place (Sid Vicious being one of the most obvious images of selfdestruction in popular culture), this has the knock-on effect of suggesting that the only way teenage girls have of asserting rebellion is through dress-codes: ‘Who would have thought that a pair of black fishnet gloves and a hair crimper could be so liberating?’55 James Hannaham makes a similar distinction between Goth and Heavy Metal (notably he is writing from an American perspective): ‘Heavy metal was aggressive, sexist and therefore “masculine”, while Goth had a softer, more accepting, “feminine” cast.’56 Just what it is that Goth is ‘accepting’ of remains unspecified. In fact, the Goth music scene is markedly dominated by men (as is the music industry in general), with a few notable exceptions, most prominently Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees. While Sioux’s long, successful music career and distinctive sartorial inventiveness resist stereotypical gender categorisations, other female Goth icons occupy more problematic or marginal spaces in the industry. The Sisters of Mercy’s second album Floodland (1987) is instructive: while The Sisters’ second incarnation depended heavily on the visual presence of bassist Patricia Morrison, who features strikingly on the cover photograph, she is not credited anywhere on the album sleeve. The circumstances preceding her eventual departure from The Sisters of Mercy underscore this point; according to Mick Mercer: ‘Having felt her contribution, already spread over four years perhaps merited more than the paltry £300 a month provided, she asked for more, receiving the reply, “All I need is somebody to hold a bass low enough – and you’re out”.’57 The Nocturnal (1998) compilation CD, which promoted itself as an ultimate Goth compilation, featured thirty-six tracks, only nine of which feature female musicians.58 Similarly, Mick Mercer’s Gothic Rock Black Book (1988) and the article in the August 1997 issue of Vox documenting Goth music are visibly dominated by images of men.59 In contrast, the pictures of Goth fans in Polhemus’s Street Style and Style Surfing and in the ICA catalogue Gothic all feature women. The recent explosion of Goth sites on the Web also registers a strong female presence. Thus if, as Hannaham suggests, Goth is more ‘accepting’ as a subculture than heavy metal, for example, what it seems to be more accepting of is men expressing ‘feminine’ traits of dressing up, exploring their sexuality and displaying intense emotion (as The Cure’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ ironically suggests). This is confirmed by the testimony of Phil Wills, a Goth from Nuneaton featured in Mick Mercer’s Gothic Rock: ‘The most important thing about the

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Goth/Alternative image for me is that it gives me a chance to show the feminine side.’60 Women’s place in this subculture is, however, more ambiguous. As in Forrest’s article, Goth women are presented primarily as consumers of Goth culture – clothes and music – rather than creators of it. Nevertheless, they also appear, through the stereotypical muse role, to become a kind of accessory in themselves, as exemplified by the marketing of Patricia Morrison’s image cited above. Even a track like All About Eve’s ‘Scarlet’, from the 1989 album Scarlet and Other Stories, which could be regarded as a femaleauthored counterpart to The Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Ribbons’, cannot envisage its protagonist outside the muse role. The song describes a fallen woman’s spiritual enlightenment through sartorial metaphor: she has finally ‘found out / What no-one’s about to tell me. … I don’t wear scarlet well.’61 Consequently she expresses her intention to jettison her ‘scarlet / Ribbons and bows’ for the higher demands of poetry and art, insisting that ‘I’ll change these clothes if I want to, and I do.’ Self-determination is enacted through clothing; nevertheless, it is the ‘Poets and painters’ whose words she says she will die for, rather than her own. Despite her desire to escape the ‘fallen woman’ role, she remains a consumer rather than a creator. Similarly texts privileged by Goth subculture, such as the novels of Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite, display a marked disposition towards male and in particular gay sexualities, despite the fact that their most prominent authors are female. Brite’s Lost Souls, for example, contains a number of perverse and frequently incestuous couplings, almost all of which occur between male partners. Vampire sexuality is largely maleon-male sexuality, reflecting Brite’s own self-identification as a gay man with a woman’s body. As such it is opposed to both heterosexual relationships, which are all presented as profoundly problematic within the novel, or the trendy bisexuality of the suburban Goth teenagers with whom the protagonist Nothing hangs around. Nothing observes with detachment that ‘Bisexuality was much in vogue among this crowd. It was one of the few ways that they could feel daring’, suggesting that within this community sexuality is a surface construct, an adjunct of alternative fashionability.62 It is also a weak substitute for the genuinely daring, which in this case is aligned with vampirism. Of the fourteen-year-old Laine, Brite suggests: Nothing had his doubts about how much Laine really liked girls. The walls of his room were plastered with posters of The Cure. … [His girlfriend] Julie wore her hair wildly teased in all directions, and she favored lots of black eyeliner and smudged red lipstick. Nothing

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suspected that Laine liked her mainly because of her superficial resemblance to Robert Smith.63

Laine is only attracted to Julie because she superficially resembles a male pop star. His deeper attraction, it turns out, is towards Nothing himself. In Brite’s world, at least in this early work, women tend to function as objects of exchange or definition according to what Eve Sedgwick has called homosocial relationships between men. Trevor Holmes articulates what is a commonly expressed objection to the book: ‘women in the novel serve either as the inevitably destroyed vehicles for the propagation of male vampires or as titillating sidedishes for mostly male-male sex’.64 Both of the major female characters die horribly in childbirth, and Ann, in particular, provides an emotional nexus among Steve, Ghost, Nothing and Zillah, allowing their respective friendships and antagonisms to develop. Brite presents both her ‘children in black’ and her vampires as seeking alternative ‘families’ as substitute for the dysfunctional suburban nuclear families they reject, but as if to emphasise the constructed, ‘artificial’ nature of these new bonds, vampire families marginalise not only female reproductive sexuality but also women. In a symbolic statement of perverse kinship, Brite’s vampires link foreskin-rings ‘to pose for a series of studies by a famous photographer of erotica’.65 She continues: ‘They stood together, naked and embracing, the three of them as much a family as anyone could be, anywhere, ever.’66 Thus the embrace of fluid, queer sexualities in Brite’s first novel is not extended to women, who are, it seems, excluded from the vampire family through their anatomy. This reflects a more general essentialism in the novel, which appears to disavow the notion of performative identities even as it serenades the ‘eyes smudged black and ripped black clothes’ of the Goth teenagers it describes.67 For the teenage vampire Nothing, vampiric identity is the cause of his social alienation rather than an effect. In other words he is depressed because he is really a vampire, not simply interested in vampires because he is depressed. Thus the construction of Goth as ‘feminine’ tends to gloss over specific deployments of gender (not always progressive) within the subculture itself. This division becomes more complex when read alongside Henry Jenkins’s theories of fan culture cited above. The fan communities Jenkins describes are principally female, and thus his redefinition of fan practices as creative appropriation rather than passive parasitism is also a reinterpretation of gender stereotype. The

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‘feminine’ cast of Goth, therefore, reflects a feminisation of activities based around practices of reading, viewing and dressing up: if female Goths are less visible in many of the ‘official’ versions of Goth subculture, they are more so in the unofficial spheres of consumption and fan production. Perhaps it is more important to look to the gender of writers such as Rice, Brite, Nancy Collins and others than to that of the characters they portray: their reworking of the vampire tradition recalls not only the culturally legitimised practice of literary rewriting, but also the textual poaching practised by the ‘slash’ writers envisaging erotic encounters between Kirk and Spock. It is arguable that, like the inventions of slash authors, Brite’s polymorphously perverse male vampires critique patriarchy by insisting on a fluidity of erotic object-identification and throwing ‘conventional notions of masculinity into crisis’.68 For Goth women, perhaps this reconfiguration of the masculine provides one of the subculture’s biggest attractions.

‘Strange and unusual’: Goth girls on film With the media depiction of Goth as a ‘feminine’ subculture in mind, it is interesting to turn to two Hollywood films that have made a point of representing female Goth characters. Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988) is a macabre fantasy featuring Winona Ryder as a troubled teen Goth who finds herself living in a real haunted house. Both film and director have received considerable critical acclaim. The Craft (1996) is an altogether more mainstream affair, depicting four high-school girls experimenting with witchcraft in order to combat their respective problems, which include an abusive white-trash stepfather, severe bodily scarring, racial prejudice, and fancying the school football jock. In both of these fictions, the teenage fans of the weird and the supernatural are confronted with the actually weird and supernatural. In Beetlejuice, this initiates the heroine’s return to ‘normality’, in The Craft, the antiheroine’s descent into madness. Both films display, however, ambivalent views about the motives for taking on the Goth look. The Craft, which inspired Emma Forrest’s article on Goth for The Face, participates in a genre of Hollywood films specifically concerned with the trials of adolescence within the American high-school system. This genre was popularised in the 1980s with John Hughes directed and/or produced films such as Pretty in Pink (1986), Sixteen Candles (1984) and The Breakfast Club (1985), and subsequently developed into the more witty, self-referential style of Heathers (1989) and Clueless (1995). The late 1990s in particular saw a resurgence in the genre, with

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titles including the exploitation horror flick The Faculty (1998), besides She’s All That (1998), Cruel Intentions (1999), 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Never Been Kissed (1999) and Election (1999) among others. The genre usually focuses on a female protagonist and involves struggles with peer pressure and social alienation, which are resolved through the establishment of a heterosexual romance plot. The extreme cruelty of teenage experience has, however, led to increasingly darker treatments of the genre, recalling Stephen King’s Carrie (1976), and spilling over into the teen slasher revival, exemplified by Scream (1996), along with its sequels and spin-offs. For example, Heathers portrayed Winona Ryder and Christian Slater murdering the more offensive members of the school, while Election pits ex-teen icon Matthew Broderick’s disaffected, washed-up teacher in a vicious game of wits against Reese Witherspoon’s pathologically ambitious and insufferably perky schoolgirl, Tracy Flick. The most recent incarnation of the genre is the film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), which casts a Californian cheerleader as reluctant superhero, and its more successful spin-off TV series (1997–2003). The majority of these films are targeted at a teenage and, arguably, mostly female audience, although the superior examples of the genre such as Heathers, Clueless and Election appear to generate a wider appeal. As such, they display a preoccupation with initiation not only into adulthood but also into conventional femininity and all its attendant paraphernalia. In the intensely hierarchised and cliqueoriented milieu of the American high school, clothing takes on a magnified significance. In Pretty in Pink, for example, much of the plot centres on the heroine’s inability to afford a dress for the prom, and efforts to make a suitable outfit herself. In Heathers, the position of dominance within the most popular clique in the school is signified by a red hair-ribbon, which is passed on from one girl to the next. In all these films, the tension between a fashionable in-crowd and a group of either geeks or ‘alternative’ types is evident. In Clueless, the heroine Cher makes over a dopehead skate-chick in order to make her ‘popular’, while in Pretty in Pink, the heroine’s bohemian appearance is sharply differentiated from the jocks and cheerleaders who surround her, largely as a marker of the economic difference (that compels her to make her own clothes). The principal motif is recuperation of alienated characters, usually through clothing, in order to become socially acceptable in the eyes of the peer group. The most overt example of this narrative occurs in the recent film She’s All That, a teen rewrite of Pygmalion, in which the popular male hero transforms school ‘weirdo’ Laney Boggs into prospective prom queen for a bet. This is effected

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largely by a makeover at the hands of his sister in which – surprise, surprise – she turns out to be stunning underneath the geeky glasses and strange bohemian clothing. While on one level such films preach tolerance and acceptance, on another this very acceptance can only be achieved at the price of conforming to the norm. The idea that the hero could fall for Laney while she maintains her ‘weirdo’ guise is impossible for the genre to entertain. This set of conventions is parodied particularly well by The Faculty, in which an alien parasite infects first the staff and then the pupils of a school with the objective of making everyone conform and therefore happy The (female) alien is disguised as the new girl at the school, a stock character in the teen film narrative, who therefore is literally as alienated as the five teenagers she falls in with who eventually unmask and defeat her. These five are directly modelled on the archetypes of The Breakfast Club – the jock, the prom queen, the geek, the weirdo and the outlaw – and are all shown to be alienated in some way from the remainder of the student body. In a darkly humorous twist, however, all five are ‘normalised’ by their shared experience, with the geek becoming the hero and winning the prom queen, the Goth dressing ‘straight’ and dating the sensitised sports jock, and the outlaw joining the football team. Thus the very struggle against the erasure of individuality ironically ends up achieving the alien creature’s aims. The Craft takes the familiar conventions of the teen high-school film and overtly Gothicises them. The familiar spaces of home, school and shopping complex are converted to Gothic spaces by infestation with snakes, insects and vermin, the featuring of nuns and Catholicism, and the sale of candles, magic equipment and arcane books. Within this environment the four female protagonists discover witchcraft and use it initially to counteract the mundane cruelties of high-school existence (ostracisation, gossip, sexual hypocrisy, malicious teasing and racism). Their power is shown, however, to be increasingly corrupted and corrupting, with three of the four girls becoming worse than their oppressors, leaving the heroine Sarah to return their powers to good rather than evil. Thus any horror generated by the film is due not to supernatural forces but rather to the ways in which these forces reveal the latent cruelty already present within the characters. Of the four members of the circle, only Nancy, played by Fairuza Balk, is a Goth in the subcultural sense; the others wear determinedly conventional or ‘Preppy’ clothing. Significantly, it is Nancy who becomes the focus of transgressive power and behaviour, the ‘black’

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witch to Sarah’s ‘white’ one. Furthermore, as she becomes increasingly corrupted by her new-found powers until she is outright evil, she becomes progressively more Gothic. Therefore, while at the beginning of the film she is wearing a Punky, customised school uniform, she migrates through more conventional Goth combinations of black garments, pale make-up and silver jewellery, culminating in an antique black Victorian dress with granny boots and backcombed hair. Even her lipstick darkens from red to black, while her black eyeliner becomes progressively thicker. As her dress becomes more risqué, it is increasingly suggested that she is also promiscuous. If at the beginning of the film she is the school ‘bad girl’, the film initially seems to challenge that stereotype (by suggesting she is really just quirky, misunderstood and economically disadvantaged). If anything, Nancy seems deliberately to inhabit the stereotype in order to regain some power from her marginalisation. However, The Craft ends up confirming that the bad girl really is Bad – sexually and morally – after all. Her inability to use restraint in her magical practice or tolerate criticism leads not only to the sexual humiliation and murder of a former boyfriend, but also to the persecution of Sarah as a ‘traitor’ to the coven, re-enacting the process of ostracism of which the girls were once the victims. Finally, like Radcliffe’s Laurentini, Nancy’s excessive passions and desires are too much for her and she goes insane. If she avoids the normalisation conventionally meted out to the ‘different’ in the teen movie – as well as the capitulation to heterosexual romance over relationships between women – she is nevertheless punished for her excess. The last shot of Nancy shows her in regulation pyjamas, strapped down to a bed in a bare cell, stripped of her Goth glamour and transported to another kind of Gothic scenario altogether. Beetlejuice offers a very different reading of the Goth girl, which in some ways is more sympathetic and in others more conservative. Tim Burton is often characterised as the quintessential Goth director, having also directed Edward Scissorhands, the first two Batman films and Sleepy Hollow, all characterised by the same quirky, grotesque style, black humour and dark aesthetic. Winona Ryder’s Lydia, whose age is unspecified by the film but who is probably meant to be around thirteen or fourteen, appears draped in black accessorised with elaborately backcombed hair, gigantic hats and assorted veils which she wears even while eating. Her complexion deliberately echoes those of the real ghosts when they are masquerading as ghosts in order to frighten the new inhabitants of their house. Prone to pronouncements such as (on being offered a photographic darkroom)

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‘My whole life is a dark room’, or (on reading that humans ignore the strange and unusual), ‘I myself am strange and unusual’, she is portrayed as withdrawn and depressed, at one point composing a suicide note that begins, ‘I am alone’, only to discard it and begin again, ‘I am utterly alone.’ Her preoccupation with ghosts is interpreted by her wealthy architect/artist parents as attention-seeking behaviour, although they do not take the hint, as she is obviously deprived of their attention in particular. Finding that her house is actually haunted is the best thing that could possibly happen to her. Ironically, the ghosts provide her with the care and attention her real parents fail to offer, and through her contact with them (and the obnoxious Beetlejuice who wishes to re-enter the world of the living by making her his bride) she ends up happy and well-adjusted. This change in mental state is signalled by a change in attire: the enormous black hats and spiky fringe she wears for most of the film are replaced by a healthy complexion, sleek hair and an ordinary school uniform. The overt message conveyed is that Lydia needs to dress morbidly only because she is unhappy, and once the source of her unhappiness is dealt with she is able to dress like a ‘normal’ teenager. If Nancy is destroyed by her propensity for darkness, Lydia is recuperated. Burton, however, covertly undercuts this message, first by subtly customising Lydia’s uniform with a long black petticoat and stockings, and secondly by suggesting she no longer needs to evoke death through her costume, as her two best friends are literally dead, and they themselves are happy, well-adjusted people. The vision of domestic harmony the film’s conclusion endorses, with parents and children happily interacting, is profoundly disturbed by the fact that two of the loving, cheerful participants are ghosts. Furthermore, there is also a sense in which the spectacular clothing worn by Winona Ryder and Fairuza Balk resists enclosure by the films’ conventional happy endings in the same way that Radcliffe’s supernatural resists its explanation for the reader. Both Ryder and Balk look far more glamorous and attractive in their Goth outfits than out of them, and in Balk’s case her role as ‘villain’ is inevitably more interesting than that of the good-girl heroine. By all accounts it is Balk’s appearance, not that of the preppy heroine, that mall-chicks are choosing to imitate. Nevertheless, The Craft can hardly claim sole responsibility for the resurgence of Gothic within mainstream fashion. While in the United States it clearly tapped into a trend, the resuscitation of the Gothic look has been going on for some time, reflected by an increasing prominence in the mainstream media. The following section will investigate this revival in greater depth.

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‘Fashion’s Gone Spooky’: Gothic style in the Nineties69 In March 1998 The Face ran an advertisement for Smirnoff vodka depicting five women in Gothic attire, checking their make-up in a nightclub toilet (figure 5). Although the same image also appeared on billboards and in other publications at around the same period, this chapter will use its particular context in the pages of The Face to illustrate the relationship between Goth and 1990s’ style. The woman seen through the distorting lens of the Smirnoff bottle is dressed with more sophistication than the others and – significantly – casts no reflection. The copy reads, ‘Pure Smirnoff – The Difference is Clear’. The implication is that the Smirnoff-enhanced woman is the Real Vampire, while the other four women are wannabes, aping the poses of the femme fatale but coming across as trying a bit too hard. The advert depends on a certain level of knowledge in the viewer in order to work. The viewer must be familiar, for instance, with the convention in horror films for vampires to cast no reflection in mirrors. They must also be familiar with the existence of a Goth subculture which is viewed by the mainstream as overdone and cliched, and ultimately somewhat ‘uncool’. This basic knowledge is enough for the general viewer to receive the message of the advert, that real Smirnoff is sexy and dangerous while its competitors are, quite literally, pale

Figure 5 Smirnoff advertisement, March 1998

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imitations. The ironic suggestion is, of course, that if you are a real vampire you don’t have to dress like one. It is arguable, however, that there is also another subtext to this advert, which would not work at any period in history other than the late 1990s. Readers of The Face in 1998 were well aware that Gothic was back in fashion, thanks to numerous fashion headlines throughout the previous few years. In May 1997, for example, The Face ran an article entitled ‘Doom Generation: New Tales from the Dark Side’, detailing the debt 1990s’ fashion owed to 1980s’ Goth. These fashion stories make a point of both claiming a link with the Goth subculture of the 1980s and emphasising a progression, or – in the terms of the Smirnoff ad – a difference. The appropriation of Goth style by haute couture as described by The Face seems to illustrate Ted Polhemus’s description in Street Style of the way in which subcultural style inevitably gets exploited in the ‘bubble up’ rather than ‘trickle down’ processes of contemporary fashion, whereby the catwalk derives its influence from the street rather than vice versa. Nevertheless, the article tends persistently to disparage Goth subculture, even shying away from the term ‘Goth’ when discussing the new 1990s’ model, preferring the terms ‘Dark Side’ or ‘Doom Generation’. This movement is subtly redefined not as subcultural but as avant-garde, and is therefore permitted a degree of artistic credibility and subversive potential denied the Goths of the 1980s. As the magazine states:

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if you think of Gothic as being inextricably bound up with dyed black hair, The Mission and the Eighties. … [T]he Dark Side is thriving because it believes that it has a new relevance for the present: it is challenging preconceptions in a way Eighties Goth … always seemed too timid to attempt. Fashion may be turning to that decade for inspiration, but 1997’s Goth prototype is no longer the anorexic wallflower whose most provocative act was to apply a gash of black lipstick.70

The function of clothes within Goth subculture largely depends on who is wearing them: the middle-class Goth of the 1980s can enact rebellion only through stereotyped and implicitly ridiculous dresscodes, while the classless, avant-garde Goth of the 1990s is stylishly subversive of convention. This new generation is ‘confident and glamorous’, and is constructed as looking forwards – towards the millennium – rather than at the past.71 In fact, it is constructed as a kind of Utopian space where the forces of irrationality and intellectual critique can coexist happily. Read alongside this thesis, the Smirnoff advert apparently takes on a new significance for the magazine’s readers. The implication seems to be that the four non-Smirnoff women are old-school Goths, while the enhanced woman is of the stylish new variety. In other words, drinking Smirnoff will transform you from a sad Goth to a Gaultier Goth. The sell-line to the advertisement, as already noted, states, ‘The Difference is Clear’, presumably referring to the difference between the real vampire and the wannabes (besides of course the transparency of the vodka itself). Within the context of subcultural style, however, the word ‘difference’ also takes on a more complex range of meanings. Subcultural style tends to enact a paradox, in that while it is predicated on looking different from the mainstream, it necessarily entails looking similar to other members of the subculture, the marking out of socalled ‘tribal’ identity. While members of the subculture itself often vigorously assert their individual differences, to the outsider the members of the styletribe usually all look the same. This is clearly demonstrated by the testimonies of individual Goths interviewed in Mick Mercer’s Gothic Rock cited above. The Smirnoff advert plays into this kind of subcultural anxiety, suggesting in particular the efforts of the ‘Real Vampyres’ described by Katherine Ramsland and others to distinguish themselves from mere role-players and Goths.72 Nevertheless, ironically the ‘real vampire’ in the advert is only recognisable through appeal to stereotype. So what are the origins of this Gothic revival? Goth, according to its commentators, is always making a comeback, if it ever really went away. In 1988 the music journalist Mick Mercer could write, ‘Fresh

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impetus into the Gothy scene seems unlikely’ Nevertheless, The Face’s fashion report of May 1993 asked, ‘the return of goth?’, while in March 1995 the magazine ran a photographic sequence by David Sims captioned ‘She’s In Parties: Early Madonna meets Gothic Melodrama’, which showed a model mimicking a teenage Goth hanging out in a graveyard (figure 6).73 The Guardian ran a similar fashion spread entitled ‘Goth Almighty’ in June 1996, substituting Stonehenge for Abney Park. In August 1997 Vox argued that Goth had returned to the music scene through the likes of bands such as Garbage, Placebo and Marilyn Manson, claiming ‘They’ve called it “new grave”, “miserabilism”, “snakebite rock” … but when you’ve scraped away the hairspray and black nail varnish, it’s all goth underneath’ – a bizarre if appropriate metaphor apparently suggesting that Goth is in disguise as itself.74 According to Ted Polhemus, Goth has displayed unusual longevity among subcultures: To a majority which fetishises happiness, Goth is by its very nature off-putting and therefore it has avoided the fate of being drawn into the mainstream. Thus, whereas a much-imitated styletribe like, for example, the Skaters has had constantly to chop and change in order to keep one step ahead of its trendy imitators, the Goths (like Dracula) have had the luxury of timelessness.75

Like Dracula, Gothic fashion is constantly revisited by the trope of the undead. It is continually undergoing a ‘revival’, despite the fact that according to popular perception it has never really died in the first place. The Face’s 1993 article on ‘the return of goth’, for example, invokes ‘those girls at school, (all schools, any school, 1983 or 1993)’.76 Or, perhaps more appropriately, Goth has always been dead anyway and simply requires reanimation: ‘The bats have left the belfry and Bela Lugosi is dead, but Paris wants to bring it all back again.’77 If, as Polhemus argues, Goth has retained its integrity as a subculture because it has never been taken up by the mainstream in the same way as Punk or Skater style, then surely the 1990s’ ‘Gothic Revival’ in haute couture and lifestyle magazines might be a sign of its imminent demise. Yet there is a distinctive shift in tone to the pervasive claims that ‘Gothic is back.’ To begin with, this is a curious assertion on the part of high fashion as Goth has never been fashionable, as such, and therefore cannot be said to be undergoing a revival in the same way that 1970s’ disco style, or even Punk, for example, can. This is unless the ‘revival’ is taken to be referring to the nineteenth-century fashion for Gothic, itself a revival. Gothic as defined today, whether as literature or subculture, has always been an

Figure 6 From ‘She’s In Parties’, by David Sims. Styling by Nancy Rohde. The Face 2:78 (March 1995)

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implicit revival of something else, whether nineteenth-century decadence, eighteenth-century Romanticism, medieval architecture or uncivilised pagans. ‘Gothic’ as signifier is primarily a symbol of pastness, and pastness that is in the process of returning. Secondly, the insistence on Goth’s return, rather than its development, presumes it is a monolithic entity not subject to historical contingency. Goth is not ‘timeless’, but reflects the historical conditions of the decade in which it flourished, the 1980s. It may have continued to the present day but has inevitably adapted itself: Garbage and Marilyn Manson are radically different in style to the bands of the mid-1980s such as The Mission or the Fields of the Nephilim, as well as far more successful in terms of records sold and international exposure. No doubt part of the reason for this change consists in the outdating of the oppositional subculture/mainstream model for a more widespread diffusion of ‘alternative’ music and fashion styles through contemporary culture. Similarly, Gothic imagery in fashion changed through the 1990s; earlier images are more obviously derived from Goth subculture. In the ‘She’s In Parties’ sequence, which is named after a song by Bauhaus, model Jade wears fairly ordinary little black dresses that have been accessorised with features usually seen as the particularly ‘naff or tasteless elements favoured by Goth subculture: winklepicker boots; crimped hair; fingerless gloves (figure 6). Through the gawkiness of her pose and the outdoor location a semblance of realism is attempted, suggesting this is a real teenage girl posing in her local graveyard. Similarly in the Guardian’s ‘Goth Almighty’ story from a year later, the impression is of two dressed-up teenage girls messing around. More recent photographs, however, have a very different feel, having jettisoned the allusion to subculture for a deeper immersion in Gothic imagery. The work of Sean Ellis with Isabella Blow in particular, in his ‘Taste of Arsenic’ and ‘The Clinic’ stories for The Face in October 1996 and March 1997 respectively, creates visual narratives that clearly reference the aesthetic and intellectual inheritance of the Gothic tradition. ‘Taste of Arsenic’ conjoins two incongruous signifiers of Victorianism – childhood and corsetry – in order to deconstruct the binary opposition of innocence and experience. The distortion of the child models’ bodies caused by their corsets and masks makes them appear both disturbingly demonic and perversely androgynous. ‘The Clinic’, on the other hand, reads like a trip to a terrifyingly Foucauldian institution under the influence of strong hallucinogens (figures 7 and 8). The institutional feel is maintained in each shot with a background of discoloured white tiles and grimy bathroom fittings. Props suggest

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surgical instruments and an anatomist’s dummy, although it is unclear whether some of these are being used for punishment or cure. Against this backdrop a narrative of deviance unfolds: madness, lesbianism, vampirism and satanism. Many of the women are doubled, in mirrors or in each other, suggesting the visual tradition of ‘the lesbian glass’ as well as fragmenting psyches. In one image, a model is suspended from strings like a broken puppet; however, the strings also look like heartstrings, musical strings, a child’s swing. It is impossible to tell whether she is unravelling or being sewn back together, being held together or torn apart (figure 7). Another image, of a model in an Owen Gastor waistcoat, suggestively references Diamond’s portraits of the insane. The implication is that this is a clinic for producing insanity rather than curing it. The complexity of Ellis’s images is accompanied by an increasing sense of Gothicism in the clothes themselves. A new wave of designers in the 1990s deliberately courted the Gothic in their work, Alexander McQueen in particular basing collections on The Birds, The Hunger and The Shining and frequently returning to themes of automata, dissection and prosthesis. While the garments featured in photographs from earlier in the 1990s would be reasonably wearable by a mainstream consumer once shorn of Goth accessories, those of the slightly later images are increasingly esoteric and perverse. ‘The Clinic’ further distorts a hunchbacked Comme des Garçons ‘Distortion Dress’ by reflecting it in a doorknob to create a freakish effect. Similarly, the piece of Sean Leane jewellery which features in one of the most striking images for the shoot defies everyday wear by the average consumer (figure 8). It is, however, particularly resonant with Gothic themes: not only with the characteristic motifs of imprisonment, torture and vampirism, but also, on a more complex level, with the kind of structural conventions Eve Sedgwick has identified as characteristic of Gothic literature. Vampirism in this image is ostentatiously a surface effect, produced through costume – there is no illusion of realism – rather than intrinsically a part of the self. By conflating the penetrating fangs with the penetrating gaze, moreover, the image seems to have undergone what Sedgwick refers to as ‘contagion’, or the way in which within Gothic texts, properties of one thing transfer themselves to another. Finally, there is an element of black humour – the torture instrument resembles nothing so much as one of those flexible toy straws where the liquid gets sucked round a pair of spectacles before it goes into the mouth. The increasing engagement with the literary and artistic elements of Gothic, however, rather than its manifestation in subculture, has led

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to the perpetuation of a different kind of Gothic cliché. As mentioned earlier, Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall identify the tendency of twentieth-century theorisations of the Gothic to emphasise the irrational, the subversive and even the spiritual at the expense of

Figure 7 From ‘The Clinic’, by Scan Ellis. Styling by Isabella Blow. The Face 3:2 (March 1997)

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accurate historical analysis. The typical Gothic critic, they demonstrate, is preoccupied with psychology rather than history, and from the earliest critics such as Montague Summers and Devendra Yarma, attrihutes a spirituality to Gothic literature derived from

Figure 8 From ‘The Clinic’, by Sean Kllis. Styling by Isabella Blow. The Face 3: 2 (March 1997)

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Gothic’s foundations in medieval architecture.78 Arguably, this is also the case in late-1990s Gothic fashion. The language used to caption the more Gothic of The Face’s fashion shoots is instructive: in ‘The Clinic’, for example, ‘Welcome. We’ll tear your soul apart.’79 Similarly, a spread entitled ‘The Unexplained’ by Lee Jenkins, another proponent of complex Gothic fashion photography, puns in an almost Carlylean way on the possibilities of cloth for spiritual advancement: ‘We are spirits. In the material world.’80 The attendant images, which allude to Victorian spirit photography and the crawling heroine of ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’, show a model isolated and enclosed in a dark or twilit interior, alternately rapt, levitating, practising telekinesis, manipulated by disembodied hands, and surrounded by superimposed spirit faces. The material world, of cloth and of photograph, suggests an index to a spiritual realm even as this realm appears to require the material world in order to manifest itself. The conflation of Gothic images with the spiritual is perhaps most evident in the video directed by Chris Cunningham for Madonna’s single Frozen (1998). Madonna appears dressed in clothing from JeanPaul Gaultier ‘s Gothic-inspired Fall 1997 collection, an eclectic mixture of period styles which reflects the way in which Goth subculture borrows anachronistically from the spectrum of nineteenthcentury costume. However, she also wears black henna-style skinpainting on her hands, which both echoes the texture of lace and evokes mystic Hindu patterns. Initially the video appears to be ‘straight’ Gothic: Madonna sits beside her doppelganger, and like Dracula transforms herself into a large black dog and a flock of crows. As the video progresses, however, a more mystical element comes to the fore: she levitates from the ground weaving her hands in an Oriental fashion, recalling images not only of Eastern spirituality but also of Renaissance saints or spirits in Symbolist art. The video thus comprises a sophisticated blend of Western Gothic and Eastern spirituality. The Gothic elements are, however, precisely those which most fit to the notion of a psychological or spiritual interpretation, evoking a surrealist rhetoric of symbol (the doppelgânger, the mysterious dog) that defies rationality. The dependence of Goth subculture upon literary narratives, principally those of vampire fiction, ultimately leads to an ambiguous relationship with stereotype. Animating these kinds of narratives through dress is an important aspect of Goth fantasy life: in Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls, for example, one of the characters owns a copy of Dracula in which ‘Some passages were circled over and over, in pencil and lipstick and what looked like blood.’81 Similarly, Goths in Mercer’s

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selection of interviews testify to the importance of texts by Stoker, Le Fanu and Rice in determining their identity. It could therefore be argued that the subculture does, to a certain extent, invite homogenisation or stereotype on the part of the mainstream media. Goths themselves, however, clearlv see these images as a means of exploring identities not available to them through mainstream culture, and therefore invest them with notions of difference and unique selfidentity. This form of imaginative escapism through dress at which Goth subculture excels is not lost on the mainstream fashion press,

Figure 9 From ‘Black White Red Magic’, by Paolo Roversi. Styling by Edward Enninful. i-D 175 (May 1998)

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some of whose presentations of Gothic-influenced fashion play precisely on this fantasy potential. i-D magazine’s ‘Supernatural’ issue of May 1998, for example, featured a model dressed in Chanel playing a female vampire – precisely the upmarket vampire of the Smirnoff advert that had appeared in The Face two months previously (figure 9). Luella Bartley writes of Oliver Theysken’s work in Dazed and Confused, ‘We must all become princesses of the dark, or naive medieval lace maidens, practise the lovelorn frown and all get thee to a nunnery [«V].’82 A similar feature in Elle is entitled ‘Cathy Come Home’, which nominally invokes Wuthering Heights, although the clothes reference a range of period styles all subsequent to Emily Brontë, and the location work on St Vincent results in a number of sea shots as well as the requisite moorland. Nevertheless, the copy promises, ‘New romantics are celebrating the return of Victorian drama to the catwalks. Swishing skirts, flouncy blouses and a shadow of black lace turn you into a real-life gothic heroine.’83 The difference between fantasy and ‘real-life’ experience, it is implied, lies in wearing the appropriate clothes. While, clearly, fashion doesn’t come much more mainstream than on the pages of Elle, the copywriter seems here to have tapped in to a key element of Goth’s sartorial appeal. Within Gothic discourse, the clothes are the life: Gothic chic is not a false surface for the Gothic psyche, but an intrinsic part of it. Surely, therefore, within the world of fashion, it is this enduring potency of Gothic images for imaginative self-identification that leads to their perennial revival.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Paul Hodkinson’s Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture (Oxford: Berg 2002) appeared as this book was going to press and is a notable exception. www.gothic.net. Evans , ‘Dreams that only Money can Buy…’, p. 175. Ibid., p. 176. Punter (ed.), Companion to the Gothic. Grunenberg (ed.), Gothic, pp. 210, 208. Page numeration runs (perversely) back to front in this text. The International Gothic Association and its journal Gothic Studies were both founded during the 1990s. Jobling, Fashion Spreads, p. 42. Ibid., p. 44. Marie Claire, ‘Future World’, p. 208. Gelder and Thornton (eds.), Subcultures Reader, p. 201. Gordon and Hollinger (eds.), Blood Read, p. 171. Cigarettes and Oldham, ‘But for the Grace of Goth’, p. 65.

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

FASHIONING GOTHIC BODIES Grunenberg (ed.), Gothic, p. 49. There is a good deal of slippage over the term ‘Heavy Metal’, which is usually treated as a distinct musical genre and subcultural affiliation from Goth but nevertheless displays many overlaps, which have increased over the late 1990s. Bracewell, England is Mine, p. 118. Grunenberg (ed.), Gothic, p. 96. Ibid. Evans, ‘Dreams that only Money can Buy…’, p. 181. Leslie Fiedler notes how the term ‘freak’ has been associated with the counterculture since the late 1960s (Fiedler, Freaks, pp. 300–19). Goth is certainly recycling this range of references, but I would argue within a distinctively different generic context. Brite, Swamp Foetus, p. 44. Ibid. Ibid. Polhemus, Street Style, pp. 6–7. Mercer, Gothic Rock Black Book, p. 54. ‘She’s in Parties’ from Bauhaus, Burning From the Inside, (Beggar’s Banquet, 1982), lyrics to ‘Spirit’ by Bauhaus, The Sky’s Gone Out (Beggar’s Banquet, 1983). The Cure, Songwords, p. 94. Lyrics by Robert Smith. Lyrics to ‘Alice’ by Andrew Eldritch, from The Sisters of Mercy, Alice (Merciful Release, 1983). Mercer, Gothic Rock, p. 76. Connor, Postmodernist Culture, p. 151. Grunenberg (ed.), Gothic, p. 96. Ibid., p. 93. Leeds is described as ‘Gothsville itself by Mick Mercer (Mercer, Gothic Rock, p. 113), and in the 1980s spawned a deluge of bands including The Sisters of Mercy, The Mission, The Skeletal Family, Ghost Dance, The March Violets, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Rose of Avalanche and many others. Bracewell, England is Mine, pp. 119–20. Carter, Shaking a Leg, p. 119. Thornton, Club Cultures. Ibid., p. 12. De La Haye and Dingwall, Surfers Soulies Skinheads Skaters, no pagination in this text. Mercer, Gothic Rock, p. 67. Ibid, p. 115. Rice, Interview, p. 110. Ibid, p. 265. Rice, Lestat, p. 250. Rice, Queen of the Damned, p. 145. Ibid, pp. 145–6. Ibid, pp. 146–7. Lyrics to ‘Ribbons’ by Andrew Eldritch, from The Sisters of Mercy, Vision Thing (Merciful Release, 1992). The Cure, Songwords, p. 22. Lyrics by Robert Smith. Ibid, p. 123. McRobbie and Garber, ‘Girls and Subcultures’ (1975), in Gelder and Thornton (eds.), Subcultures Reader .

UNDEAD FASHION

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50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

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Forrest, ‘Grimly Fiendish’, p. 191. Ibid. Ibid. Gelder and Thornton (eds.), Subcultures Reader, p. 116. Forrest, ‘Grimly Fiendish’, p. 191. Ibid. Grunenberg (ed.), Gothic, p. 114. Ibid., p. 148. One of those is by Morrison-era Sisters of Mercy, one a guest vocal from mainstream pop icon Kylie Minogue on a Nick Cave track, and three by crossover ‘Indie’ bands the Cocteau Twins, Curve and the Cranes. Which leaves only Danielle Dax, and the bands All About Eve, Dead Can Dance and Alien Sex Fiend, who have one female member each – the last of these bearing the humorous pseudonym ‘Mrs Fiend’ (her partner being known as ‘Nik Fiend’) as if her identity is subsumed by the band in much the same way as that of a conventional wife within patriarchal marriage. The Gothic Rock Black Book contains 72 photographs of Goth bands; only 16 feature women. Similarly, the Vox article incorporates 32 photographs, only 7 of which feature women. Mercer, Gothic Rock, p. 173. Lyrics to ‘Scarlet’ by Julianne Regan, from All About Eve, Scarlet and Other Stories (Phonogram, 1989). Brite, Lost Souls, p. 32. Ibid., pp. 32–3. Gordon and Hollinger (eds.), Blood Read, pp. 181–2. Brite, Lost Souls, p. 82. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 63. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, p. 205. Anon, ‘Sussed: News and Reviews’, p. 12. Gilbey, ‘Doom Generation’, pp. 120, 122. Ibid., p. 122. Ramsland, Piercing the Darkness. ‘She’s In Parties’, pp. 78–9. Cigarettes and Oldham, ‘But for the Grace of Goth’, p. 64. Polhemus, Street Style, pp. 97–8. Heath, ‘The Return of Goth?’, p. 37. Ibid. Punter (ed.), Companion to the Gothic, p. 213. ‘The Clinic’, p. 98. ‘The Unexplained’, p. 123. Brite, Lost Souls, p. 77. ‘Period Drama’, p. 127. ‘Cathy Come Home’, p. 181

7

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Refashioning Gothic bodies: an anti-conclusion

In the preceding six chapters this study has attempted to provide some historical contextualisation for the presentation of clothing in Gothic fiction. The nature of this exercise makes it difficult to draw any overriding conclusions about the function of clothing within the genre. As previously explained, fashion discourses tend to defy any kind of totalising narrative, characteristically resisting closure in their endless preoccupation with recycling the past. Gothic too, in its persistent fixation on the past returning, is disposed to evoke circularity, despite the drive towards denouement required by the narrative format. Any conclusion this study can provide, therefore, is necessarily partial and incomplete. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that while the generic preoccupation with clothing in the form of veils, masks and disguises, first identified by Sedgwick, persists in Gothic fictions from the late eighteenth century to the present, this is not a static or homogenous phenomenon, but is invariably inflected by the discursive slant particular to the period in which each text was engendered. This means that while they maintain a recognisable coherence, Gothic conventions are more flexible than might first appear. Rather than always relentlessly privileging the surface over depth, they tend continually to foreground and interrogate the surface/depth relationship, according to the theories and ideologies of the period in which individual texts were produced. Thus while they consistently raise the same themes, they do not always suggest identical readings. Indeed the tensions between the emphasis on surface and the striving for interiority and depth are often where some of the most interesting effects occur. There is a patchwork aspect to Gothic, whereby pieces of a distinctly different fabric are nevertheless linked through patterning and repetition, meeting through the juxtaposition of like edges. The textile/textual monsters thus fashioned, hideous creations that show their stitches, cannot be reduced to a simple overall shape.

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The body in Gothic fictions is a profoundly unstable concept: continually evoked, nevertheless it is always disappearing beneath the mask or the veil. The times it seems most present are often those in which it is ineluctably absent: dispersed into the continuum of clothes, skin, surface. Gothic is not preoccupied with bodies so much as with clothes: clothes produce its most characteristic effects, and when the body does appear, it is usually to be defined through what it is wearing, or at least what it has taken off. Above all there is no natural or authentic body in Gothic fictions, but only socially and sartorially constructed bodies. Thus the Gothic body, when it appears, is plural in form and in a constant state of refashioning. The process of bodily refashioning through Gothic fictions shows no sign of diminishing. The most effective way of illustrating the perennial power Gothic bodies possess to fashion themselves anew, replaying the preoccupation with surface and depth, is through a final example. The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer unites a number of the themes discussed in the previous chapter. Suturing the kind of American high-school fictions discussed previously to a number of diverse generic conventions, most prominently those of Gothic narrative, the programme depicts a small southern Californian town called Sunnydale, in which the high school is literally situated over the mouth of Hell. Just as in the earlier films, fashion is seen as particularly important in depicting the habitus of the high-school students: each character is carefully delineated through the clothes they wear, and Buffy herself is an archetypal Californian teenager, more concerned with shopping than school. In fact, the idea that an airheaded Californian cheerleader should be the ‘Chosen One’ with the power to save the world provided the main gag behind the movie that gave rise to the series. Buffy, however, articulates a particularly complex relationship with clothes, enabled by the long-running episodic structure of the series, in which the lead character’s superficialities are repeatedly addressed and ultimately allowed to develop plenitude and depth. In the episode entitled ‘Hallowe’en’, Buffy and her friends dress up in costumes acquired from the Magic Shop in order to chaperone parties of small children trick or treating. Each of the costumes they choose acts to fulfil a perceived lack in their own social selves: shy Willow picks a sexy outfit before bashfully covering it up with a ghost’s sheet; Xander, whose masculinity has been threatened by Buffy saving him in a fight with the school bully, dresses as a GI; Buffy, compensating for her own perceived lack of conventional femininity, chooses the gown of an eighteenth-century Gothic heroine. A spell cast

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by the Magic Shop owner, Ethan Raine, causes each of the characters to take on the characteristics of their costumes. Xander becomes hypermasculine, a Hollywood parody of a soldier; Buffy on the other hand relinquishes her kick-ass efficiency for a hyper-feminine display of fainting and sensibility. Under the influence of Ethan’s spell, Sedgwick’s mantra that within the Gothic text, surface determines character, literally takes effect. In the case of Willow, the veil has literally transferred its properties to the flesh, in that she steps out of her enveloping sheet to find herself semi-transparent and permeable, a literal ghost of her former self. Ironically, the normally superficial Cordelia, who lives mainly for her clothes, is the only character not to be affected, as she obtained her cat outfit from a different shop. Cordelia, it is implied, is all surface already. Sedgwick’s theory, however, is also put into question by the narrative trajectory: at the climax of the episode, Buffy’s watcher Giles manages to break the spell and Buffy returns to her usual self in the nick of time, just as she is about to be vamped by Spike. The contagion from veil to flesh proves temporary and reversible; depth is reinstated – and indeed, enhanced, as each character learns valuable information about themselves from the experience. If, as Angela Carter has suggested, fancy dress provides ‘a holiday from the persistent self’,1 this holiday is one from which it is a relief to return. As in the teen highschool genre from which the series also derives, the process of acquiring adulthood is presented as one of acquiring proficiency in the technologies of self. For Buffy and her friends as the series progresses, self-knowledge equals power, the experience of growing up and facing one’s demons producing a deep, structured subjectivity. The Hallowe’en costumes do not, therefore, disguise the characters’ ‘true’ identity, but allow them to explore and augment that identity. Buffy in particular learns a valuable lesson in feminism from this episode: the old-school Gothic heroine is inferior to the new kind in that she is unable to take care of herself and more likely to endanger others and herself; she is annoying and well, rather dull from the point of view of the modern male (vampire); and, as Willow points out, she was unable to vote. ‘Hallowe’en’ not only pays a debt to Buffy’s origin in the narratives of Radcliffe and Lewis, but also definitively makes a case for a new Gothic. The new Gothic heroine has a more sophisticated understanding of gender politics, but she also possesses a more complex relationship with her clothes. Buffy obviously loves clothes, as she is never seen wearing the same outfit twice, but she is not defined by them. She can, in fact, slay vampires while wearing a halter

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top and high-heeled boots. Similarly, within the series mythology itself, Buffy is determined by her given role as Slayer, but within that identity is able to forge a unique approach to her task and a particular sense of self founded in friends, family and community. From the social intimacy she brings to her prescribed role comes her unique strength. In Buffy, therefore, a complex and ever-evolving sense of self emerges: one in which surface and depth continually are articulated through and play off against one another. Within these limits, infinite narrative potential is possible: combinations as varied as Buffy’s wardrobe itself. Gothic, it seems, is in no imminent danger of going out of fashion.

Notes 1

Carter, Shaking a Leg, p. 106.

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Fashion spreads ‘Black White Red Magic’, photographer Paolo Roversi, stylist Edward Enninful. i-D 175 (May 1998) pp. 82–93 ‘Bonne Nuit le Petit’, photographer Blinkk, stylist Karina Jefferey. Dazed and Confused 61 (Sept. 2001) pp. 218–27 ‘Brother Wolf and Sister Moon’, photographer Willy Vanderperre, stylist Olivier Rizzo. i-D 194 (Jan./Feb. 2000), pp. 96–9 ‘Cathy Come Home’, photographer Fabio Chizzola. Elle (April 1999) pp. 180–91 ‘The Clinic’, photographer Sean Ellis, stylist Isabella Blow. The Face 3:2 (March 1997) pp. 98–107 ‘Death Valley High’, photographer Phil Poynter, stylist Charlotte Stockdale. The Face 3:51 (April 2001) pp. 110–21 ‘Future World’, photographer Troy Ward, stylist Sarah Walter. Marie Claire 87 (Nov. 1995) pp. 208–15

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‘Goth Almighty’, photographer Eitan, stylist Rebecca Leary. Guardian Weekend June 15 1996 pp. 38–9 ‘The Intrepid Fox’, photographer Lee Jenkins, stylist Grace Cobb. The Face 3:44 (Sept. 2000) pp. 214–21 ‘Malice In Wonderland’, photographer Mario Sorrenti, stylist Annett Monnheim. The Face 3:14 (March 1998) pp. 112–17 ‘Period Drama’, photographer Martina Hoogland Ivanow, stylist Alister Mackie. Dazed and Confused 47 (Oct. 1998) pp. 126–31 ‘She’s In Parties’, photographer David Sims, stylist Nancy Rohde. The Face 2:78 (March 1995) pp. 78–83 ‘Simplex Concordia’, photographer Andrea Giacobbe, stylist Maida. The Face 2: 94 (July 1996) pp. 90–9 ‘Sisters of Mercy’, photographer Greg Lotus, stylist Patti Wilson. i-D 211 (July 2001) pp. 72–9 ‘Spook!’, photographer Peter Robathan, stylist Yvonne Sporre. The Face 2:56 (May 1993) pp. 98–105 ‘Taste of Arsenic’, photographer Sean Ellis, stylist Isabella Blow. The Face 2:97 (October 1996) pp. 90–7 ‘The Unexplained’, photographer Lee Jenkins, stylist Joanna Thaw. The Face 3:96 (March 1999) pp. 122–33 ‘Untitled 5’, photographer Corinne Day, stylist Panos Yiapanis. i-D 201 (Sept. 2000) pp. 302–9 ‘Untitled 6’, photographer Jeremy Murch, stylist Sarah Richardson. i-D 201 (Sept. 2000) pp. 310–17 ‘The Wanderer’, photographer Tesh, fashion director Edward Enninful. i-D 215 (Nov. 2001) ‘Which Witch Is Which?’, photographer Lee Jenkins, stylist Judy Blame. The Face 3:6 (July 1997) pp. 156–63

Film and visual media Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988) Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2, Episode 6, ‘Hallowe’en’ (written by Carl Ellsworth, directed by Bruce Seth Green, created by Joss Whedon, 1997) Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996) The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) The Faculty (Robert Rodriguez, 1998) Frozen, Madonna promotional video (Chris Cunningham, 1998) Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989) Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutsch, 1986) Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) She’s All That (Robert Iscove, 1998)

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Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992) Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Sellick, 1993) Vincent (Tim Burton, 1982)

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Selected discography All About Eve, Scarlet and Other Stories (Phonogram, 1989) Bauhaus, Bela Lugosi’s Dead (Small Wonder, 1979) _______ Burning From the Inside (Beggars Banquet, 1982) _______ The Sky’s Gone Out (Beggars Banquet, 1983) The Cure, The Top (Fiction, 1983) _______ Standing on a Beach: The Singles (Fiction, 1986) _______ Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (Fiction, 1987) Siouxsie and the Banshees, Once Upon a Time: The Singles (Polydor, 1981) The Sisters of Mercy, Alice (Merciful Release, 1983) _______ Floodland (Merciful Release, 1987) _______ Vision Thing (Merciful Release, 1992) Various Artists, Nocturnal (Procreate, 1998)

Selected electronic sources Alexander Mcqueen, www.alexandermcqueen.com/ A Study of Gothic Subculture: An Inside Look for Outsiders, www.gothics.org/subculture/subculture.html Gothic.Net 5.0, www.gothic.net Poppy Z. Brite Official Website, www.poppyzbrite.com/ Hogle, Jerrold E., ‘The Ghost of the Counterfeit – and the Closet – in The Monk\ Romanticism on the Net (Nov. 1997), users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/ghost.html Tuite, Clara, ‘Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, the Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution and The Monk”, Romanticism on the Net (Now. 1997), users.ox. ac.uk/~scat0385/closet.html

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Index Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page; numbers in italics refer to illustrations; literary works can be found under authors’ names; films can be found under title. Adams, James Eli 95–6 affair of the Queen’s Necklace 40 Alexander, John 118, 120 Alien Sex Fiend 199n.58 All About Eve 179, 199n.58 All the Year Round 62 Andersen, Hans Christian 76 aniline dyes 47 Artaud, Antonin 170 Austen, Jane, Nonhanger Abbey 18 Baddely, Gavin 21n.2 Bakhtin, Mikhail 14, 123–4 Baldick, Chris 15, 17, 36, 50, 106–7, 150, 160, 162–3, 164, 168, 193–5 Balk, Fairuza 183, 185 Ballaster, Ros et al. 130, 135 Balzac, Honoré de 76 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules 88, 92, 101, 103 Barnum, P. T. 116 Barthes, Roland 6 Bartley, Luella 197 Batman (film) 184 Baudelaire, Charles 88, 92–3, 100, 101 Baudrillard, Jean 6 Bauhaus (rock band) 162, 169–70, 191 Beckford, William, Vathek 8 Beetlejuice 181, 184–5 Berger, John 147 Berkeley, George 170 Bernhardt, Sarah 109 Birds, The 192

Birthday Party (rock band) 162 Bloomer, Amelia 109 Blow, Isabella 191 Bracewell, Michael 168, 171 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth Henry Dunbar 75–6, 80 Lady Audley’s Secret 8, 48, 57, 64–5, 76, 78, 79, 105 Bram Stoker’s Dracula 8, 103 Breakfast Club, The 181, 183 Breward, Christopher 47–8, 93, 95, 125n.12 Brite, Poppy Z. 159, 160, 181 ‘A Georgia Story’ 169 Lost Souls 179–80, 195 Broderick, Matthew 182 Brontê, Charlotte 3, 129 Jane Eyre 4, 9, 46–7, 55, 134 Villette 55–9, 62 Brontê, Emily 3 Wuthering Heights 4, 197 Broughton, Rhoda, Dear Faustina 112 Brown, Helen Gurley 151, 152 Browne, James Crichton 61, 62, 73 Brummell, George ‘Beau’ 88, 89, 91, 95, 96, 97, 103 Bruzzi, Stella 153, 154 Buck, Gurdon 74 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film) 182 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV) 20, 182, 201–3 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 91, 95

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Burke, Edmund A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful 32, 119 Reflections on the Revolution in France 32–5, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 52 Burton, Tim see Batman; Beetlejuice; Edward Scissorhands; Sleepy Hollow; Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas; Vincent Butler, Judith 155 Byron, George Gordon 9, 44n.10, 91, 96, 100, 103, 172 Camus, Albert 170 Carlyle, Thomas 74, 102 Sartor Resartus 19, 48–55, 81, 87, 89–96, 97, 106, 195 Carrie 182 Carter, Angela 15, 66, 141, 172, 202 Cave, Nick 169, 199n.58; see also Birthday Party Chanel 197 Chard, Chloe 39 Cigarettes, Johnny 167 Clueless 152, 181, 182 Coates, Paul 129, 149 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 9 Collins, Nancy 181 Collins, Wilkie The Law and the Lady 97–100 The Moonstone 7–8, 67 Poor Miss Finch 65–6, 80 The Woman in White 47, 48, 60, 62, 65, 66–70, 72, 97, 100 Columbine High School 160 Comme des Garçons 192 Connor, Steven 170 Conolly, John 60, 61, 63, 121 corsets 16, 24–8, 35, 55, 191 Cosmopolitan 130, 151–2, 155 Craft, The 181, 183–4, 185 Craik, Jennifer 12–13 crinoline 47, 55, 84n.69, 148 Cross, Victoria 107 cross-dressing 20, 87, 107–15 Cruel Intentions 182

Cullwick, Hannah 112 Cunningham, Chris 195 Cunnington, C. Willett 4, 65 Cure, The 170, 176, 178 Curtis, Ian see Joy Division cyberpunk 164 Dacre, Charlotte 40–1 Damned, The (rock band) 173 dandyism 18, 20, 82, 86–107, 108, 115, 120, 121–4, 125n.12, 173 David, Jacques-Louis 31, 37–8 Dazed and Confused (magazine) 197 Defoe, Daniel, Roxana 109 degeneration 86, 101–7, 164 Delacroix, Eugene 40 Delamotte, Eugenia C. 44n.1 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix 6 Dellamora, Richard 91–2, 94 Diamond, Hugh 60, 64, 65, 73, 121, 192 Dickens, Charles 47, 91 Bleak House 80 Great Expectations 51–2, 78, 80–2, 120, 122 Hard Times 82, 117 ‘Meditations in Monmouth Street’ 50–1 Oliver Twist 120 Our Mutual Friend 82 Dickinson, Emily 129 Directory, the 19, 26 Doctor Who 165 doppelganger 20, 128–56, 195 d’Orsay, Count Alfred Guillaume Gabriel 88, 91, 98 Doyle, Arthur Conan ‘The Copper Beeches’ 108 ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ 111 du Maurier, Daphne, Rebecca 129, 131, 132, 133, 134–42, 146, 148, 155, 156, 157n.35 du Maurier, George, Trilby 97, 107 Edward Scissorhands 184 Eldritch, Andrew see Sisters of Mercy, The Election 182

INDEX

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Elephant Man, The 116–20, 123–5; see also Merrick, Joseph Elle 197 Ellis, Kate 44n.1 Ellis, Sean 191–2, 193, 194 Empire Line 26, 35 Esquirol J.E.D 54–5, 61, 65 Evans, Caroline 17, 160, 168 Face, The (magazine) 160, 165, 177, 181, 186–8, 189, 191, 195, 197 Faculty, The 182, 183 fan culture 165–6, 180 Farmer, Penelope 176 Favazza, Armando 10–11 fetishism 17, 111, 162 Fiedler, Leslie 198n.19 Fields of the Nephilim 191 fin-de-siecle 18, 20, 86, 94, 107, 108, 123, 160, 164 freaks 87, 115–25, 169, 198n.19 Forrest, Emma 177–8, 179, 181 Foucault, Michel 6, 11–13, 17, 59, 78, 79, 117–18, 191 Freud, Sigmund 11, 17, 23, 24, 79, 128 ‘The Uncanny’ 2, 143, 149 Gagnier, Regenia 93, 96, 100 Garbage (rock band) 162, 177, 189, 191 Garber, Marjorie 109, 113 Gastor, Owen 192 Gaultier, Jean-Paul 188, 195 Gianvito, John 167–8 Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan 56– 7, 58, 129 Gillray, James 35 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 129 ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ 195 Gilman, Sander 63–4, 74, 77 Gilmour, Robin 78, 80, 82 Girard, René 132 Godwin, William, Caleb Williams 128 Gothic (film by Ken Russell) 9 Gothic Revival (architecture) 4, 9 Goth subculture 4, 16, 18, 20, 159–97

221

Graham, Peter W. and Oehlschlaeger, Fritz H. 117, 120, 123 Great Expectations (film by David Lean) 120; see also Dickens, Charles Grunenberg, Christoph 162 Guardian 189, 191 hair 108–9, 127n.73 Halberstam, Judith 5, 9–11, 104, 112 Hammer Horror films 8, 14, 23 Hannaham, James 168, 171, 178 Hart, Lynda 152, 154 Harvey, John 72–3 haute couture 20, 162, 187 Heathers 181, 182 Hitchcock, Alfred see Birds, The; Rebecca Hodkinson, Paul 197n.1 Hogg, James, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 128, 129–30, 131, 132, 142–3 Holladay, William E. and Watt, Steven 118, 123 Hollander, Anne, Seeing Through Clothes 2–4, 40, 53, 73, 76 Hollinger, Karen 152, 154 Holmes, Trevor 166, 180 Horner, Avril and Zlosnik, Sue 140–1 Howard, Jacqueline 14 Hughes, Arthur 64 Hughes, John see Pretty in Pink; Sixteen Candles; Breakfast Club, The Hunger, The 192 Hurley, Kelly 86, 106 Hutcheon, Linda 116 i-D (magazine) 160, 197 International Gothic Association 197n.7 Irigaray, Luce 141 Jack the Ripper 116 James, Henry 80 Jenkins, Henry 165, 180 Jenkins, Lee 195 Jobling, Paul 163 Johnson, Claudia 32, 38, 39 Jordanova, Ludmilla 31 Joy Division 171

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Kaplan, Joel H. and Stowell, Sheila 106 Keats, John 1, 6 King, Stephen 182 Kline, Sally J. 102–3, 104, 105 Kristeva, Julia 6 Kunzle, David 16, 28 Lacan, Jacques 6, 144 Ladies Monthly Museum 43–4 Lean, David see Great Expectations’, Oliver Twist Leane, Sean 192 Leeds 171, 198n.32 Le Fanu, J. Sheridan 196 Checkmate 77–8 The Rose and the Key 61–2, 63, 71, 84n.57 Uncle Silas 16, 70–3, 78, 97, 100 Levi-Strauss, Claude 132 Lewis, Matthew 48, 96, 202 The Monk 8, 10, 28–31, 36, 39–40, 41, 42–3 Light, Alison 134, 135 Lombroso, Cesare 101–2, 105 Lugosi, Bela 103, 168, 174–5, 189 Lynch, David 88; see also Elephant Man, The McClintock, Anne 112 McCracken, Ellen 151, 152 McEvoy, Emma 41, 42–3 McGrath, Patrick 8 McGrath, Roberta 74, 77, 79–80 McQueen, Alexander 17, 192 McRobbie, Angela and Garber, Jenny 176–7 Mad Max 164 Madonna 195 Maginn, William 91, 94 Manchester 171 Manic Street Preachers 177 Manson, Marilyn 160, 162, 189, 191 Manson, Shirley see Garbage Marie Antoinette 14, 19, 25, 31–4, 38–9, 40 Marie Claire 163–4

Marsh, Richard, The Beetle 107–15, 127n.79 Matlock, Jann 109 Maturin, Charles, Melmoth the Wanderer 35–7, 100 Mercer, Mick 161, 169, 173, 178, 188–9, 195–6 Mercier, Louis-Sebastien 28, 29 Merrick, Joseph 20, 88, 115–25, 121, 122 Merveilleuses 26, 44 Michisaw, Kim Ian 41 Mighall, Robert 4, 9, 15, 17, 160, 162–3, 164, 168, 193–5 Miles, Robert 9, 29 Millennium 20, 159, 162–3, 164, 188 Miller, Karl 129 Miss Congeniality 152 Mission, The 191, 198n.32 Moers, Ellen 44n.1, 82, 91, 97, 104 moral management 20, 47, 60–73, 121 Morrison, Patricia see Sisters of Mercy, The Morrison, Toni, Beloved 15 Murphy, Peter see Bauhaus Never Been Kissed 182 New Woman 87, 109, 112 Nordau, Max, Degeneration 101–2, 103, 107 Oldman, Gary 103 Oliver Twist (film by David Lean) 120; see also Dickens, Charles Ophelia 63, 64, 65 Page, Carol 167 Paine, Thomas 7, 38, 41, 43, 52, 53 Rights of Man 34–5 Perrault, Charles 76 Placebo (rock band) 189 plastic surgery 77–8 Plath, Sylvia 129 Poe, Edgar Allan 129 ‘William Wilson’ 128 Polhemus, Ted 169, 178, 187, 189 Polidorijohn, The Vampyre 96–7’, 100, 103

INDEX

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Pollack, Julius 74–5, 75, 79–80 Pre-Raphaelites 78; see also Hughes, Arthur; Siddal, Elizabeth Pretty in Pink 181, 182 Price, Vincent 165 Punk 159, 162, 165, 167, 170, 177, 184, 189 Punter, David 105 Pykett, Lyn 55, 66–7 Radcliffe, Ann 4, 38, 46, 58, 202 The Italian 41–2, 43 The Mysteries of Udolpho 6, 16, 18, 39, 43, 184 The Romance of the Forest 39 Ramsland, Katherine 167, 188 Ranee, Nicholas 76 ready-made clothing 47 Rebecca (film by Alfred Hitchcock) 135; see also du Maurier, Daphne Reynolds, G. M. W. 107 Ribeiro, Aileen 25, 26, 44n.10 Rice, Anne 159, 160, 167, 179, 181, 196 Vampire Chronicles 173–5 Rich, Adrienne 133 Richardson, Samuel, Pamela 79 Riviere, Joan 155 Robespierre, Maximilien de 26, 44 Romanticism 3, 9, 73, 173, 191 Rosenberg, John D. 54 Rothfield, Lawrence 111 Roversi, Paolo 196 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 16, 32, 34, 43 Emile 28–31 Ruskin, John 56 Ryder, Winona 181, 184 Sade, Donatien Alphonse Francois, the Marquis de 28 Sales, Roger 95 Sand, George 108, 109 Savage, Jon 171 Schroeder, Barbet see Single White Female Scream 182 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Between Men 132–4, 156, 180

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The Coherence of Gothic Conventions 1, 2, 5, 6, 9–11, 13–14, 20, 43, 56, 58, 90, 118, 130, 131, 163, 167, 192, 200, 202 Sensation novel 14, 47, 55, 75, 82, 127n.29 Shelley, Mary 9 Frankenstein 11, 50, 81, 90, 118, 128, 168 She’s All That 152, 182 Shining, The 192 Showalter, Elaine 60, 61, 63, 64, 73 Shuttleworth, Sally 47, 54–5, 58 Siddal, Elizabeth 108 Silence of the Lambs, The 9, 11 Sims, David 189, 190 Single White Female 131, 132, 133, 149–56 Siouxsie and the Banshees 162, 171, 178 Sisters of Mercy, The 162, 169, 171– 2, 175–6, 178, 198n.32, 199n.58 Sixteen Candles 181 Sleepy Hollow 184 Small, Helen 63 Smiles, Samuel 78 Smirnoff 186, 188 Smith, Robert see Cure, The Sontag, Susan 8–9 Springsteen, Bruce 170 Star Trek 165, 181 Steele, Valerie 16, 25, 26 Stevenson, Robert Louis 129 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 5, 9, 87, 102, 116–17, 128, 145 Stoker, Bram 196 Dracula 4, 102, 104, 105–6, 112, 172, 189, 195 The Mystery of the Sea 107 Street Style (V&A exhibition) 172–3 Summers, Montague 194 sumptuary laws 74 Tanner, Tony 56 Taylor, Jenny Bourne 47, 60, 79 Tennant, Emma

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INDEX

The Bad Sister 129, 131, 132, 133, 142–9 Queen of Stones 144 Two Women of London 129 10 Things I Hate About You 182 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The 9, 10 Thatcher, Margaret 171 Theyskens, Oliver 197 Thorne, Tony 167 Thornton, Sarah 160, 166, 172 Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas 11 Tinkler, Penny 135, 137 transvestism see cross-dressing Treves, Frederick 88, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121–4 Turner, T. 10 uncanny see Freud, Sigmund Utilitarianism 53 U2 170 vampires 1, 17, 96–7, 102–3, 147, 148, 166–7, 172, 173–5, 178–9, 186–7, 188, 192, 195 Vanian, Dave see Damned, The Varma, Devendra 194 Varney the Vampire 172 Veblen, Thorstein 56, 111 Vicious, Sid 178

Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth 25, 31, 32, 33 Vincent 165 Vogue 148 Vox (magazine) 167, 178, 189 Walkowitz, Judith 111–12 Walpole, Horace 17, 96, 98, 99, 100 The Castle of Otranto 1, 8 Warwick, Alexandra and Cavallaro, Dani 5–6, 12, 14, 59, 124 wedding dress 65, 66 Weeks, Jeffrey 95 Wells, H. G., The Invisible Man 6 Wilde, Oscar 91, 93, 94, 100, 101, 106 The Picture of Dorian Gray 5, 9, 87, 91,100–1, 102–7, 115, 116–17, 128 Willett, C. and Cunnington, Phillis 24 Winship, Janice 131, 151 Winslow, Forbes 78 witchcraft 183–4 Witherspoon, Reese 182 Wollstonecraft, Mary 52, 53 Rights of Men 34–5 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 30, 34, 37 women’s magazines 20, 130–1, 134–6 Zdatny, Steven 109