Gothic Imagination: Gothic Identities

This is the second in a series of talks I delivered as part of my undergraduate art history module Gothic Imagination. The script has been edited for publication here. As published, Gothic Imagination consists of five talks, accompanied by select presentation slides; slide images have been compressed and animations have been removed.

The talks were designed to be presented in the following sequence. Seminars, being unscripted and interactive, have been omitted.

1. Gothic Associations
   • Seminar—Heritage, Heresy and the Canon
2. Gothic Identities
   • Seminar—Politics, Terror and the Other
3. Gothic Bodies
   • Seminar—Science, Creation and the Unnatural
4. Gothic Landscapes
   • Seminar—Nature, Catastrophe and the Sublime
5. Gothic Visions
   • Seminar—Civilisation, Ruin and the Haunted

Gothic Imagination: Gothic Identities

We began our excursion into the “gothic”—the word, the phenomenon, and our associations with it—by considering its boundaries and examining the uses of the term beyond architecture and literature—that is, beyond definitions of a style, movement, and genre.

We are approaching the gothic as a mode, as an attitude and a way of looking at the world that is not confined to any particular period in history—say, the Romantic period—but that is nonetheless responding to and reflective of particular historical developments. In other words, the modally gothic is continually present, but it is not ahistorical.

In response to an invitation to Treacherous Territories, a series of film screenings I staged a few years ago, the School of Art received an email from a postgraduate. It reads: “I doubt that I’ll be able to make any of these, but what a delicious feast! Great idea.  Have lots of spine-chilling, escapist fun.”

Now, the word I would take issue with here is … what? “Escapist.” As I hope to convince you, the “gothic” is not a way of getting away from what troubles us. It is a way of confronting our anxieties, of looking at what others might not want to face. It responds to moments and currents of history, and it picks up on political sea changes and cultural mood swings.

Popular entertainments that may be considered gothic enable us to process crises: wars, revolutions, panics and pandemics.

Not all nightmares are private. Nightmares can be collective experiences. An undercurrent at times, the gothic mode comes to the fore with a vengeance whenever crises occur that are experienced by a sizeable section of society.

The gothic mode can be—and is—reactivated, or reanimated, galvanised like Frankenstein’s creature whenever it is most urgently needed. As the Marquis de Sade, to whom we owe the term Sadism, remarked some 225 years ago. The Gothic [meaning, Gothic literature] “is assuredly not without merit: ’twas the inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered.”

Rather than being “escapist,” the gothic imagination gives voice to fear. Even in Paris during the Reign of Terror, where the horrors of the Revolution were in plain sight, the public exposed themselves to horror shows of the imagination. Bloodcurdling melodrama, the Grand Guignol, and pre-cinematic spectacles were invented during the French Revolution.

In the Phantasmagoria staged by Etienne-Gaspard Robert, for instance, the severed head of the French Revolutionary Danton, adapted from his death mask, emerged from the fumes rising from his casket. The head then faded away and transformed into a skull. Sure, this is claptrap. It is spectacle. But the spectre of the revolution was real, giving expression to real anxieties.

In a gallery talk with the painter-printmaker Marcelle Hanselaar, I referred to some of her prints las “gothic.” I did the same in the exhibition catalogue. I did not mean to say that the scenes of violent conflict that Hanselaar depicts are “gothic” or that “horror” is gothic. Rather, the fact that Hanselaar feels compelled to image them is “gothic.”

Hanselaar was not at the scene of violence. Like most of us, she is confronted with newspaper headlines or listens to news on the radio. And then she is alone with the images that the headlines imprint on her mind.

When I was a child, I overheard my parents talking about some crackpot who had predicted the end of the world. That very night. I did not know it was a hoax. I went to bed thinking it was the last night of my life. I don’t mean to psychoanalyse myself, but being alone, terrorized, changed my outlook on life. It was an existential crisis. It made me question everything I see or hear. It made me draw on my doubts and anxieties, and a distrust in authorities. It formed my identity.

And that is what we are exploring here today: gothic identities, notions of self, otherness, and intersectionality—the debates surrounding ethnicity, gender, and class. Might the word “gothic” apply when other words fail us, bearing in mind that “gothic”itself is a term that raises doubts.

“Gothic Identities”—there are books devoted to the subject—have been explored in studies like these. But such texts are still mainly focussed on literature or literary criticism rather than visual culture.

By the way, this lack of disciplinary interfacing, and the lack of attention that is being paid by literary scholars to the visual gothic may be the result of – or perhaps even account for—the poor reproduction of William Blake’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s Richard III on the cover of The Gothic Other (2004).

While a mode transcends time, we nonetheless need to consider the societal and political contexts in which the gothic manifests, evolves and renews itself. From where does it draw its blood? How does it feed itself? And why does it keep coming back for more? Without context, we reduce the potency of “gothic” to trivia.

“Trivia,” if I may quote myself, “is knowledge we refuse the potential to matter.” Nothing is trivial unless we neglect it, unless someone declares it to be negligible or ineligible for inclusion in our histories.

And the gothic has long been ignored, dismissed or marginalised, certainly academically, partly because it does not represent the supposed “best” or “highest” a culture—or a people—has produced. It raises doubts about progress narratives. It questions hierarchies, established ways of classification, of “fine” art and “good” taste.

It is no coincidence that interest in the gothic was revived in the late twentieth-century and by postmodernists in particular. Modes of deconstructing, of questioning binary oppositions, of black-and-white thinking, of challenging traditions, all that—along with the anxieties that those strategies provoke—the gothic shares with postmodernism.

As I said, gothic literature has been derided as culturally inferior and dubious. The fact that much of it—at least during the height of the Gothic as a literary genre—was written by and for women may have something to do with that refusal to accord it critical attention.

What we now might classify as “visual gothic” again, bearing in mind that the term “gothic” was not used to classify such works at the time when they were created—has likewise been dismissed as inferior.  Fuseli, for instance, was ridiculed for violating classical proportions. And yet, he was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1799. Five years later, he became Keeper of the Academy. Bear in mind, then, that Fuseli painted The Nightmare (1781) nearly two decades before his professorial appointment.

It takes a like-minded, perhaps gothic-minded, artist like William Blake to come to Fuseli’s defense: “You think Fuseli is not a Great Painter? I’m Glad! This is one of the best compliments he ever had,” William Blake declared in his Notebook (c. 1809). As a result of this perceived lack of greatness, works of art and literature that violate classic or neoclassical ideals have long been left out of the canon—a term I used in the title of our first seminar.

These works may be old.  But they are not “classic.” The establishment argued them to be in “poor” taste. They violate “good” taste. That is, they present us with an alternative aesthetic. They also present an alternative vision—a different way of looking at the world.

Why do works like Fuseli’s Nightmare, which exists in several versions, continue to resonate with us? Even though the artist’s nightmare was a personal one, as we shall explore in another session, the Nightmare has been appropriated again and again to express public anxieties.

The print on the right was produced only a few years after Fuseli’s Nightmare captured the public imagination, and it is one of dozens of adaptations, that, to this day, draw on Fuseli’s composition for social and political commentary.

As a popular phenomenon, the gothic clearly resonated with the public—especially the reading public in late eighteenth-century Britain. Meaning so much to so many, it must have given expression to the zeitgeist—the spirit of an age and of successive generations.

The gothic is exploitative. But what is it that it exploits? What is it in us that is ripe for gothic exploitation? Rather than being ‘escapist,’ the gothic offers an outlet for us to explore our fears and desires. The gothic in literature and visual culture serves as a reminder of what ails or troubles us—as individuals and as a society.

Let us look again at the first set of five works of visual culture I asked you to compare and relate. Using chronology as a guide, we can divide them into two contemporaneous groups.

Three of those works were created roughly in the same time period, an age we now label Romantic. All three of them were produced in Britain by artists—all of them Members of the Royal Academy of Arts—who identified as Protestant.

All three artists, in terms of their personal identity, may have experienced a sense of crisis or at least hybridity. Fuseli, an ordained Zwinglian minister, came to England from Switzerland.

Loutherbourg, the son of a Polish miniature maker, came from Strasbourg, a French city on the German border. He moved to London in 1771 and first made his mark in theatre design rather than the fine arts. By the time, however, he produced this painting here, he had been a Royal Academician for about a decade.

Richard Cosway was English, but his wife, the artist Maria Cosway, was an Italian-born Catholic. So, Fuseli and Loutherbourg were foreigners, and Cosway was married to one.

Apart from the artist’s own sense of self, works like these also address or encode the identity of the British people. They reflect widely shared attitudes towards Catholicism in Britain at the time: anxiety, fear and suspicion manifesting in various ways, be it hostility, ridicule or, as in Loutherbourg’s painting, conflicting emotions. And they were all exhibited in a visual gothic context as part of Gothic Nightmares.

Now, let’s fast forward to the Postmodern. Like Loutherbourg, Cosway, and Fuseli before them, Serrano and Cattelan are contemporaries.

Both identify as Catholic and express attitudes towards Catholicism that are ambiguous or that appear to conflict with their expressed intentions.

Regardless of those stated intentions, the works of both artists elicited—and continue to elicit—violent, hostile responses from the public as well as from influencers and policy makers.

Whether or not church and state are separate entities, religion is always political. Religion plays a key role in the formation—and re-formation—of national identity. 

Horace Walpole, the son of a prime minister and himself a politician, embraced and emulated the medieval Gothic. For his gothicized villa, Strawberry Hill, Walpole had copied for him elements of Gothic architecture. And yet he was violently opposed to the religion associated with that architecture: Catholicism.

Walpole, as his father before him, was a Whig, an opponent of the Tories. The Whigs had been important players in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. They were key to the abolishment of absolute monarchy in Britain. They were enemies of the House of Stuart who were Roman Catholic.

The Whigs gained control of the government in 1715, the year of the failed Jacobite rising, which was an attempt to get a Catholic king back on the throne. The so-called “Whig Supremacy” remained unchallenged until King George III came to the throne in 1760.

For a Whig like Horace Walpole, what Vasari had called “barbarism”—Gothic architecture—became associated with the politics of anti-absolutism that was argued to have its roots in ancient Germanic general assemblies.

Anti-Catholic sentiment in Britain escalated in 1780. The Gordon Riots, in which about three hundred of the forty to sixty thousand anti-Catholic protesters were killed—many shot dead by the military—took place just about the time when the Gothic novel emerged as a popular literary genre.

During the two decades following the publication Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764 the genre had developed only slowly. The literary Gothic gained momentum and was at its height during the 1790s and into the 1820s in response to other political developments in Europe.

Even though Gothic tales were often set in a bygone, mostly imaginary southern Europe, they expressed the anxieties of the British in light of the developments of national and international politics of their present day.

Like the previous caricature, Un petit souper (published 20 Sept. 1792) is by James Gillray, who specialized in chronicling the horrors and terrors of his age. By making anxieties visual—and concrete—he turned terror into horror. That is, he made lingering fears concrete, and he did so with dark humour and an irreverence protected by law: caricature.

Like many artists and writers in Britain, Gillray had welcomed the outbreak of the Revolution in France as a break with absolutism. But, also like many of his contemporaries, he was shocked by the Reign of Terror.

The Revolution was at its most violent in September 1792, and this caricature by Gillray is a response to the news from abroad. It shows a perversion of the hope of constitutional monarchy—the democratization of government in France.

The Whig party had by that time not only become the opposition but, to many, the enemy. The Whigs sought to reach peace with France. The politician Edmund Burke—who famously theorised on the Sublime—wrote a pamphlet arguing against peace with revolutionary king-killers.

Gillray represents Burke’s nightmare vision of French soldiers marching up St James’s Street in London. This is a mad scene. Pandemonium. The Royal palace is in flames. Royal princes are hurled from a balcony.  The Whig leader Charles James Fox, whose followers were called Foxites, is flogging the Prime Minister, William Pitt, at a Liberty tree – an American symbol of defiance against British rule.  It is a nightmare vision of England and English politics infiltrated by French revolutionary ideas.

The image contains a great deal more information and commentary; but the political references would take us longer than this talk to recover. What is important to note is that none of this happened. It was a dark vision of what might happen. Call it propaganda. Call it exploitative. The anxieties expressed in it were real.

There are many other works by caricaturists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, George Cruikshank among them, that could be—and have been—associated with the “gothic.” These performances are violent, irreverent, sensationalistic—all terms you could use to describe political caricatures. Might the word “gothic” serve as an umbrella term to capture all of that?

Martin Myrone, the curator of Gothic Nightmares, thinks so. He not only defended the inclusion of such prints in the exhibition but also the project of drawing those caricatures—and the gothic mode—from the margins into a major exhibition space:

“Gothic tendencies” in visual culture, Myrone argues, “represent a suppressed dimension of British culture, more true and vital than the legitimately ordained heritage.  Our present sense of communal cultural identity […] tend[s] to emphasise the quaint and restrained, and dismiss—as the Anti-Jacobins did in the 1790s—the excessive, violent, abstract or visionary as vile and foreign.”

According to Myrone, “it is not just a matter of bringing some extra works into a canon of the legitimate, but accepting that our own standards of taste might be tested and extended to encompass kinds of visual production which were deliberately popular, sensational, exploitational.”

What is the relationship of the gothic to the spirit of revolution? In her study The Gothic Imagination (1982), Linda Bayer-Berenbaum argues that “Gothicism allies itself with revolutionary movements because it cannot tolerate any restriction of the individual.” The “Gothic mind is free to invade the realms of the socially forbidden.”

This is not what is operative in the caricatures I showed you. They express a fear of revolution, which is also communicated in Gillray’s painting Voltaire Instructing the Infant Jacobinism (c. 1800). It is a preparatory study for an illustration to the “Ode to Jacobinism,” an anonymous poem first issued in The Anti-Jacobin, a conservative magazine that rejected revolutions and denounced reformers, including anti-slavery activists.

Gillray’s works were featured in the journal. Here, too, “revolutionary democracy”—and any support for or teachings of it—is vilified and shown to be abhorrent. Conservatives and revolutionaries alike can be gothic. It is not the position artists take that makes their works gothic—it is the fact that the works tap into the anxieties experienced at the time. The ideals of the Enlightenment were put to the test—and reason, rational thinking and behaviour were shown to be under threat or argued to have failed.

Visual artists whose works give voice to anxieties about national identity frequently reference works of the literary Gothic. The Modern Frankenstein, for instance, depicts Horace Greeley, the editor of The New York Tribune and a well-known abolitionist to suggest that he, or his politics, had created a monster, and that he was horrified by what he has wrought.

This work on the right by the cartoonist Henry Louis Stephens comments on the uprising of black power during the Civil War—that is, before liberty was granted to the enslaved. The person the creature hurls into the air is Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Mary Shelley’s Gothic story of a modern Prometheus was being appropriated, or misappropriated, for the expression of opposing views on US American identity.

To this day, the United States is haunted by the spectre of slavery, lynching and segregation, the legacies of which are often explored in terms that—like the reference to Frankenstein—can be traced or at least related to the literary Gothic.

The evolution and application of the Frankenstein myth as metaphor is explored in this book by Elizabeth Young, which aims to “show how the black Frankenstein metaphor affirms, and at the same time challenges, structures of race and masculinity in US culture.”

Here are two eighteenth and nineteenth-century British responses to slavery by William Blake and J. M. W. Turner. Both offer support for the abolitionist movement. And while neither of them references the literary Gothic, both may be read as gothic performances.

Turner’s Slave Ship (1840) was ridiculed at the time for its excesses and its unrealistic depiction of the slave trade, which had been officially abolished in the British empire in 1833 but was still going on and still legal in the United States when Turner painted The Slave Ship.

Turner references an historic event that occurred sixty years earlier. Slaves were considered cargo. Their loss at sea, according to the so-called jettison clause, was covered by insurance. So, a sick body, which would not fetch any money on the market, would be more valuable if lost.

Perhaps, a work that is received as being both “sublime” and “ridiculous” may be reasonably termed “gothic”—an over-the-top, emotionally charged, melodramatic performance.

A painter associated with mood swings, whom you may recall from my Looking into Landscape lecture on Romanticism is Thomas Cole, whose hybrid identity as an English-born US American resulted in anxieties not only about the ruination of the US American countryside but also about the mistreatment of the native population and the threat of extinction they faced as a result of the US Government’s “Indian Removal Act,” which was signed into law in 1830.

Was Cole’s view a minority view? To what extent might such views—the insistence on looking at the dark side of society—have been marginalized because they do not serve the progress narrative or the political agenda propagated at the time?

One of Thomas Cole’s paintings made it onto the cover of a book that sets out to explore the “Gothic Imagination” in nineteenth-century USA. The author, Sarah Burns, recovers works of visual culture from that period, works that did not make it into traditional histories, works that do not fit art historical narratives.

In literary studies, it became difficult to ignore the Gothic because it was a genre. In art produced after the medieval period and outside the gothic revival, the gothic as an alternative aesthetic, a phenomenon or world view was marginalised further. By applying the term ‘gothic’ to works of visual culture produced in the United States, Burns readies those marginalised works for academic discussion. And that is what I aim to do here.

What Burns calls the “dark side” conflicts with the Enlightenment. That is one reason, as I suggested earlier, that the gothic resurfaced in the Postmodern era, in which assumptions about norms and hierarchies were contested, as were the binaries of the either/or operative in distinctions, for instance, between high and low culture. The progress narratives of modernism were questioned just as the gothic/Gothic of the late eighteenth century, responding to revolutions and mob violence, had thrown the grand narrative of the enlightenment into doubt.

Postmodern art at the end of the twentieth century reflected on the horrors and terrors—the anxieties—of the day, from AIDS to the Millennium bug. The exhibition Gothic, staged in 1997, was the first show devoted to an exploration of the visual gothic in contemporary art In the catalogue, literary scholar Anne Williams declared: “Certainly Gothic conventions have had remarkable staying power, which implies that their re-apparances, their continual rebirth in various guises, reveals something constant—and anxiety-provoking—in Anglo-American culture of the past two centuries.”

Also on display at the Gothic exhibition was a sculpture by the Chapman brothers that references an etching by Goya from the Disasters of War, a series of prints that inspired Marcelle Hanselaar’s Crying Game, which I mentioned earlier. The stated objective of the Chapman brothers was to provoke moral panic—a strong reaction against behaviours that deviate from the norms and values of society and that causes us to question the moral fabric of society and what Hanselaar refers to as the “Remnants of Civilisation.”

Some of the same artists whose works were featured in the Gothic exhibition had also been part of the groundbreaking and notorious 1993 Whitney Biennial, an exhibition that drew attention to unresolved tensions that defined contemporary American society— attitudes toward ethnicity and gender, the sexually private and its relation to public health. It was a show that showcased anxieties and foregrounded identity politics to demonstrate that American society was in a state of crisis brought on by multiculturalism, or, rather, by policies addressing that reality and advocating for its socio-economic potentialities.

Not long afterwards, a new terror struck the West—and, once again, the gothic was evoked. The limits of reason—and of civilization—were being tested. 9/11 was a sublime event as Edmund Burke understood the term in the eighteenth century and as the Romantics employed it response to the horrors of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror.

Image and video footage showing the falling tower was reproduced over and over again. But images such as That Line of Darkness/Falling Man (2001) by Richard Drew were soon taken out of circulation and long suppressed. Here is a moment of suspension between life and death. A moment based on an impossible decision you could not possibly call a choice: not whether to live or die, because that was not an option, but whether to be killed or commit suicide.

Again, the gothic spectre was evoked: “The Gothic has never really left; one hell was replaced by another,” art critic Jerry Saltz declared in “Modern Gothic,” an article published in the Village Voice on 27 January 2004.

“[S]ociety itself has changed markedly since the World Trade Center towers were destroyed,” Kyle William Bishop wrote less than a decade later in American Zombie Gothic (2010). “Scenes depicting deserted metropolitan streets, abandoned human corpses, and gangs of lawless vigilantes have become more common than ever, appearing on the nightly news as often as on the movie screen.” According to Bishop, the “conventions of Gothic fiction in general and zombie cinema in particular make the subgenre the most likely and appropriate vehicle with which to explore America’s post–9/11 cultural consciousness […]..”

As Michael J. Lewis wrote in the context of the Gothic Revival in architecture and design, the “Gothic always stood for ideas larger than itself.” In the “broadest view,” he argues, “it is the “story of Western civilization’s confrontation with modernity.”

New crises, new fears arise, and we need to find ways of confronting them, dealing with them, processing them. The question remains: is “gothic” the word for objects and creative pracitices that encourage or force us to do just that? I would not be giving this talk if it were just about the definition of “gothic.” Nor would I be talking “gothic” if I were entirely convinced about its applications and applicability in such diverse contexts.

This series continues with Gothic Bodies.