Dissertation

THE GOTHIC CONFESSIONAL: LANGUAGE AND SUBJECTIVITY IN THE GOTHIC NOVEL, \VILLETTE,\ AND \BLEAK HOUSE\ (BRONTE; DICKENS)

TOFANELLI, JOHN L

1987

Overview

In this dissertation I examine the representation of confessional performances in novels belonging to the Gothic tradition. I begin with a consideration of that familiar Gothic locus of dread and fascination, the Roman Catholic confessional. Making use of Michel Foucault's thesis that confessional procedures have been, in Post-Reformation Western culture, a pervasive means of constituting the identity of individuals and inscribing them within a system of power relationships, I show how the first Gothic novelists--in their depiction of the mysteries of the confessional--are, in fact, exploring the mysteries of personal identity and its origins in discourse. Confessional narratives, throughout the Gothic tradition, are shown to be generated, inhabited, and haunted by a conflict that can never be resolved or even definitively mapped out: the confessant's aspirations towards \"clearness of experience and expression\" are forever engaged in a struggle with the confining and mystifying powers of a frighteningly extensive and seemingly archaic \"verbal-ideological\" order. In early, classically Gothic, works (such as Ann Radcliffe's The Italian and Charles R. Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer) that order takes the form of a tyrannical Roman Catholic Church; in later works, blending Gothic and realist traditions (such as Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Charles Dicken's Bleak House, that order is shown to be culture itself (whose relationship to the individual is pictured in essentially Freudian terms). If all of our experience is, as Bakhtin has claimed, situated within, and mediated by, a \"verbal-ideological\" environment made up of words already spoken, then we might say that novelists in the Gothic tradition are characteristically distrustful of this environment. One source of this distrust can be located in a traditional imperative of Protestant hermeneutics: the individual is obligated to question and to struggle against all forces that might impede the clarity of vision needed to articulate the story of the self. While the Gothic distrust of linguistic and narrative constructs may be rooted in a traditional religious past, it also anticipates the epistemological scepticism of modern movements in interpretive theory, such as Freudianism and deconstruction.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: British & Irish literature / British and Irish literature
• ISBN: 9798207046327