| Like an earthquake, the Revolutionary Zeitgeist of the Romantic era had an extensive but generally unseen pre-history. Once set in visible motion, however, the profound social movements of the period--the French and Industrial Revolutions--provoked all Europe into a startled awareness of fundamental philosophical, technological, and economic change. By the end of the era, revolution of all kinds had become the norm, a concept based on the frightening but compelling paradox that the road to contentment lay through upheaval. In particular, the French Revolution embodied this paradox: it swept through the Great Terror with Robespierre, who chose to purify the Revolution with blood, to bring apocalypse and paradise by annihilating the corrupt. For all its Biblical implications, the pattern set by Robespierre was essentially modern, and it led to his own destruction only after he had first sacrificed to it the lives of thousands of others.; Inevitably, perhaps, this bloody pattern was paralleled in the Gothic fiction which thrived during this age. Over and again, Gothic writers created paradoxical central characters, heroic antagonists, in effect, whose apparently boundless potential allows them to reach beyond the ordinary, and who end in horror after subjecting their environment to a miniature Terror. The creators of these antagonists, however, were themselves no demi-heroes/demi-fiends; nor were they gifted with lasting genius. Yet their erratic abilities not only separated them from the more imposing figures of their day but also linked them to their audience. Rather than being rebels without causes, they like their reader peers were sporadic rebels dragged into causes they both feared and felt at one with. The Gothic genre functioned for them and their audience as a veil obscuring harsh realities by transferring them into fantastic fiction. Thus, it became not only a mass medium but also a curious kind of insurrection, half-exploited, half-repudiated by its participants.; Matthew Lewis, a seemingly inconsequential boy, followed this pattern in The Monk, a book rampant with both sensationalism and the Revolutionary ethos. Soon after, Ann Radcliffe, conventional and middle-class, responded in The Italian to the supposed depravity of Lewis' work; however, her own novel shows just how quickly that ethos had become ingrained in the bourgeois English character. Then again, William Godwin was a radical by reputation, but his Caleb Williams defied its author's political intentions to reflect an age ambivalent toward its own desire for progress. Years later, his daughter created in Frankenstein a new and overwhelming myth. Yet Mary Shelley, mythmaker, was a reticent girl, swept into history by her heritage, her environment, and her own quiet awareness of the flaws in both. Charles Robert Maturin was an Anglican priest; his Melmoth the Wanderer is a devastating treatise on spiritual despair. And late in the era, James Hogg wrote a remarkable psychological study, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It was subsequently ignored, as much by its rustic author as by the critics.; What the Gothics seem to have sensed about their culture was its proximity to chaos, the anti-Romantic probability that apocalypse would bring damnation rather than redemption. They did not like their own intuitions, and so in their works they used a series of grim motifs as reflection and disguise: narrative sensationalism, spiritual disintegration, sexual perversion, a doppelganger effect, and overriding moral ambiguity. Through their works they fled the spectres of their age; and though they never really escaped, they signalled a shift in perception that indicated the death of old dreams and the birth of new perspectives. For better or worse, their unheralded Gothic genre signified the coming of the modern world. |
