Shapes half-hid : psychological realisation in the English and American Gothic novel.

This study explores the paradox that the delineation of mind, the dominant concern of the English and American Gothic novel, is both obscured and revealed through its method of presentation. The mind of the character is filtered through every defining feature of the Gothic novel: the focus on terror, the presence of the supernatural, complex plots, narrative structure, symbolic incidents and a landscape distanced from everyday existence; it is consummately expressed in spectral shapes of uncertain reality. The apparitions that haunt these novels--what Mrs. Radcliffe calls "the dubious forms that float, half veiled in darkness"--are both expressions of the characters’ minds and images for the strategies implemented to depict them. The result is a resourceful attempt to render the processes of the individual imagination, to make real the protagonist’s psyche.

Rehearsing problems of definition, I suggest that the Gothic novel is a natural concomitant of the eighteenth century’s philosophical interest in the workings of the human mind. The Gothic novel’s fascination with terror stems from Burke’s theory that terror produces "the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling." Terror provides a way of examining the psyche under a metaphysical microscope.

Every Gothic novel presents an ambiguously charged conflict based on Clarissa. Otranto introduces the supernatural and the role of settings to convey emotion. Using representative works, I show how the mind of the protagonist is revealed--how the monster, the most explicit of Frankenstein’s phenomenological selves, is one of the ghosts glimpsed in Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels, viewed up close--how Falkland and Caleb in Caleb Williams are each the half-hidden shape of the other--how in Wieland, Carwin is the phantasmal embodiment of Clara’s madness. My final chapter discusses the transfiguration of the Gothic in Jane Evre and The Scarlet Letter, illustrating that while Jane Eyre’s phantoms are fleshed out, Hawthorne’s protagonists become physically attenuated.