The last twenty years have seen a virtual explosion of critical and popular interest
in all things Gothic. This interest, which shows no signs of abating, extends far
beyond the conventional Anglo-American literary canon and has generated an increased
awareness of the Gothic impulse in other cultures. Scandinavian Gothic, however, remains
relatively unexplored and vaguely defined, and Danish Gothic has been entirely neglected. Given its predilection for realism, Scandinavia has arguably not had a very strong
tradition of what are usually seen as fantasy modes, Gothic often being located by
readers somewhere in this non-realist spectrum. However, a closer look and a clear
sense of how this infamously malleable genre works reveals an ongoing negotiation
of Gothic conventions by Danish writers, deftly employing the genre to comment on
the crucial interface between “the real” and the artificially constructed. From its
inception, Gothic has been envisioned
as the ultimate transgression of boundaries between reality and illusion, depth and
surface, originality and imitation—binaries which typically set off adjoining conflicts
between reason and emotion, life and death, sanity and pathology, mind and body, self
and other. These conventional conflicts serve, often in the most shocking ways, to
frame a vehement testing of concepts of identity and self-formation, an exploration
that is not at all removed from “reality.”
While Gothic is a rather obscure genre in the context of Scandinavian studies, it
has evolved with accelerated force in the Anglo-American literary world since the
publication of the first self-proclaimed Gothic novel in 1764/1765, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. The subsequent transformations of the genre, which was already varied in its tumultuous
1764-1824 heyday, from Romantic to Victorian Gothic, from fin-de-siècle to Post-Modern
Gothic, are reflected in the trajectory of what we might conveniently label “Danish
Gothic,” a genre represented by a number of texts.
Of B.S. Ingemann’s tales from 1820 to 1850, only his Gothic rewriting of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s
“Der Goldne Topf” [“The Golden Pot”] (1814) “Sphinxen” [The Sphinx] (1820) is anthologized
today and none has been translated.
The lesser known “Moster Maria” [Auntie Maria] (1820), “Varulven” [“The Werewolf”]
(1835), “Niels Dragon” (1847), “Glasskabet” [The Glass Cabinet] (1847), “Det Tilmurede
Værelse” [The Bricked-Up Room] (1847), and “Skole-Kammeraterne” [The School Mates]
(1850) also draw heavily on Gothic romances, echoing Ingemann’s own early Gothic
ballads, and maintaining a dialectic between suspenseful terror and graphic horror,
a rather surprising mode to work in for this national icon of benevolent Christianity.
H.C. Andersen may seem a controversial choice in this context: “Skyggen” [“The Shadow”]
(1847) is a perfect example of his late romantic management of what smells like a
Gothic tale of duplicitous doubles. Instead, it is his last tale, “Tante Tandpine”
[“Auntie Toothache”] (1872) which most clearly articulates the gruesomeness latent
in many of his narratives,
not least “De Røde Sko” [“The Red Shoes”] (1845). Andersen mirrors a Victorian Gothic
in his late Biedermeier tale of societal
and psychological forces encroaching upon the freedom of the artist, also a dominant
theme in Karen Blixen’s tales.
Given its more appropriate English title, Blixen’s 1935 Syv Fantastiske Fortællinger—her 1934 Seven Gothic Tales published under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen—has been examined, albeit sparsely, in
the light of this Anglo-American tradition, which the market-savvy Blixen avoided
for the Danish publication in order to address what she rightly assumed was a more
familiar tradition to the German-influenced Danes (Jacobsen 163). The often neglected ghost story “Et Familieselskab i Helsingør” [“The Supper at
Elsinore”] relies on a sophisticated matrix of Gothic conventions, while “Drømmerne”
[“The Dreamers”], “Syndfloden over Norderney” [“The Deluge at Norderney”] and “Aben”
[“The Monkey”] participate more indirectly and parodically in the genre. “Karyatiderne”
[“The Caryatids”] and “En Herregårdshistorie” [“A Country Tale”] from Sidste Fortællinger (1958) [Last Tales 1957] return to a classic Gothic mode, detailing the tyranny of the past. Published
under
another pseudonym, Pierre Andrézel, her 1944 paranoia extravaganza Gengældelsens Veje (1960) [The Angelic Avengers] (1946) is perhaps the only case of pure Gothic in Danish literature, comprising
both
a sincere female Bildungsroman and a tongue-in-cheek parody of the genre.
Blixen’s parodic homage to Gothic conventions has been cleverly parodied by Peter
Høeg in his postmodern bricolage tales, which resemble the architecturally incongruent
haunted house in his “Forholdsregler mod alderdommen” [Precautions against Old Age]
constructed from choice bits and pieces from past traditions. This tale as well as
“Medlidenhed med børnene i Vaden By” [“Pity for the Children of Vaden Town”] and “Fortælling
om et ægteskab” [“Story of a Marriage”] from Fortællinger om Natten (1990) [Tales of the Night 1998] all play elegant tricks with Gothic conventions, while the nightmarish schoolhouse
Gothic De Måske Egnede (1993) [Borderliners 1994] rearticulates the generically mandatory questioning of the rationality, progress
and degree of civilization in enlightened modernity.
What then do these texts, spanning almost two centuries, have in common in order for
the argument to be made that they participate in the same literary tradition? The
intertwined questions of inclusion and definition are hotly contested in the critical
debate, particularly as the Gothic phenomenon has grown ubiquitous in recent years,
infecting other genres and media to the point where the term seems both reduced and
broadened to a certain eerie ambiance and threatening darkness or slightly better,
a group of settings, atmospheres, character patterns and stylistic idiosyncrasies
that work together as a representation of the darker side of life: of death, decay,
evil, perversion, pathologies, unsanctioned desires, sensory disorientation, the supernatural,
the abject and the monstrous. An extreme counter-narrative, Gothic has since the eighteenth
century consistently shadowed normative ideals of self, society and literature, while
continually destabilizing established boundaries between legitimate literary forms
and trivial entertainment. Once a discourse at the dark margins of culture, Gothic
is currently hailed as a subversive cultural force by critics from multiple theoretical
positions, which share a focus on the repressive mechanisms and marginalization processes
at play in Gothic fiction as well as in its reception history, bound up with middle
class consumption patterns—and often rightly so. However, there is a sense now that
Gothic, due to its own inherent tensions, both formal and ideological, can be mobilized
to meet any given cultural or critical need. To establish a viable Danish Gothic tradition
requires a rethinking of what Gothic is, or rather, how it works, in order to go beyond
mechanically descriptive conclusions of exemplarity leading to identification, or
a too-inclusive model, which neglects the very characteristics of the genre for the
purpose of discovering, or even forcing, an underlying psychological, political or
religious meaning in its supposed depths. A logical place to begin is in the extensive
repetition of recognizable conventions, a rather interesting paradox for such a mobile
genre. How exactly do these conventions work?
Gothic is a “literature of terror,” as David Punter has named it. The central fear
revolves around transgressions of
the individual’s physical and psychological integrity, undertaken by both characters
and setting. The conventional inter-human relation consists of a pattern of flight
and pursuit, usually embodied in variations on the persecuted maiden and the tyrannical
villain, threatening to violate all established boundaries. Usually forgotten is the
fact that the relation of pursued and pursuer, often informed by a sexually tinged
paranoia, can be rather ambiguous, suggesting the reversible dynamics and role-play
found in sadomasochism, and displaying not a Manichean binary of inherent good vs.
evil, but rather a case of monstrous properties spreading through contagion. In Gengældelsens Veje, the previously persecuted maiden cries out: “Eller ogsaa … betyder det, at det er os, der jager dem! Og at vi ikke slipper dem, før de er døde!”
(1960 169), or in Blixen’s own translation: “The tables have turned and now we are
chasing them. The canary birds are out of their
cage, and on their track. And they will never leave the blood-trail till they have
hunted them down, till they are dead” (1946 200). The avenging victims become relentless pursuers after prolonged exposure to evil,
gradually alienated from themselves through a transmission of qualities. Høeg’s De Måske Egnede repeats the pattern in the most violently physical manner, while Ingemanns’s Arnold,
continually on the run in “Sphinxen,” must ask whether he or his double is a murderer.
These narratives explore doublings
between the victims on the one hand, in such pairs as close friends or siblings, and
their shadowing victimizer on the other, as is also seen in numerous tales by Poe,
Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions (1824). The collapse of distinctions between self and other, subject and object,
has informed the genre since its inception.
Contributing to the key Gothic fear of encroachment upon one’s personal and political
autonomy is the scene of this dramatic struggle: usually an old castle, either literally
or metaphorically haunted, but always dark and spine-chilling. The haunted castle
has become the defining convention of the genre. Usually envisaged as an antiquated
and dilapidated space of repression and confinement, it takes many different architectural
forms, which are often convoluted and darks. Replacing the the underground vaults
and torture chambers of eighteenth-century feudal castles are convents, old farm houses,
schools, parsonages, crumbling ancestral mansions and constricting mid-nineteenth-century
living rooms. Ingemann, Andersen, Blixen and Høeg cover a wide range of suddenly threatening
spaces, as spectres of a repressed past resurface along with disturbing family secrets,
and ideological and psychological conflicts. These real or imagined threats to the
self are often acted out in a way that makes the house itself seem alive—blurring
the boundaries between imagination and pathology in “Sphinxen” and “Tante Tandpine,”
subtly playing on age-old notions of sympathy in “Et Familieselskab” (echoing Poe’s
“House of Usher”), blatantly exploiting the shock effects the genre so easily affords
in Gengældelsens Veje in “det Morderhus, der lukkede sig om dem til alle sider” [the house of murder, which
closed around them on all sides] (1960 161; 1946 188) and creating a paranoia-inducing
panopticon through modern surveillance technology
in Høeg’s De Måske Egnede. Through defamiliarization and dark inversion, subject and object coincide; the everyday
world in the house as home is rendered disturbing and strange, while the uncanny becomes
commonplace. Gothic personal identity is about this bewildering reorientation of the
self in the world.
To make sense of the confounding visceral imagery and primal human relations, critics
have often resorted to psychoanalysis, itself arguably a Gothic narrative. Through
the psychoanalytical approach, scholarly validity and formal coherence have with increasing
sophistication been conferred upon this once academically marginal, but commercially
popular literary form. However, while Gothic is clearly expressive of fears, anxieties,
and complex psychological issues, reading it only as a Freudian allegory, as about
something else located in its convoluted depths, tends to dismiss its most striking
characteristic—that it is “a writing of excess,” in Fred Botting’s famous words, and
that its primary mechanisms take place on the
surface, as the props, stagy settings, and thrilling effects threaten to appropriate
the narrative (Botting 1995 1, Sedgwick 1981 255-56, Spooner 2006 25). Not only is this important in the context of identifying a distinct Danish Gothic
tradition and what exactly makes these texts seem so alien against the drab background
of Scandinavian realism; it is also an obvious but neglected aspect of Gothic fiction
in general, although fully present in it since Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). This inaugural text contains all the central elements of Gothic fiction:
the haunted castle, the persecution of various innocents though dark, labyrinthine
passages, the dysfunctional family and the related theme of rightful inheritance,
as well as a general atmosphere of depravity and violence. In order to get to “the
meaning” of this campy narrative, its equally central elements are often dismissed:
its melodramatic
extravagances of plot, histrionic gestures, hyperbolic rhetorical style, and stagy
effects such as portraits and statues that come alive as giant pieces of armour drop
from the sky. This highly visual theatricality set the tone for the genre. Andersen’s
images of actually and potentially severed limbs in “De Røde Sko” and “Tante Tandpine”
show a delight in the physical shock, an affinity shared by Ingemann, who relies
on prop-heavy effects such as closet doors opening, skeletons bursting out of their
concealment, the dead returning from the grave, bloody knives found in haunted castles,
mysterious visions and revealing portraits. Høeg’s predilection for mirrors is anticipated
by their use as one of Ingemann’s props. Blixen, too, has her fair share of ghosts
and skulls, albeit framed more existentially as a futile peeling away of layers in
search of a human core.
Added to these Gothic effects are veils, cloaks, cowls, curtains and other means of
concealment and dramatic revelation. These are often employed to heighten the suspense
of the customary revelation when the veil is lifted to reveal true familial identity,
a dominant theme in Gothic romances. The motif is found in some variations in Blixen’s
Gengældelsens Veje and “Et Familieselskab,” while it is doubled in the veiled trompe l’oeil portrait
of the veiled, ghostly mother
in Ingemann’s “Sphinxen” (1820 67). Many of Høeg’s
Fortællinger om natten revolve around disguises and shocking revelations of true identity or the collapse
of the distinction between public and private stages at curtain call. As the genre
was shaped by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis in the 1790s, the effect afforded by
veils and veil-like constructions snowballed into a more existential questioning of
what defines human identity: how art fashions nature, how surfaces shape self and
text (Sedgwick 1981 255-58, Kilgour 130). It is my argument that Danish Gothic texts
in particular, toning down more traditionally
terrifying Gothic conventions, draw attention to these surface effects. It is almost
as if they are propelled by a
horror vacui which fills a fundamental emptiness with decadent artifice and convoluted ornamentation
on the levels of both plot and narration. This is of course the very foundation of
Blixen’s oeuvre but Ingemann, Andersen and Høeg, too, contribute to this shaking of
the foundations of “reality,” which is described as a devouring and “føleligt vakuum” [a
palpable vacuum] in Høeg’s “Spejlbillede af en ung mand i balance” [“Reflection of
a Young Man in Balance”] (1990 282; 1998 276). The empty repetition
en abyme of Arnold’s imagined reflection of himself in Ingemann’s “Sphinxen”—literally a nobody
as indicated by his repeated question “hvem er jeg?” [who am I?]—is connected across
the centuries to Høeg’s tale.
Det øjeblik vi betragter verden, begynder den at forandre sig. Og vi selv med den.
At se på virkeligheden er ikke at begribe en struktur. Det er at underkaste sig og
at indlede en uoverskuelig forvandling … Jeg så et spejl. Derefter uendelig mange spejle der spejlede hinandens tomhed...
En verden der er en illusion … en verden der ikke eksisterer, men drømmes af et væsen, der heller ikke eksisterer.
(1990 281-82)
As soon as we lay eyes on the world it starts to change. And we with it. Viewing reality
does not mean making sense of a setup. It means surrendering oneself and triggering
an unfathomable transformation … I saw a mirror. Then an infinite number of mirrors reflecting each other’s emptiness
… A world which does not exist, but is dreamt up by a creature which in turn does not
exist. (1998 276)
While this narrative is not exactly Gothic, its ontology does inform many of
the Danish tales by adding a literal level of circularity in the reciprocal process
of creation between the mirror and its creator—in which does agency lie? And what
sort of orientation in the world is the result of this illusory self under “uoverskuelig
forvandlin” [unfathomable transformation] governed by this fragmenting aesthetics
of surface in the depthless image?
Many critics, notably Robert Miles, argue that Gothic narratives, often set on the
cusp between an older age and a new world, delineate and condense the anxieties of
transitional times. The great theme of Romanticism is the loss of the Golden Age,
the mythological childhood, from which man has fallen. This is perhaps why Gothic
comes to Denmark some fifty years after its inception in England: the Gothic theme
of the end of innocence, and of personal and cultural unity, articulates perfectly
the quandaries of the new human being emerging in the Romantic age. Thus, Ingemann
and Andersen, and Blixen taking this age for her own, confront the daunting task of
defining a new self severed from previous frameworks—a project which continues to
govern the post-romantic consciousness. In many of their narratives, the lost unity
and still haunting presence of the past are conveyed in recurring images of falling,
of fragmentation, isolation, disorientation, drowning, being buried alive or devoured
by various monstrous beings. It seems that the Gothic idea of a family curse is widened
to encompass the family of man, doomed to fall and fail, as illustrated in Satania
Infernalis’s biblical imagery of the original fall in “Tante Tandpine,” and the constant
disoriented falling of Arnold, who “som Adam efter Faldet,” [like Adam after the Fall]
(my translation, as also below) is left “udenfor sit Paradiis som Tilskuer” [outside
his Paradise as a spectator] separated from a previously known, clearly defined reality,
and expected to create
his own (46). In the “broader Gothic notion of personal identity … life begins with a blank,” as Sedgwick puts it (1981 261). Identity is not discovered
within or from an identifiable point of origin, but must
be found or constructed.
Rather than a blank slate signalling freedom of invention, childhood is far from a
golden age of pre-lapsarian bliss in Gothic narratives, which for their effect rely
on the construction of the personal and cultural past as sites of terror. Andersen
and Ingemann are both heavily inspired by the works of German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann,
and it is of course Hoffmann’s childhood nightmare “Der Sandmann” (1817) that provided
the foundation for Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” [“The Uncanny”] (1919), a work immensely
influential on Gothic criticism. While we want to go beyond
the psychoanalytical model, which dismisses the Gothic imagery of the surface to analyze
a supposedly individual, originary self buried beneath, what is useful in this context
is the dissolution of classical notions of a stable, unified subject, albeit divided
only into a three-part model rather than the fragmented, polyvalent Gothic subject.
Equally important is the location of the source of terror in the home, the family,
everyday life, through the key concept of the “return of the repressed.” What has
been repressed, on both personal and cultural levels, inevitably comes back
to haunt the subject in unfamiliar—yet familiar—shapes and disguises: homely yet othered,
propelling the subject into an epistemological crisis when this defamiliarization
renders everything uncertain and uninterpretable, including the self and the family
as extension of self, while this ambivalence is exacerbated by the confusion of who
exactly lurks behind the veil, curtain or locked door, hidden from their supposed
origins. The uncanny is associated specifically with the dynamics in the family in
Freud’s analysis, and Gothic fiction is riddled with confusing familial relations:
Blixen’s tales are characterized by a complete absence of conventional nuclear families,
while Ingemann, Andersen and Høeg describe orphans and broken homes. Most of their
protagonists deal with painful losses and interruptions in the maturation process
towards becoming a complete being, so that a “true” identity must be continually negotiated.
Relations are either too close or too distant,
pointing through theatrical exaggeration to the unnatural roles everyone plays: in
Gothic fiction, “individual identity … is social and relational rather than original or private” (Sedgwick 1980 255). Gothic
highlights the process of self formation that takes place through the relation
to the other as a site of self-making and at the same time, uncannily, a source of
self-division.
The sundering dialectic of attraction and repulsion, desire and prohibition, inherent
in the family constellation, drives the plots in “Et Familieselskab” and “Tante Tandpine.”
Informing a Byronically torn Zerissenheit, it is fatal in the “circulus vitiosus” [vicious
circle] of the three siblings in “Et Familieselskab” (Blixen 253; Dinesen 268), and
entirely demonized in “Tandpine” in the odd, sexually tense relationship between the
artist and his maternal aunt,
at times indistinguishable from her monstrous form of Satania Infernalis. The Auntie/Satania
character testifies to the simultaneous nurturing and destructive aspect of the claustrophobic
family unit, as the maternal aunt ruins his health materially by dissolving his teeth
into a dark absence, and her nightly form threatens to further chip away at the already
impotent student with her dentist tool hand. The bourgeois living room, the privileged
site of Danish culture and mentality during and since the age of Biedermeier, is transformed
into the obscure torture chamber of classic Gothic, no longer a refuge but synonymous
with the very threatening forces it was constructed to keep at bay. In Gengældelsens Veje, the living room in the farmhouse, cursed by a crime committed during the Revolution,
is the scene for the spectacular Liebestod of the Pennhallows, self-proclaimed parental
figures turned Gothic villains. Høeg’s “Fortælling om et Ægteskab” and Blixen’s “Familieselskab”
also both have the past return to haunt the living room in the form of a curse, combining
“a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in
space” for the special Gothic impression of “a sickening descent into disintegration”
(Baldick xix). Reliving a complex love-hate relationship with strong incestuous undercurrents,
Blixen’s two spinsters conjure up their long-dead brother in a dark living room facing
Hamlet’s Kronborg, another dramatic stage for the proto-typical Gothic ghost story
of dysfunctional, even murderous familial relations. Høeg’s couple is doomed to enact
a happy version of their sadistic marriage in their living room as both private space
and stage for an audience looking in when the curtain is drawn. A Gothic convention
is thus used to break down the boundaries between inside and outside, surface and
content. Cloaking familiar images of domesticity in Gothic forms does not disguise
but rather discloses what is already strange, in these cases the assumption of the
stability of the Freudian bourgeois self, which relies for its formation on the introverted
constellation of the nuclear family as it emerged in the early nineteenth century
and on the reconciliation of the predatory relations within this unit, required for
the production of a healthy social order.
While Radcliffean terror and Lewisian horror are associated with more physical threats
to the self, the epistemologically confounding uncanny erupts when things are inexplicably
the same and different. Unstable familial relations dissolve the identifying masks
that distinguish one person from another in the established roles that uphold individual,
family and society. When one person wears several masks, particularly in the texts
that deal with doubles, incestuous relations or malicious parental figures, it results
in a profound identity crisis for the protagonist. “Sphinxen,” “Moster Maria,” “Altertavlen,”
“Tandpine,” “Karyatiderne,” “Et Familieselskab,” Gengældelsens Veje and De Måske Egnede all represent this collapse of identity referents. While in some texts this uncanny
conjoining of identity and alterity only propels further trauma, in others, such as
“Familieselskab” and “Karyatiderne” it is sought out as an attempted merger with doubles,
siblings, ghosts or other projected
or mirrored selves, both identical and different, to bypass the problematic relation
between self and other and become, with the least amount of resistance, “other than
oneself,” yet “more completely oneself” (Miyoshi 11).
Still charting this easy transition from liberating autonomy of the mind to alienating
solipsism, yet other Gothic narratives describe this merger as attempted with an actual
Other. This generates many sensational effects when characters dress to assume other
identities. A simple disguise transforms Kasparsen, the actor, into the murdered Cardinal
in Blixen’s “Norderney,” and the foul-mouthed assistant into the eloquent but deceased
Monsieur Andress in
Høeg’s take on “Norderney,” “Vaden By.” Both of these metamorphoses frame the identity
crises of the adolescent protagonists,
Høeg’s Kristoffer and Blixen’s Calypso, as the world around them comes to an apocalyptic
end. Likewise, in the gender-confused Gengældelsens Veje, the Pennhallows, he “en gammel Dame i Herreklæder” [an old lady in men’s clothing] and she “hans kone en gammel Mand i Dametøj” [his wife an old man in ladies wear] (Andrézel
1960 84), both dress up easily in the clothes of their two captive girls. Zosine’s outburst, “Vi lever ikke mere,” [We are no longer alive] at the realization
of the masquerade indicates the instant and complete obliteration
of their identities, in the same way that Monsieur Andress and the Cardinal have been
done away with by their imitators in voracious, violent take-overs (1960 201; 1946
240). The threatening atmosphere of sexual depravity and sadomasochistic dynamics
in Gothic
often stems from a fundamental doubt that there can be a relation which is not based
on the complete domination, even destruction, of the self or the Other, defamiliarizing
by exaggeration the closeness of “normal” human relationships required by modern society.
As an example, Mrs. Pennhallow, self-effacing appendix to her brother-husband, seems
to be always devouring her foster daughter Lucan with her piercing gaze. Zosine describes
it graphically: “Naar Fru Pennhallow sluger dig saadan med sine runde, graa øjne,
prøver hun at suge
noget af din Skønhed over fra dit Ansigt til sit eget” [Perhaps, when our old foster-mother
cannot take her eyes off you, she is trying to
draw [literally ‘suck’] the beauty from your face into her own] (1960 84; 1946 98). The Gothic trope of ocular vampirism and piercing gazes is often associated with
demonic villains such as Godwin’s Falkland, Hogg’s Gil-Martin, Stoker’s Dracula, and
du Maurier’s Svengali. However, “et Ægtepar, der lever meget lykkeligt sammen ... kommer til at ligne hinanden,” [a married couple who live very happily together ... end up looking alike] and so through contagion, Mrs. Pennhallow, described as “en
tør og træt gammel Herre” [a stale and tired old gentleman] becomes equally the Gothic
villain that her brother-husband is (1960 84). Her attempt to assume Lucan’s identity
by merely looking at her shows that external
aspects in this universe constitute identity to a much greater extent than interior
qualities, and so in the economy of Gothic identity, the formation of both femininity
and masculinity are tied to the mechanics of appearance. At the same time, this penetrating,
devouring gaze, which characterizes other figures as well, notably Fanny in “Et Familieselskab,”
also shows a frequent drive towards interiority, as if to transcend the limits of
the body to test this ontology of surface.
The same tension between the recognition of exteriority and the urge for plenitude,
authentic meaning and genuine self-expression, which Spooner identifies with Gothic’s
twin impulse in Romanticism, governs today’s most prominent form of the Gothic Weltanschauung
in postmodern Goth subculture (Spooner 2006 28). The modern Goth strand of Gothic
is usually dismissed by critics as unreflective
cookie-cutter non-conformism, which does not subvert any established political paradigms.
That may be, but such argumentation shows a misunderstanding of how the Gothic sensibility
works: the meaning is not behind the clichés or elaborate costumes but in their coded
forms, as one recognizable prop conjures up an entire framework of identity and one
costume articulates the subject, in its role as victim or victimizer. Literary Gothic
and the subculture that has emerged from it share a hyper-visual, theatrical nature,
an obsession with stylized selves that are deliberately clichéd and one-dimensional,
created from an existential awareness of a fundamental nothingness at the core, as
I have mentioned, by means of elaborate artifice, convoluted ornamentation, and patchwork
referencing. For both text and body as scripted and inscripted surfaces, this means
a continual deferring of the gaze from penetrating the surface to find true depth
in the quest for wholeness at the centre of the Gothic drive.
The lack of depth apparent in Gothic bodies and selves seems only to provoke a continual,
violent testing of the validity of the surface (Spooner 2004 10). There is an obvious
connection, beyond the obsession with transience and decaying
materiality, from early Gothic’s interrogation of bodily boundaries, in the form of
rape, incest, violence, torture, and sadomasochistic relations, to the more visual
self-inflicted violation and submission of the pierced, perforated and penetrated
body in the aesthetic of Goth chic. For Ingemann and Andersen, such testing of the
perimeters of the body is shaped as a series of physical transformations, from the
magical animalistic style of their fantastic narratives and fairy tales, to complete
disintegration in the Gothic mode, as they populate their stories with werewolves,
the living dead, ghosts, corpses, trolls, monstrous and fragmented bodies that morph
into other unstable shapes, later echoed in Blixen’s playful “Aben.” Less romantic in spirit are the blank white skulls that are the supposed core of
the self in her “Den gamle vandrende ridder” [“The Old Chevalier”] and “Et Familieselskab,”
akin to Ingemann’s defleshed corpses in “Skole-Kammeraterne.” Horrifyingly physical
are the naked, tortured, degraded bodies in De Måske Egnede, and Rosa’s self-mutilation in Gengældelsens Veje as she brands her own skin, penetrating and devaluing that surface before anyone
else can. “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,” unstable, manipulable and negotiable like its extension, clothing, our
second skin,
and acquiring the suppleness of a text (Spooner 2004 9-10). This general instability
means that skin, clothes and other surfaces, rendered sites
of transgression, cease to divide inside from outside, self from other, in an unnatural
and uncanny collapse of distinctions (Halberstam 7). If skin, as the ultimate boundary
and surface of the self, is supposed to house
the body, it becomes another haunted castle, no longer protecting or shielding the
self: “One need not be a chamber to be haunted,” as Emily Dickinson envisaged it in
her famous “Poem 670.”
Gothic narratives “turn bodies and minds inside out in their search for monstrosities”
(Halberstam 72). In “Et Familieselskab,” the exterior of the monstrous, unnatural
spinster, Fanny, displays “en uhyggelig lille Vanførhed” [an uncanny little disfigurement]
(1961 227; 1934 238) and “et frygteligt grumt Næb” [a terrible, cruel beak] (1961
237; 1934 250), adding to her self-identification as an old scarecrow (1961 242;
1934 265). However, although she leads a schizoid existence she resists a simple inner-outer
dualism, which would produce a deep-structured subjectivity: “Som [de gamle Grenaderer]
iførte hendes Sjæl sig den gamle Uniform. Fra dette øjeblik
af var det kun for et Syns Skyld, og for Spøg, at hun tog sig ud som en gammel Dame” [Her
soul [like the French troops] donned the old uniform. It was for the benefit of
the onlookers only … that she was dressed up in the body of an old woman] (1961 242; 1934 265). The fact
that her body is described elsewhere as a coffin (1961 254; 1934 269), and here as
a garment, incongruent with her self, would indicate a true self hiding
beneath, but her innermost core is yet another surface, dressed up in another gender.
The simple dualisms of the Freudian surface-depth model implies something predictable
to be interpreted under the surface in the depths that are supposed to be the locus
of the original, individual self, but Fanny’s example is far from unique in indicating
that the “authentic” selves supposedly concealed underneath the multiplicity of masks,
disguises and garments,
both literal and metaphorical, are simply not there. The continual oscillation between
Auntie Toothache and Satania Infernalis, not to mention Blixen’s Aunt Cathinka and
her monkey in “Aben,” attest to this friction of surfaces: can we really determine
who is disguised or
contained under the skin of whom? Is it clear which is inner and which is outer being?
The multiformed ego in continual flux is perhaps demonstrated best in Blixen’s elusive
Pellegrina, in whom one might say that “disguise becomes equivalent to self” rendering
“subjectivity a surface effect,” patterns identified by Halberstam in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray (64). When the sensational Gothic veil is dramatically rent, it often discloses
only another
illusion: there is no human core or essence revealed after Pellegrina’s fall, nothing
anchoring the continual chain of metamorphoses by this ghostly cipher told by others,
voiding the question of self-realization. The narratives in which the most important
characters turn out to be actually absent, their bodies dissolved into decorporealized
ghosts, such as “Et Familieselskab,” “Forholdsregler” and De Måske Egnede, underline the lack of authentic presence behind the continuum of effects. Surface
attributes are transferable, “contagious metonymically,” as Sedgwick has established
(1981 255). “Simultaneously, contagion flattens or empties out that which is inside
or within,
transforming it to one more link in the signifying chain” (Spooner 2004 7), which
renders the question of agency complex. The uncannily manly Carlotta in “Vejene omkring
Pisa” and Mrs. Pennhallow in Gengældelsens Veje instantly re-gender and seemingly humanize themselves by donning women’s sartorial
props, demonstrating this transmission of qualities from clothing to body. Andersen
demonizes this process in Satania Infernalis, as the disembodied matchstick figure
drawn child-like as “Noget, der skal ligne et Menneske” [something that is supposed
to look like a person], reminiscent of Andersen’s famous paper cuttings as a mere
outline based on empty
spaces, has gendered identity conferred upon her by her clothing: “et Slags Kjoletøi,
meget tyndt, meget fiint, men det viste, at den hørte til Hunkjønnet” [a sort of gown,
very thin, but this showed that the figure was female] (2004 418). Likewise, Ingemann’s
confused orphan Arnold is suddenly rendered regal, made into
a somebody, by the metonymical crown and sceptre, reflected en abyme in the mirror construction, foreshadowing the process of instant transformation run
amok in Andersen’s “De Røde Sko,” in which the accessory ends up articulating the
captive subject.
The tension between agency and determinism in the dissolution of the interior / exterior
binary points to Judith Butler’s discussion of the production of effects of self.
Where identity according to Butler is produced by non-voluntarist reiteration, Gothic
identity is formed instantly and precariously, through contagion, by proximity or
touch. The hyper-theatrical exterior focus in Gothic—and Goth—on performance, show,
costume, disguise, drag and stylization identifies through exaggeration and defamiliarization
the staged and highly unnatural nature of gender and self as a chain of performative
citations and quotes, “a persistent impersonation that passes as the real” (Butler
viii). Often as well, Gothic, torn between progressive explorations of transgression
and
conservative punishments of deviation from a norm that is reinstated at the end of
the narrative, identifies the structural features of the societal forms masked as
“reality” which shape the context for its figurations of identity within the constraints
of
the discursively given. Through repetition of conventions, inversion, supernatural
distortion, and deliberate confusion, Gothic reveals gender and gendered identity
to be “a free-floating artifice,” an act “that is open to splittings, self-parody,
self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions
of ‘the natural’ that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic
status” (Butler 6 and 146-47).
The fragmentation of self on multiple levels in Gothic is a response to bourgeois
models of identity, calling into question the concept of “Dannelse” which is so extremely
important in a Danish context. “Dannelse” is the linear progress of a unique, innate
self, which grows into a sense of organic
unity between self and world, through exercise of restraint and education—education
in the sense of developing and extracting innate qualities in a transition from inside
to outside. While some Gothic texts can be seen as darker versions of the normative
“Dannelsesroman,” in the education-themed Gengældelsens Veje and De Måske Egnede most obviously, Gothic usually inverts the idea of the desirable unity into fragmentation:
both novels figure ghosts as attempts to escape the structural and artificial confines
of selfhood superimposed by a rigidly authoritarian educational system. Generally,
“normal” human relationships are critiqued by being pushed to destructive extremes,
growth
is replaced by disintegration, linear identity by a bricolage of disguises and quotes.
Further underlining identity as fiction and the consequently profound scepticism regarding
the originality, agency and unity of the self is the constant referencing and rehearsal
of already written scripts by Gothic writers and characters. The themes of storytelling
and writing are crucial to all four Danish writers in question, and the vast quantity
of writer-protagonists in these and in Romantic Fantastic and Gothic texts in general
is, of course, not coincidental, engaged as they are in writing their way to a firmer
grasp of self and reality. What begins as potential artistic and personal freedom
in the age of Romanticism turns into a questioning of creativity and originality,
as we also see in the artistic Bildungs-narrative of Aladdin vs. Noureddin, omnipresent
in Danish literature since Oehlenschläger. Protagonists resort to artifice, imitation,
performative role-play and unlimited quotation in the attempt to construct a complete,
conformist self, but they are then unable to distinguish between self and other: Blixen’s
characters often confuse themselves with fictional figures, and Ingemann’s Arnold
thinks he is Hoffmann’s Anselmus in “Der Goldne Topf,” not knowing whether he is writing
his story or it is writing him. Texts of the past,
sometimes even the present, become another force encroaching upon, even annihilating
the self, as happens for the student in “Tante Tandpine” and the sisters in “Et Familieselskab.”
The multiple quotes and references, even in early Gothic, demonstrate with a strong
metafictional charge that texts as well as selves are imitative, relational constructs
which can only refer to yet other constructs, and not to an essential meaning. The
Chinese box structure of illusions within illusions is also manifest at the narrative
level, which Blixen uses in her convoluted stories-within-stories to create a textual
labyrinth reminiscent of the haunted castle she rarely creates in physical form, and
which Andersen interestingly uses in “Tandpine” to collapse the distinction between
inner and outer frames by a slip of the tongue,
again deferring the penetrating gaze that is on a quest for the real essence in the
depths of the story. “Sphinxen,” “Pulcinellen,” “Tandpine,” “Norderney,” “Et Familieselskab,”
“Drømmerne,” “Vaden By,” “Rejse ind i et mørkt hjerte” all disclose only more fictions
in a continual circuit. This is of course the nature
of all texts, but by adapting Gothic conventions of non-originality, impossible creativity,
and negative transcendence, Danish writers are able to point more clearly to the consumptive
nature of all literature and all identities, particularly as they, then, steal from
a non-Danish genre. Gothic texts are buried within and feed off each other, so as
to create a self-referential semiotic system of familiar images, conventions, recycled
and revised narrative structures, and inter-textual allusions well-known to the Gothic
reader. Such short-hand codes are another component in the formation of one-dimensional
characters created by references and ghostly signifiers, but not by an originary essence.
Frankenstein’s monster, dressed up in the bodies of multiple others, is often used
as an apt image for such consumptive texts and identities, its precarious patchwork
nature demonizing its own parasitical creation and haunted absence of identity (Kilgour
190). Detailing multiple destructive forces, Gothic is “not fantasy in need of psychoanalysis,”
but rather “a series of contemporaneously understood forms, devices, codes, figurations,
for the
expression of the fragmented subject,” and of the alterity of subjectivity (Miles
4). This is not least because the heterogeneous Gothic form in itself has a parasitical,
cannibalistic relation to other narratives, split between realism and romance and
without its own proper identity.
The endemic fakery and imitation at the heart of Gothic is particularly acute for
later writers such as Blixen and Peter Høeg, who must engage with numerous texts in
a tradition spanning more than 200 years, but even Ingemann and Andersen overtly rewrite
other texts in the nineteenth century. In addition, they usually set their anachronistic
stories in the past, playing tricks with our notion of authenticity by participating
in a genre that has been self-consciously fake from its clichéd inception in 1764,
building on false Renaissance ideas about the Middle Ages, again based on erroneous
perceptions of the historical Goths, as Jerrold Hogle has pointed out. Like the symbols
of the past it plunders, Gothic has now taken its place in a system of commodities,
its images and discourses reproduced for mass-consumerism as spooky-kitsch Halloween
decorations, its complex identities copied and renegotiated by Goths. Whether or not
that means it has been emptied of meaning is a continuing debate, but it certainly
seems that for Ingemann, Andersen, Blixen and Høeg, the articulation of identity is
not possible without the Gothic emphasis on surface, spectacle and performativity,
which is of course immensely relevant for the simulated, post-heteronormative hyper-reality
of today. The fact that there is no original Gothic, but a counterfeit concept centred
on the surface, is of course reflected in the construction of the human, or rather
post-human, in that fiction, as well as in its figuration of truth, which cannot lie
within, but—like the writing that is supposed to express it—is dressed up in excess.
Unlike realism, Gothic “calls attention to itself as costume,” as Halberstam formulates
it (61): Gothic is literature as cross-dressing, but it is precisely through its
uncanny
extravagances, supernatural events and persistent foregrounding of surfaces that we
are able to acknowledge the very real impossibility of a true reconciliation of “the
real” and the artificially constructed, originality and imitation, self and other,
into
the well-balanced, organic whole, of identity or text, that is central to the Danish
“Dannelsesprojekt” and most constructions of the Danish literary canon.