Session 11: Writing Gothic and Treasonous

Session 11: Writing Gothic and Treasonous
Chair: Carmen Darabus

Evil Writers: The Obsessive Effect of Gothic Writing
Maria Antonia Lima
University of Évora, Portugal

To consider writing as an addictive practice, that leads to obsession and madness, is a point of view from which some gothic writers depart to reflect on the dangerous effects of the creative process, when it becomes a Faustian enterprise that exceeds all its reasonable limits. Gothic fiction involves high levels of ambivalence, which are sometimes translated by a curious similarity between hero and villain, and by a fatal attraction between victim and criminal. A possible identification between the writer and his villain is an important aspect of the ambiguity and transgressive power of gothic narratives.
The intention to give gothic fiction a high degree of reality, in order to produce  strong emotions, has always been a central motive for many gothic writers. In John Carpenter’s famous film, In the Mouth of Madness (1995), we can find an expert in fantastic literature, Sutter Can, who is able to affect the mental state of his readers by the power of his writing, a special gift that any other author, such as Lovecraft and Stephen King can possess. Jack Torrance in The Shining, Ben Mears in Salem’s Lot, Thaddeus Beaumont in The Dark Half and Paul Sheldon in Misery can be good  examples to illustrate  the obsessions and existential crisis provoked by gothic writing.
Gothic terrors can subvert and transgress social and moral values as well as any kind of aesthetic limits, but they are also paradoxically used to reaffirm those limits underlying their value. Gothic fiction can become a warning against the dangers of transgression, presenting them in their darkest and most threatening form.  However, many of the bestselling gothic novels can only produce a high level of alienation, extracting only a very superficial aesthetical pleasure from destruction. As Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose reminds us, the threat may not be a supernatural creature, but a text.

Victorian Evils and Gothic Revivalism: Narratives and Aesthetic of Human Wickedness
Sonia Ouaras
Department of English Studies of La Sorbonne-Nouvelle University (Paris III), France

I wish to engage with Victorian literature as a paradoxical artistic period regarding the conceptualization of Evil. Focusing on nineteenth century fin-de-siècle fiction, I will draw a hermeneutic path toward the acceptation of beauty as both a moral and, strangely enough, as a powerful immoral device. The emergence of a strong – though not perfectly Manichean – dichotomy in beauty offers a philosophical questioning that many charismatic Victorian authors have studied via the supernatural in fiction, as we will see mostly in the works of John Meade Falkner, and also Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and George Du Maurier. Indeed, I will refer to various literary works of the time to demonstrate how Art – i.e. painting, music, and literature through crafty mises en abyme – has this uncanny potential to corrupt the human soul instead of elevating it, contrary to what one might expect. The strangeness of Art as seen in the fin-de-siècle Gothic revival, or its das Unheimliche as Freud would define it, derives from the legacy of aesthetic forms inherited from the past and that inspired, exalted and haunted Victorian authors, who aimed at questioning – and even subverting – the Philistine codes of their time. Such was certainly the aim of Oscar Wilde, spokesman of the Decadents, in his whole work and finds its epitome in The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which he established an ‘immoral moral’ of Art.
This literary Gothic revival expends on human corruptibility and coincides with the movement of Decadence of the time, itself prodromic of the contemporary sense of a latent ending. All these themes turn our old set of values on its head where normally ugliness is devilish and beauty virtuous, so that we realize the human soul is some flexible clay, malleable in a destructive way. Hence once confronted to moral choices, aesthetic beauty, contrary to a classical metaphysic, is not necessarily a good indicator of what humans are told to aspire to: high moral standards. Although the charms of Art often prove lethal, choices are made difficult by the art of fiction that presents the aesthetics of decadence as an attractive and legitimate moral standard itself.

Rebecca West and the Treason of War
Effie Yiannopoulou
School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

What I would like to contribute to the conference on evil and human wickedness is a brief reading of the concepts of war and treason as elaborated in three texts written by Rebecca West around the middle of the twentieth century. The texts to be engaged with are her historical account of her travels to pre-World-War Two Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), her writings on the Nuremberg Nazi trials in The Meaning of Treason (1949) and analyses of war crimes in A Train of Powder (1955). In actively addressing the public spheres of European history and politics before, during and after WWII, these texts speak, on one level, of West’s untiring engagement with the evils of empire building, assassination, genocide, fascism and emerging Cold War practices. However, on a parallel level, they also reveal her strong cultural attachment to the motherland and expose the anxieties and instabilities underwriting white, English identity at this historical juncture. My aim in this paper is to investigate briefly the complex network of gender, racial and ethnic discourses that allow West to take up contradictory positions vis-à-vis the violence of war and treason. Central to my argument will be the often conflictual relationship that exists between West’s social-feminist radicalism and the ambivalent textual inscription of her racial and ethnic identifications. It is so that, in her writings, treason figures as both an asset and an evil, valorised when equated with revolutionary struggle — what all men should have in their veins in order to safeguard private and public liberties — and vilified when posing a threat to English sovereignty.