Alison Milbank’s thoughtful, well-informed book suggests a longer lineage to the Gothic tradition in British literature than traditional accounts which date its inception from the Enlightenment. Rather than seeing it as originating as a counter to rational Dissent and Deism, she argues that the peculiar iconoclasticism of the Reformation in Britain created a consequent sense of loss of the mediating religious practices and structures provided by the Roman Catholic Church. Just as she sees in Anglican ecclesiology an emerging critique and appropriation of a past deliberately despoiled and ruined, so she sees Gothic fiction not so much as a negative expression of the spiritual fears of subsequent eras but as seeking to remedy the loss of mediating religious practices and structures by performing its own theological work. For her the Gothic tradition is no mere aesthetic substitute for vague religiosity but a space that not only permits but historically has actively encouraged theological reflection and creation.
Envisioning Gothic fiction as a mode of religious historiography makes for an extensive canon in which the poetry and drama of Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton play their part and Dante’s influence abounds. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, with its evocation of victims of Roman Catholic persecution, who would become Protestantism’s historic and eschatological victors, is seen as providing the prototypes of Gothic heroines. While the normal suspects such as Horace Walpole, ‘Monk’ Lewis, Anne Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, James Hogg, Emily Brontë, Le Fanu and Bram Stoker are duly rounded up, Milbank’s approach also allows space for less well-known contributors to the genre such as J. Meade Faulkner, Arthur Machen and Evelyn Underhill. An Epilogue claims that the work is ongoing in popular twenty-first century novels by authors such as James Robertson and Sarah Perry.
This scope, in terms of the primary literature included, should not be taken to suggest a broad brush approach. Instead Milbank is sensitive at every stage to contemporary political and philosophical nuance, whether in terms of the Whig/Tory debate about the nature of the true heir to the Glorious Revolution, or her carefully delineated approach to the different emphases Protestantism presented in England, Scotland and Ireland. The absence of Welsh fiction is understandable and if it was this which caused the subtitle to refer to the ‘English Literary Tradition’ that is a pity because Milbank’s account of the markedly different ways in which Scottish and Irish ecclesiastical wars played out in Gothic fiction is admirable and rare enough even these days in accounts of ‘British literature’. The case she makes for the Gothic double’s prominence in Scottish literature is both convincing and helpful. Milbank argues that this feature derives from Calvinism’s insistence that only God can save, thus human effort is unavailing, while also urging the constant work of self-examination or looking for signs of being one of the elect, thus splitting consciousness into a constant struggle between being one of the elect and eternally reprobate. Milbank’s view of the Reformation as necessarily a work in progress in Ireland, rather than a completed process, works well for her three chosen authors, Maturin, Le Fanu and Stoker, each from a Church of Ireland background, but historically impelled to investigate the way in which the blood of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice for humanity at large was being appropriated as part of a nationalist discourse.
If I have a quarrel with Milbank’s overall thesis it stems from her tendency to present a somewhat idealized version of the Anglican church as inherently ecumenical and inclusive, seeking even from early days to find a middle way between the extremes of Reformed and Catholic Christianity. By the time she reaches the nineteenth century her theological road map therefore features Coleridge, Tractarianism and F.D. Maurice. While Newman’s eventual abandonment of the search for the via media in favour of embracing Roman Catholicism is given due space, the numerous secessions to various forms of dissent which took place among those equally keen to retrieve the apostolic purity of the early church go unmentioned. Numerically speaking the Calvinist wing of the Anglican Church exercised considerable power in the mid-nineteenth century as is attested by a series of court cases which were in danger of jeopardizing the very spiritual authority upon which the Oxford Movement had posited the Church of England’s claims. The impetus for nineteenth-century novelists such as the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, to use fiction as a means of exploring alternative routes for discovering the transcendent stemmed in large part from despair at the unholy mess that clerical infighting threatened. Nineteenth-century women’s use of the Gothic, like their twentieth-century counterparts’ use of magic realism, is often an expression of their despondent recognition of the impossibility of remedying matters through natural processes.
In her Epilogue Milbank notes the tendency of twenty-first Gothic fiction to operate as a critique of organized religion ‘not for its adherence to doctrine so much as for stuffy respectability and a failure to believe its own truths’ (p. 309). I wonder whether doctrine does not play a stronger part in the discontent with institutional religion felt by many who would describe themselves as in search of the spiritual. Nowadays the fragility of the Anglican compromise and the fractures in its worldwide communion are perhaps the only facet of the Church of England known to a generation often unfamiliar with the consolation offered by its mediating religious practices and structures.
However, my rather gloomier reading of the impulse behind the theological turn in Gothic fiction should not in any way detract from the very real merits of this book, which demonstrates a fine attention to close reading of the primary texts and an impressive acquaintance with the considerable secondary literature which has accumulated in the academic field of Gothic writing.
