Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  The theme of female anger in the writing of Jane Austen has often been surveyed, partly in response to her remark that “Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked.” A psychologist, reading the novels, once remarked, “You know—she hated people.” 18 It is another way of putting what W. H. Auden meant:

  You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass

  In her anatomies of provincial society, and in her close attention to the relationship between economics and sexual politics, her frustration and dissatisfaction are clarified by her high comedy. One of her abiding themes is the pressure of loneliness among a group of people who are forced to inhabit a system of social relations over which they have no control; the heroines of Mansfield Park and Persuasion must learn to subdue their feelings or manage a nice reticence in the face of snobbery and greed. The individual woman cannot speak out. Anne Elliot remarks to Captain Harville in Persuasion, on the role of women, that “we certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us . . . We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.” He then raises the question of “women’s inconstancy” and argues that “all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse.” But she answers in spirited terms which somehow transcend the context in which they are placed. “Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.” With whatever velleities of regret and nuance, there is genuine indignation in these sentiments. It is aligned with the harshness and evident contempt with which Austen treats those of whom she disapproves, “which taste cannot tolerate— which ridicule will seize.”

  It should be recalled that in her first novel, the epistolary Lady Susan, she creates a commanding and brilliant woman whose articulacy and powers of persuasion are far greater than any of the stupid or faintly sanctimonious men who surround her. Jane Austen’s first extant letter, written in 1796 when she was twenty-one years old, shows that in the words of one recent biographer, Claire Tomalin, she “is clearly writing as the heroine of her own youthful story, living for herself the short period of power.” 19 All this excitement, and sense of power, would eventually be subdued. In her correspondence, particularly with her sister Cassandra, she evinces her resentment and frustration at those around her. “Caroline is not grown at all coarser than she was, nor Harriet at all more more delicate. . . . Ly Elizth for a woman of her age & situation has astonishingly little to say for herself, & . . . Miss Hatton has not much more.” A certain harshness, or hardness, of temperament is also manifest in remarks upon a Mrs. Hall giving birth to a dead child, “some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”

  After her unwilling removal to Bath, from her childhood home in Steventon, her anger seems to increase. “Another stupid party last night,” she wrote, “. . . I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreeable.” It has been suggested in this context that Austen “was schooled to keep up appearances, even if she was screaming inside her head” and that “she had deep and often painful feelings.”20 But she was trained in female reticence, which was designed to cover the springs and manifestations of anger. There is a passage in Claire Tomalin’s biography where she speculates upon the nature of Jane Austen’s silence. That silence encompassed the world of politics and of public events, the matter of women’s rights, and the nature of religion. Her silence upon the rights of women, however, is modified by her insistence “on the moral and intellectual parity of the sexes”21 which no even half-attentive reader of her novels can fail to notice. There was her own silence as a writer, too, which endured for ten years. Other biographers have described her irritability, her coldness and frustration. She once referred to herself as a “wild Beast.”

  It is important to insist upon her anger, in all of these examples, because it is one of the great resources of the English woman writer; the commonplaces about the female interest in sensibility, or in feeling, derive from this abiding experience of wrath. It is the single most significant source of inspiration and ambition. Of Charlotte Brontë and her creation Jane Eyre, for example, it has been suggested that “what horrified the Victorians was Jane’s anger” and her desire “to escape entirely from drawing rooms and patriarchal mansions.”22 “Why was I always suffering,” Jane speculates of her childhood, “always brow-beaten, always accused, forever condemned?” When she had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, with its history of male tyrants, the young Jane Eyre “had drawn parallels in silence.” The female silence here, as in other examples, is filled with exasperation and despair. When Mrs. Gaskell asked Charlotte Brontë about women in the nineteenth century, she replied that there were “evils—deep rooted in the foundation of the social system, which no efforts of ours can touch: of which we cannot complain; of which it is advisable not too often to think.” Here is the true recognition of oppression almost too deep for words. When Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, Brontë remarked that “I doubt not Mrs. Stowe had felt the iron of slavery enter into her heart, from childhood upwards.” The iron had entered Charlotte Brontë’s soul, also, and the apparently shy and self-deprecating author had been molded in the fire. Matthew Arnold, on reading Villette, surmised that the mind of its author was one “containing nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage” to which the answer can only be— and why not? She had every reason. At the beginning of Jane Eyre the narrator recalls how “my habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire.” Yet the fury still burned within her, occasionally striking fire in impulsive and vehement speech: “Forgive me! I cannot endure it—”

  The romantic genius flourished essentially in Charlotte Brontë; her anger propelled her into a sphere of consciousness where exultation and fury meet. “My soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty.” The call is always for liberty in Charlotte Brontë’s fiction—to take the iron out of the soul and fashion it into a sword. “I desired liberty,” Jane Eyre confides; “for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer.” Then she might enter the world with courage “to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.” That is why the theme of confinement runs so deeply within female writing, whether it be in the measured narratives of Jane Austen or in the insalubrious caverns of Gothic fiction. Jane Austen had adverted to the false example of books written by men, and in turn Jane Eyre remarks that “I have observed in books written by men” that marital ardour lasts only a short space. Here, again, are the pride and assertion. It is a matter of gender, since as Jane Eyre declared “women feel just as men feel . . . they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer. . . . It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.” So Emily Brontë’s Catherine, in Wuthering Heights, in her weary sickness, exclaims, “Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors . . . I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills. . . . Open the window again wide, fasten it open!”

  We may look, then, to female anger as one means of access to a new sensibility; it represents the unremitting flow of feeling or what Virginia Woolf called “the psychological sentence of the feminine gender,” marked by its musicality and its fluency of association. This female music is the reason that, three hundred years before, Aemilia Lanyer had identified the origins of her poetry in Nature rather than that of “scholars who by Art do write.” It is the technique of the Duchess of Newcastle, who wrote “so fast as I stay not so long to write my letters plain,” which suggests a natural susurrus hastening her along. Thus
the early twentieth-century novelist May Sinclair “wishes to remind us how ideas exist in a whole context of feeling and mundane activity by which they are shaped,” 23 so that the novel itself is the form perfectly complemented by the female consciousness of experience. It is what Austen meant by “the happiest delineation” of human nature in all its variability and variety. The “stream of consciousness” itself may be compared to a sentence from Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: “That’s how women see things. Everything in a sort of continuous creative stream.” When Virginia Woolf considered the nature of the female sentence, she described it as one “of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes.” Is this not also a definition of the pregnant female form? All paths seem, indirectly, to lead to the same beginning.

  Melodrama

  The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Woodcut dating from 1615

  CHAPTER 45

  Blood and Gore

  One of the delights of the English theatre has always been its morbid sensationalism, not unconnected with a fascination for the “Gothic” and the grotesque. It has a long history. We may recall Grendel’s indiscriminate slaughter in Beowulf where the scop did not spare the bloody detail, and the episode of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in which Sir Gawain slices off the head of the knight; the head, in characteristic fashion, then speaks. In both cases the emphasis is upon the physical detail of the butchery, which in the narrative of Gawain is treated with a vigour that marries comedy and grotesquerie. To laugh in the midst of horrors—it is another example of that heterogeneity, that medley of moods, which makes up the English imagination. There are moments of sensational horror in the mystery plays, and Malory never refrains from narratives of carnage.

  There are on-stage hangings in Horestes and Sir Thomas More, decapitations in Apius and Virginia and The Atheist’s Tragedy, scenes of terrible torture in Cambyses and Bussy D’Ambois. The Spanish Tragedy of Thomas Kyd has been considered by some to be the first modern English tragedy, and it is entirely appropriate that it should open with the entrance of a ghost seeking bloody revenge; in the penultimate scene Hieronimo bites out his tongue, which in a twentieth-century production was accompanied by “trickles, spurts, and finally showers of stage blood . . . in which black comedy and horror were inextricable.” 1 The predilections of actors and audiences have not changed through a period of four hundred years, particularly in that area of sensationalism where “black comedy” and “horror” meet. Is it not the first principle of English philosophy, at least according to Locke, that all knowledge derives from sensation?

  Of early English tragedy and tragi-comedy, then, the secret lies in a combined “taste for horror, a taste for rhetoric, a taste for ethical commonplace”;2 they have in turn been related to the appetite for public executions, and even to the bloody detail of the suffering Christ in the medieval mysteries. Shakespeare was not immune to the attraction of melodramatic death and violence, using various sanguinary effects in Titus Andronicus, Macbeth and King Lear. The authors of the revenge tragedies were inclined to murder and torture on a large scale, until in the end the English stage was filled with examples of gratuitous sensationalism.

  Rupert Brooke once described a play by John Webster as “full of the feverish and ghastly turmoil of a nest of maggots.” In Webster there is the striking concordance of wonderfully heightened speech and grandiloquent or melodramatic action; ghosts consort with metaphors, and there are such stage directions as “They shoot and run to him and tread upon him.” Most famously, in The Duchess of Malfi, the imprisoned duchess is surrounded by a “wild consort /Of madmen” who plague her out of her wits. In this scene she asks “Who am I?,” to be granted the reply which seems to epitomise the English tendency towards sensational disquiet. “Thou art a box of worm seed, at best, but a salvatory of green mummy: what’s this flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in: more contemptible; since ours is to preserve earth-worms . . .” She is then strangled. Her twin brother suffers from lycanthropy and imagines himself a wolf in duke’s clothing. It is a very English production. It is curious to note, however, that many such revenge tragedies are set in Italy, which is also the land of the Gothic novel; it is as if the conflation of papistry and Catholic superstition preyed upon the Protestant conscience. It returns like a guilty thing to its mother, who has grown monstrous out of her abandonment. We will also find that English ghost stories bear traces of a buried but unquiet Catholic past.

  That sensational violence was a native taste is illustrated by the delight of audiences in the crudities of English pantomime, when babies were regularly boiled in kettles or fried in pots. In a more serene context we might observe in English prose an equivalent fascination for death and decay. In John Donne the macabre and the rhetorical join together in a manner which is heavily reminiscent of Webster’s dramatic rhetoric. One of Donne’s editors remarks that his fondness for metaphor can become “grotesque,” and that he reserved “his more macabre performances for weddings.” 3 It suggests a curious aspect of the English grotesque, as if it were related to sexuality; the appetite for morbid description is related to the physicality of the body, and may be connected to sexual embarrassment or repression. It brings to mind Sir Thomas Browne’s divagations on eating, since “all this masse of fleshe that wee behold, came in at our mouths.”

  The connection of the “Gothic” with thwarted or perverse sexuality is well attested, and that is perhaps the reason why the “Gothic novel” of terror and of the supernatural became an English speciality if not exactly an English possession. Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) and Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) were two of the earliest examples of that national “craze” which was eventually satirised in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. We may include in this list Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, M. G. Lewis’s The Monk and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,or The Modern Prometheus, which in turn prepared the way for the peculiarly English institution of the “horror” film or “Hammer horror.” An authority upon the subject has concluded that, in distinction to the English version, German Gothic was “politically committed” and “critical social comment . . . was implicit and explicit in the stories.”4 German Gothic had a higher purpose, therefore, whereas the English revelled in the macabre or sensational for its own sake. The effect is similar to that of English translations of French romances; the “romance” is trimmed, and only the story or adventure remains.

  Aspects of the Gothic are to be found in all areas of the English imagination. Leigh Hunt remarked that “a man who does not contribute his quota of grim stories nowadays, seems hardly to be free of the republic of letters. He is bound to wear a death’s head as part of his insignia. If he does not frighten everybody, he is nobody.” Hunt’s contemporary Charles Lamb remarked of English pantomime that it resembled “the grotesque Gothic heads that gape, and grin, in stone around the inside of the Round Church of the Templars.”

  Gothic effects lie somewhat uneasily on the border between comedy and tragedy. This heterogeneity of effect is entirely congenial to the English imagination, which does not care to dwell upon a single emotion for very long. Gothic drama itself was advertised as “a drama of mingled nature, operatic, comical and tragical.” Havergal Brian named his masterwork The Gothic Symphony precisely because of its mixed musical nature.

  There are other suggestive associations. The Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century was largely set in an imaginary medieval civilisation, or at least one overtly Catholic in its paraphernalia. It represents once more the fear of an ancient but not forgotten past. It has a flavour of antiquarianism, therefore, in particular of the English reverence for “the imagined vitality of past ages”;5 but it also represents “a fear of historical reversion . . . of the nagging possibility that the despotisms buried by the modern age may prove to be yet
undead.”6 This may account for the popularity of Gothic fiction “within the British and Anglo-Irish middle class.”7 It is curious, too, that Anglo-Irish writers were responsible for the development of the ghost story; Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish Protestant.

  The Gothic story is characteristically set within an ancient dwelling—a castle, a monastery, a ruinated house. The English family house itself embodies the desire for privacy and individuality, for protection and defence, but it can grow sour and induce claustrophobia or fear. It can become a labyrinth, or a wilderness of corridors. Its very Englishness decides its fate, and the Gothic novel is concerned with ancient foundations and decaying structures. A leprous or clammy moisture infects its walls, manifesting a native fear or dislike of the physical body. The physiological or psychological dwelling is invaded by strange and perverse desires. Many of the greatest writers of Gothic fiction were women—among them Ann Radcliffe and the Brontë sisters—so the old house can exemplify the horrors of the patriarchal condition. In Gothic fiction, too, there are references to parchments and manuscripts which often unravel the mysteries of torture and pursuit; these fragments resemble the incomplete “Rowley” poems of Thomas Chatterton.

  Gothic literature itself is a rancid form of English antiquarianism. The picturesque ruins assembled by eighteenth-century dilettanti might be said to mimic the haunted residences of the Gothic imagination; in their proliferation across the countryside, England spawned a living or tangible Gothic. It has been noted of the Gothic melodrama upon the nineteenth-century stage that it was “deliberately archaic.”8 The resonances may go far back, indeed, in the sense that Gothic fiction also “appropriates the marvellous and supernatural from folk tales.”9 It is a constant feature of the English imagination, caught in some helpless reversion to the past.