The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800 (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

REVIEWS 553 EJ. Clery. The Rise ofSupernatural Fiction, 1762-1800. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xii + 222pp. ISBN 0-521-453 16-X. E.J. Clery's book on supernatural fiction is not primarily a rereading of Gothic classics (though it does include substantial readings of Walpole and Radcliffe) or an attempt to open up the canon (though it does make reference to a number of neglected authors). Instead, it sets out to describe the historical circumstances that made a new kind of fiction possible. In Clery's materialist account, the sensational success of Gothic fiction depended on "a fundamental chiasmus": "if eighteenth-century Britain saw the growing commercialisation of spirits, it also saw a spiritualisation of commerce" (p. 7). The new laissez-faire economics of Mandeville and Smith postulated occult entities, uncannily if providentially at work, transforming private vices into public benefits; Smith's "invisible hand" is only the most famous of the examples Clery cites (p. 9). This ideological climate, Clery argues, brought about "a change in the very nature of superstition" (p. 17): "the 'real' supernatural" (p. 18), in which ghosts were adduced as evidence of the truths of religion, gave way to "the 'spectacular' supernatural" (p. 24), in which they were exploited for profit. The "spectacular" had begun to infect the "real" as early as the 1680s, when the publisher of Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus refused to reprint the work unless more ghost stories were added to boost sales (p. 23); the results allegedly were to inspire the young M.G. Lewis. Clery picks up the story in 1762, two years before the publication of The Castle of Otranto, with the case of the Cock Lane ghost, whose reality was investigated, with disappointing results, by Samuel Johnson; but whose spectacularity was exploited, more satisfactorily, at both Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Next, Clery traces two complementary developments. In the first, the new, naturalistic acting of Garrick, at its most striking in Shakespeare's ghost scenes, created a "taste for supernatural terror" (p. 49) by teaching the audience to enjoy the vicarious experience of fear. By staging "the supersession of the ghost as an autonomous object, and its internalisation by the expressive sensorium of the perceiving actor" (p. 42), he initiated a shift in emphasis, away from the public spectacle and towards the internal, individual response, a shift which contributed to "the projection of an atomised modem subject" (p. 36). In the second development, the new discourse of the sublime freed the novel from its old didactic (and "realistic") responsibilities and conferred on it the autonomy of the aesthetic object (pp. 64-65). The consumer and commodity were ready for each other. Clery's capsule histories of the circulating libraries (pp. 87-88, 96-99) and of the Minerva Press (pp. 135-37) show how the market responded. Clery's account is not only historicist in itself but attends to the historicism of the eighteenth century. The Castle ofOtranto was acceptable when first presented as a relic of the Italian Counter-Reformation (p. 53); when revealed as the work of a modem Englishman, it caused a scandal comparable to that of 77ie Fable of the Bees (p. 62). Radcliffe's "explained supernatural," by contrast, conformed to the contemporary notion of historical progress, from medieval superstition to Enlightenment rationalism (pp. 1078 ). The many coincidences Radcliffe needed in order to explain the supernatural away could be ascribed to the invisible hand of Providence (p. 113). Clery does not neglect the gender issues that have traditionally been important to criticism of the Gothic, but subordinates them rigorously to the materialist thesis, through the "linking of female sexuality with the eighteenth-century consumer revolution" (p. 101). Proponents of the new commerce celebrated it as "an innocent, gentle, civilising 554 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:4 pastime, linked to the faculties of sensibility and sociability and typically gendered 'feminine '"; opponents denounced the resulting "disaccumulation of wealtfi" as "actively, virulenüy emasculating" (p. 102). Gothic fiction addressed Ulis gender anxiety through "the legitimating discourse of the sublime," which offered "to cleanse tiie reading subject (constructed as masculine) of the effects of a luxurious society" (p. 105). Clery subordinates gender to economics...