As Lang points out, her method “involves reading these responses as texts in themselves,” which is necessarily biased by her own perspective.Like Lang, I make no claims to objectivity, but I attempt to be a thoughtful reader of others’ responses. Lang, in the article mentioned above, calls attention to a scholarly tendency toward “obfuscation”: “Conventions of referring to one’s own idiosyncratic interpretation as that of “the reader”—a convenient fiction—are normative within literary criticism, and their effects in obscuring the way interpretative differences flow from differences in the subject position, geographical location and educational training of readers are rarely remarked on.”This convention includes not only “the reader” but also “we” and any subjective judgment stated as objective fact. Felski writes that though many scholars look askance at the idea of objectivity, “these same critics adopt a stance of what we can call ‘procedural objectivity’ that screens out any flicker of emotion, tamps down idiosyncratic impulses, and steers away from the first-person voice.”This practice becomes especially noticeable when scholars use it to represent their own emotions about a text. For instance, in her introduction to The Castle of Otranto, E. J. Clery asserts that the long-suffering Hippolita’s circumstances are “never so affecting” as the ones of comparable characters from other works.Similarly, Napier writes that “we are virtually prevented from developing anything more than a programmed response to stock Gothic situations.”
Though it is a scholarly norm to generalize from one’s own reaction and expertise,nursery grow bag these kinds of statements imply that readers who feel differently are feeling incorrectly. Lynne Pearce, in Feminism and the Politics of Reading, provides an alternative to this scholarly way of writing about feeling by including alongside her scholarly analysis the responses of readers in feminist reading communities and extracts from her own diary-like accounts of first experiencing, remembering, and reexperiencing the texts she analyzes. She uses these more overtly affective responses to illustrate what she calls “implicated” reading—a relationship with the text that is as dynamic and complex as a relationship between lovers, including not only “ravissement” but also feelings like disappointment. She sets this kind of textual engagement against the professional hermeneutical reading that can be comfortably performed by feminist scholars. Her opposition of implicated reading and hermeneutical reading demonstrates the “massive discomfort of those of us who, as feminist readers, regularly ‘commute’ between these two discourses/models of reading.”In one of her “meta-commentaries” on her reading experience, she draws attention to the way her feminist interpretive practice “constitutes an obstacle to a more personalized and emotionally engaged one” even as she recognizes her theoretical objection to the idea that politics and emotions are separate spheres.What she concludes is that the close engagement of implicated reading cannot be performed simultaneously with the distanced practices of contextualizing and interpreting.
My own reading practice, which informs the structure and method of my dissertation, often toggles between these two modes or even employs them simultaneously. My initial readings of the novels I discuss in these chapters were deeply implicated—I felt anxious for the characters, I cried over the portrayals of grief—but most of the time my critical faculties remained engaged as well, as an internal voice that noted distracting repetition or sexism or narrative techniques, like watching a film with a director’s commentary running. It is possible that my reading experience is unusual, the unconventional product of my lifelong empathetic enjoyment of sentimental and sensational fiction; my training and practice as a fiction writer and a copy editor; and my education in eighteenth-century literature, feminism, and emotion studies. Though I have been inculcated with the mood of scholarly suspicion that Felski describes, it is also mixed with many other moods when I read, reread, and write about texts. My initial orientation toward the criticism I analyze in my dissertation was thus adversarial: I was angry that amateur critics write violently about a character I had identified with; I was frustrated that scholars assert the impossibility of feeling what I did in fact feel. But in the process of attempting to understand these critical responses, I was able to acknowledge them as being equally valid as my own, the products of different orientations, practices, knowledges, and perceptions. It is these differences, and what they can tell us about engagements with literature, that energize my dissertation. In my first chapter, I investigate what is “bad” about The Castle of Wolfenbach , by Eliza Parsons.
Tepidly received by its contemporary critics, this sentimental gothic novel was nonetheless popular, in part because it was one of the works published by Minerva Press, which catered to the taste for formulaic gothic fiction in the 1790s. Minerva was the target of critical anxiety about popular novels and their readers, which is likely why Jane Austen included several by this publisher in her list of “horrid” novels that a young woman passes along as a recommendation in Northanger Abbey. Because of Wolfenbach’s association with Minerva and the Northanger Horrid Novels, scholars have tended to approach the novel as one among many of an emotional type, uninteresting in itself. Employing eighteenth-century ideas about feeling, Parsons portrays and enacts a kind of emotional instruction that teaches characters and readers to respond appropriately to types of suffering without needing to know the particulars of the distressing circumstances. The methods Parsons uses to teach a way of “feeling with the formula”—didactic moralizing, conventional characters and situations, and sparse detail— become, for amateur critics today, evidence of the novel’s poor literary quality. These amateurs, in turn, model ways of feeling against the formula, reducing Wolfenbach to its conventions in order to channel contempt into amusement, for example by counting the number of times characters burst into tears and categorizing the novel as one that is “so bad it’s good.” In contrast, Sianne Ngai’s description of scholarly interest appears to offer a way of suspending critical dismissal, but in practice it also closes down responses by limiting acceptable ways to feel. By comparing the way Parsons and different forms of criticism school emotional response, I attempt to make the institutional qualities of our affective judgments of “bad” fiction more apparent, which can allow us to resist our own emotional training. My second chapter, on Matthew Lewis’s 1796 novel, The Monk, uses Daniel Gross’s “uncomfortable situations” and Rita Felski’s suspicious critical mood to further consider the emotional constraints of criticism.In contrast to Wolfenbach, The Monk has met a better reception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than it did when it scandalized early critics. But it has also been the subject of two very different marketing strategies during this time—one to abstract it from its sensationalism and the other to rebrand its sensationalism for modern fans of genre fiction. This tension in its publication history mirrors a tension in its scholarly reception, in which many scholars avoid discussing the novel’s emotional features or dismiss them as falsely sentimental. Meanwhile, scholars who address its graphic violence and rape and its aestheticized lust in detail follow conventions of feminist analysis or close reading that end up sounding awkwardly similar to amateur responses that praise the novel’s misogyny or prurience. Seeking a method for writing about the novel’s feeling that avoids these critical traps, I turn to its illustrations, which allow a different approach to the novel’s affective power dynamics and lead me to analyze the rhetorical struggles in its scenes of distress. In this chapter, analyzing the novel’s paratexts enables me to reconsider its critical history and access a set of responses that the dominant scholarly discourse has minimized,plastic growing bag freeing up further possibilities for scholarly analysis that resist current academic strictures.
The problem of analyzing sentimentality in The Monk remains difficult in our current academic context, but in my third chapter, I propose a way of exploring the particular features of Ann Radcliffe’s sentimental interactions in The Mysteries of Udolphoand tracing responses to them through the word sweet. Transitioning from my consideration of formal and stylistic emotion of the first two chapters, I narrow my focus in this chapter to a single word to begin an exploration of how the smallest textual features can affect readers. I use the term “emotional taste” to describe how beliefs become embedded in diction through cultural associations and how these value-inflected keywords can contribute to different strong responses among particular groups of readers. To illustrate this idea, I closely analyze how the word sweet, which Radcliffe uses 131 times in Udolpho, creates an intratextual association with feminine emotional receptivity and influence. This association, combined with certain literary and historical associations with sweetness, could help explain why, for instance, some female amateur reviewers today respond to Radcliffe’s sweetest character with violent frustration. It could also shed light on the better modern reputation of Radcliffe’s Italian, which cloaks feminine receptive sweetness with emotional impermeability. I close the dissertation with an investigation that includes speculation about how critical feeling could hinge on even the smallest typographical feature of a text. In my final chapter, I discuss how The Castle of Otranto , by Horace Walpole, has puzzled readers for centuries, provoking ambivalent assessments about its literary quality that depend in large part on whether Walpole meant the novel to be comic or tragic. In reflecting on these mixed responses, I show how critics appear to seek a correct affective response by speculating about Walpole’s intentions and how Walpole’s inclusion in Susan Sontag’s definition of camp seems to confirm beliefs that the novel is meant for the amusement of an in-crowd. However, Walpole’s own framing of the novel is more ambiguous, as is his tone in the novel itself. Compounding this indeterminacy is the fact that different editions of the novel format and punctuate dialogue differently—minor changes that could have a huge effect on how readers interact with the text, as I demonstrate through amateur critics’ discussion of dialogue format and scholars’ quotations of speech with exclamation points. Though minuscule, exclamation points in particular carry divergent affective associations through their literary history, and the way editors preserve or amend them in certain scenes can change the tone of the scene significantly. Since neither Walpole’s statements about the novel nor the text itself provide a clear emotional directive that resolves the affective uncertainties of critics, I consider whether it is possible to approach the novel in a way that discards the idea of a correct emotional response in favor of careful attention, curiosity, and receptivity. The ultimate goal of my dissertation is not to assert my own new and better interpretations of texts or to argue that professional or nonprofessional critics should feel differently about these novels. I would like instead to demonstrate the way all critical emotion is limited by critics’ situations and to consider what those limited emotional judgments do, especially when they have the power to shape the discourse on a novel, as those of prominent critics can. Despite my own limitations, I hope to offer a broad enough range of approaches to suggest that there are many more possible directions to move in than the ones literary scholars most often choose. Even as I find myself leaning on many of the traditional academic techniques for writing with and about emotion, I am feeling around for a better way. As these selections suggest, the reception of Eliza Parsons’s gothic novel The Castle of Wolfenbachhas been remarkably static, changing very little over more than two hundred years. These tepid responses temper expressions of enjoyment with judgments of quality, and rather than dismissing the novel outright, the professional critics concede that it possesses the bare minimum of “interest” necessary to recommend it. The word interesting has different implications in these different critical contexts, which I will discusslater, but the professional assessments of the novel’s importance and ability to involve readers, as well as the blogger’s statement that it is enjoyable but forgettable, all mark the novel as only somewhat worthwhile material for reading or studying. The similarity of these critics’ assessments over time might suggest that the novel is of objectively middling quality, since critics with extremely different training judge it similarly across time. However, I will argue that the relative constancy of critical judgment has less to do with quality and more to do with the way Wolfenbach comes to readers already classified as a certain kind of derivative, emotional novel and the manner in which this classification has been passed down for generations. This is not to say that the novel is actually good but misunderstood—in fact, I agree that the novel is formulaic and melodramatic.