In Wolfenbach’s case, these responses tend to be ironic or disdainful. Even when scholars and publishers recover a novel, they often suggest it is important but not good, or that it is important only because others have dismissed it. The Castle of Wolfenbach went out of print after its 1968 publication as part of The Northanger Set of Jane Austen’s Horrid Novels, but after Rictor Norton included an excerpt of it in his 2000 book Gothic Readings, fringe publishers began to show renewed interest in Parsons’s novel. Norton introduces the excerpt with some details of Parsons’s tragic life, a description of her novels as derivate of Radcliffe’s, and a quotation from one of the novel’s early reviews that complains about its unmet expectations.Even this lukewarmreintroduction of Wolfenbach could have caught the attention of publishers and scholars who work with culturally devalued fiction. In 2003 Wildside Press, which produces mostly science fiction and is thus experienced in dealing with literature of precarious cultural value, published an edition without an introduction that is now out of print. In 2006, Valancourt Books, whose mission is to recover neglected fiction, released an inexpensive paperback with a scholarly introduction by Hoeveler, followed by a reprint in 2007 and ebook in 2009, as part of an effort to republish all of the Horrid Novels with scholarly introductions. Today, electronic versions are readily accessible, including one with a lengthy scholarly introduction by The Northanger Library Project, whose purpose is also the recuperation of dismissed fiction. These publications, like recent scholarly work on the other Horrid Novels,blueberry packaging attempt to reassess these works with the assumption that previous recovery workers were still too hasty to judge.
Yet, by continuing to assert Wolfenbach’s importance only as a novel mentioned by Jane Austen or as a novel that has been neglected, publishers and scholars spread awareness of the novel while disseminating what is likely only an ambivalent interest in it. Similarly, Wolfenbach’s scholarly recuperation as a “female gothic” novel makes interest in the novel conditional on the way it is perceived to be working in the Radcliffean mode and the extent to which it alters Radcliffe’s prototype in its depiction of female oppression. Scholars reading Wolfenbach through a female gothic lens have pointed out that Parsons, unlike Radcliffe, makes violence against women gruesomely apparent in the text, but they do so by marking this difference as a single variation in an otherwise typical imitation. Angela Wright prefaces her claim about this explicit violence with “Where Parsons deviates from the Radcliffean model, however,” and Sue Chaplin argues that Parsons’s plots are “very much in the Radcliffean mould, but what distinguishes Parsons from her predecessor” is the graphic nature of the descriptions.Karen Morton instead argues that Parsons’s gothic novels resist Radcliffe’s model, in part by portraying more realistic characters and situations, but even this argument necessitates constant comparison to Radcliffe, making interest in Parsons contingent on her relationship to a more well-regarded novelist.This contingent interest, with its attendant valuation of particularity, can help reveal the distance between the investments of a novel like The Castle of Wolfenbach and the investments of critics today. The cultural trend of recovering, reassessing, and revaluing popular older novels by women has not generally led scholars to argue that Wolfenbach is effectively written or complex. It is still extremely rare for them to approach Wolfenbach as anything but one of the Horrid Novels, for which it receives passing mention. As E. J. Clery writes, novels like Wolfenbach seem “already read” because they are formulaic.
The fact that Wolfenbach and other early gothic novels were plentiful, formulaic, and sensational has served historically as justification for describing them as indistinguishable media for feeling, rarely worthy of close, particular attention. By and large, scholars seem to pass the novel over as one among many of its kind, with nothing interesting to offer. Hoeveler represents many scholars’ attitude toward Wolfenbach well in statement that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “I would not claim it is a great novel. Instead, I see it as a historical document that speaks to us about the fears, beliefs, and prejudices of its era. As such it is an interesting text to study in relation to other gothic, sentimental, and melodramatic works of the 1790s.”Hoeveler’s tentative assertion that the novel is interesting perfectly illustrates Sianne Ngai’s argument that the word interesting offers a compromise in the conflict over whether a critic’s role should be to judge works aesthetically or dispense with aesthetic judgments entirely. Ngai writes that interesting “keeps the possibility alive that a critic might actually continue the task of influencing public judgment, if only in the modest way of suggesting that some texts are more worth paying attention to than others and then supplying reasons why.”In this way, as Ngai explains, there is “a deeply pedagogical dimension to the interesting,” as venturing this assessment often requires the critic to inform her audience and engage in a discussion with the intention of not only convincing but also illuminating.In contrast to aesthetic judgments that purport to be instantaneous, final, and universal , Ngai argues that interesting entails consideration and reconsideration, as it assumes an always-shifting point of personal knowledge. A work of art can be bad but still worthy of lengthy attention, Ngai explains, because it offers information the audience does not yet have. However, the affective dimensions of interesting complicate its usefulness as a way to reassess works like Wolfenbach.
Ngai describes interest as both affective and conceptual, a mostly detached engagement, and one that can easily tip into boredom or frustration. Gothic novels like Wolfenbach have been framed as intense emotional experiences, with an “already read” derivative quality. A reader expecting an intense emotional experience will likely find cold comfort in mere interest, and a reader predisposed to see only formula will be unlikely to search very hard for novelty. Scholars have a lot of incentive to find a book like Wolfenbach interesting, so they may be frustrated by the effort it takes, finding that a strenuous attempt to be interested yields only the rather unsatisfying option of being interested for the sake of the novel’s role in history alone, or that it requires a laborious reframing of the terms on which we judge the novel. I sidestep both of these endeavors in this chapter by attempting to occupy Wolfenbach’s world and our own critical climate at the same time, in order to illuminate the novel’s cultural investments and set them against our own. The differences among Wolfenbach’s values and our own seem too numerous to catalogue, but we have already seen the most important ones emerge in recent negative assessments of Parsons’s prescriptive morality, universality, and conventionality, which highlight our own beliefs in relativism, specificity, and individuality. According to Ngai, people are interested when they do not know something, while for Parsons, interest may involve not knowing, but it is also often determined by whether something fits into known categories. Ngai’s interest is individual and particular, always changing based on a given person’s knowledge at the time, and ambivalent in its emotional engagement, while Parsons’s is normative and unquestionably emotionally involved. These differences make it appear as though Parsons’s school of affliction is the only rigidly prescriptive one, but we have seen that what appear to be independent assessmentsof a novel like Wolfenbach actually look more like emotional rules that are passed down over time when considered together. Even a scholar like Ngai, who seems to be an independent auditor of the kinds of critics who establish emotional rules, inhabits an affective school in which she participates in the lessons. As she elaborates on the semiotics of interesting,blueberry packaging box what is for the most part a descriptive argument becomes sometimes indistinguishable from a prescriptive one. After using the definitions of authorities to break interesting into its components, like time and novelty, she then turns to examples and presents them as situations in which the particular combination of components means that there is only one appropriate response or range of responses. For example, when describing Ed Ruscha’s books of photographs of ordinary subjects , she writes, “Given the banality of the subject matter and the calculated distances at which the examples of each type were photographed , these generic-looking compilations were clearly engineered to keep affect on a low burner, generating at most tiny flickers of interest.”By linking the response to the objective components of interesting/boring that she has already established and to the artist’s intention and even the construction of the art, she excludes any possibility for meaningful variation in response, as if any such variations would be incorrect. Within a critical culture shaped by implicit affective rules like these, a reader who broadcasts her sympathetic response to a novel like Wolfenbach risks being judged as unsophisticated or self-righteous. I hope I escape both of these judgments by arguing that a sympathetic response to Wolfenbach, like my own, is not entirely different from the aforementioned critical responses. While scholars privilege educated and difficult reading experiences, in the case of eighteenth-century formulaic gothic fiction that abounds with tales of distress, it takes as much effort, cultivation of a specific taste, and resistance to the dominant critical attitude to become absorbed in the novel in a way similar to what lay readers in the 1790s might have when they made Wolfenbach and other circulating-library fiction popular.
When I read Wolfenbach for the first time, I read it with a taste for melodrama and sentiment honed by years of reading early eighteenth-century British amatory fiction, midcentury novels of sensibility, and early gothic novels, as well as American emotional literature, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Twilight. This reading practice and preference allowed me to immerse myself in the story and experience sometimes wrenching agony at the characters’ woes, especially when those woes were ones I could not bear to imagine experiencing. I also read Wolfenbach for the first time on an e-reader, like many of amateur critics note that they did, and even this new medium could have hugely affected the way I approached the novel, as scholars are beginning to consider.Even so, as a reader aware of the critical conversation about novels like Wolfenbach, I was continually conscious of how I ought to judge its formulaic qualities, and it took considerable effort to remain engaged in the story. In this way, some experiences of absorption in bad writing can be as difficult as some experiences of scholarly distance, just as some dismissive critical judgments of it can be as easy as some uncritical acceptance. The way in which our critical judgments of emotion conform to cultural standards is difficult to see because, like good students, we have internalized these standards. Parsons’s school of affliction is only visible to us in the aspects that differ from our own beliefs and conventions. Likewise, our school of critical emotion is most visible in these differences. We have our own rules that dictate the proper way to express suffering in fiction, but they are most apparent when they are broken by “horrid” fiction like Wolfenbach. We have learned a very limited number of ways we are supposed to respond emotionally to bad fiction as critics, but these limitations only feel constricting when we see the force of the critical tradition that upholds them. Our emotional conventions change greatly over time, but in any given cultural moment they have the doctrinal solidity of a schoolhouse, and only when we recognize that other people in other times and places occupied different schools can we have the option of stepping outside our own. The novel’s salacious sensationalism made it infamous after its publication in 1796, especially once the public knew that the author was Matthew Lewis, a young member of Parliament. But as we can see, the deviant brutality and pleasure that Coleridge denounces in 1797 becomes, for King in 2002, the explosive material of a swaggering rebel, something only the most uptight readers would shun. Even as early as 1957, Devendra Varma would reflect on the scandalized early reception of the novel, “To us it seems ineffably puerile that anyone could be disturbed by these mild erotics. But, immediately, the prigs and prudes rose up.”Today, The Monk’s transgressive subjects and stylistic power make it laudable, in contrast to Eliza Parsons’s “horrid” Castle of Wolfenbach from my previous chapter.