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...with wife who had come to set him free, Vickers never lost hold on his inner darkness. One almost expected him to say at the end that, thanks all the same, but he would just as soon stay underground. Hence Beethoven's impassioned paean to Enlightenment, to brotherhood and love and liberty, was shadowed by a trace of something unassimilable: a solitary consciousness that did not view the world of light as real.
That consciousness is at the heart of Marshall Brown's reading of gothic texts. In an age when reason and experience no longer seemed adequate to account for the depths of imagination and feeling, he argues, a different sort of question began to be asked: "Where then is Life, in itself, freed from its impurities?" And a peculiar answer followed: "In the eternal night of a shapeless, solitary dungeon, says the gothic novel" (105). A transcendental ego defined by its negations, not by the common sense affirmed in daylight, dissolves the stable boundaries of the self. This is the world of Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon"--"the blank stone face that the gothic personality turns toward us when it has perfectly encompassed and grown indifferent to all differences" (158)--not Byron's wild and frenetic Manfred. Behavior and action lose their meaning in these shadowy realms, as in dreams, where plots are suspended timelessly under the sway of the inexplicable, the unspeakable, and the inarticulate. Nor does consciousness itself take definite form. Instead it tends toward the lurid thoughts of Coleridge's "Limbo," a state of "positive Negation!"
Negation also marks Brown's own construction of the gothic. The book stakes out its territory with three argumentative theses: I. Romantic gothic .fiction is not exciting. 2. Gothic novels are not ghost stories. 3. Gothic novels are not women's writing (3-6). Many recent studies are...
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