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Discuss the use of the Gothic by Victorian Writers - Coggle Diagram

- - - - 'The fear that adventure may be a thing of the past in the real world led many writers to seek it in the unreal world of romance, dreams, imagination. "Soon the ancient mystery of Africa will have vanished," Haggard laments in an 1894 essay appropriately titled " 'Elephant Smashing' and 'Lion Shooting. ' " Where, he dolefully asks, "will the romance writers of future generations find a safe and secret place, unknown to the pestilent accuracy of the geographer, in which to lay their plots?"36' (Bratlinger, 239)
    - - page 92 - 'it'
        Primitive, animalistic, stripped of feminine signifiers
        Infantilisation - women as similar to children
      - chapter - The With-Hunt (95)
      - Gilbert and Gubar on women (may NOT be relevant)
        
        'the monster-woman, threatening to replace her angelic sister, embodies intransigent female autonomy and thus represents both the author's power to allay "his" anxieties by calling their source bad names (witch, bitch, fiend, monster) and, simultaneously, the mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her textually ordained "place" and thus generates a story that "gets away" from its author.' (28)
        
        'repeatedly, throughout most male literature, a sweet heroine inside the house (like Honoria) is opposed to a vicious bitch outside.' (29)
      - 'Sublime in both her physical aspect and her ruthless exercise of power, Gagool is the architect of the Kukuanas' violent annual ritual in which she and her Isanusis identify male witches and send them to their deaths. It is, as David calls it, "[a] carnivalesque display of female rage" through which Haggard registers his hatred of women and fear of their power (194-195). Wrinkled and shrunken, Gagool resembles both a "sun-dried corpse" and "a cobra" (147). Her large, black eyes gleam like "jewels in a charnel-house" and when Quatermain first sees her terrifying countenance and hears her thin, piercing voice, he feels a "shiver of fear" pass through his body (147).' (Andrew, 6)
        'It is a nightmarish scene, but one by which Haggard can warn his readers of the chaos and violence that he identifies with unchecked female power.' (7)
        
        'the women who do appear challenge the story's tactic of constructing primitive heroism through masculine identification. Gagool, the ageless witch, threatens to expose the sordidly material motives of the white presence in Africa (134; ch. 9), and thus to shatter the fantasy of interracial brotherhood in arms. Foulata, the loyal Kukuana ingenue with whom Good falls in love, raises the specter of miscegenation, at which Haggard's shallow racial relativism balks. As in Kipling's Kafiristan, women mark the boundary of acceptable primitive heroism. But with their marginality strictly enforced, manliness may be defined in a way that trumps racial difference. ' (Deane, 211)
    - - 'Lang complained of 'an almost unholy knowledge of women' in recent novels, which 'makes one feel uncomfortable in the reading, makes one feel intrusive and unmanly'.22 Romance was a man's world, the only active roles were for the hero and his male helpers, his band of white brothers and black servants. The intent in reviving the genre as fears of decadence and degeneration swirled in late Victorian culture was the ambition to re-masculinize its readership' (xxi)
      - Map as sexualised object: Trace way over the female form. Crude, titillating innuendo. Violence to this - declares at beginning 'not a petticoat in its history'. (10)
        Primal form of existence, men back to primal way of life
      - Gilbert and Gubar on women (may NOT be relevant)
        
        'Lacking the pen/penis which would enable them similarly to refute one fiction by another, women in patriarchal societies have historically been reduced to mere properties, to characters and images imprisoned in male texts' (12)
  - - - the sublime encounter is a moment of fear and trembling that overwhelms, at least temporarily, the powerful authority of the self. In the presence of the sublime, the mind is so filled with its object, it can entertain no thoughts on any other subject; it is a moment of terrifying paralysis that temporarily suspends the activities of the mind.' (1)
      - Sublime has been long associated with the gothic novel (1)
      - 'Haggard constructs situations in King Solomon s Mines and She in which the male protagonists have opportunities to exercise their heroism and power by transferring the object of their control from 'savage' natives to 'savage' women.'
        'In these novels, it is women, rather than natives, who occasion moments of sublime terror and who, because of their terrifying ferocity or tempting sexuality, open up space for the male protagonists to recuperate masculine power without compromising the delight they find in wild, untamed Africa. As index of this misogyny, Haggard represents women in the register of the sublime and contrives ways for his male adventurers to strengthen their homosocial bonds by disarming the threat to empire and masculine adventuring that these women embody.' (4)
      - 'in King Solomon s Mines, the African landscape is sexualized as a threatening female space, a naked body waiting to be discovered and mounted. Consequently, safe passage over such a landscape suggests a correlation between masculine domination over women and imperial domination over native territory.' (5)
      - 'she is crushed by the stone door, all thirty tons pressing against her body in a "sickening crunch " with "shriek upon shriek, such as we never heard" (280). It is a particularly revolting and grisly death, but one that satisfies the severe misogyny of Haggard's gender politics. Moreover, the only virtuous woman in the novel, Foulata, is also killed in the mines during a hand-to-hand struggle with Gagool. Though saddened by her loss and recalling that she was both beautiful and refined, for an African that is, Quatermain nonetheless decides that her "removal" was most likely a "fortunate occurrence." As he says, rather coldly, "complications would have been sure to ensue" (300). But now, with the two important women in the novel dead, Quatermain and the others crawl out of the mines through a foxhole and find themselves, loaded with just enough treasure to make their fortunes, ready to return to England with no female attachments or ethical dilemmas of any kind.' (7)
    - - 'I shall test the appropriateness of this critical discourse in a discussion of landscape and imperialist ideology in two of the most influential colonial documents of the nineteenth century: King Solomon's Mines and She. The literary topoi of such nineteenth century texts, I suggest, emanate from specific models of imperial control, and the contradictory impulses behind colonial administration are most dramatically demonstrated in the embodiment of African terrain in fiction. Finally, though, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the literary management of these landscapes can be found in the obsessively reiterated metonymic association of woman's body and the African landscape.' (Bunn, 1)
      - 'Maps are, in a way, like laws, but the map of Kukuanaland displays a rather different form of libidinal investment. In it, the foreign landscape appears as an uncharted "virgin" zone that waits to be inscribed by masculine colonizing Zeal.' (11)
      - 'Africa, once feminized, becomes the object of the male gaze: she promises rewards to the hardy adventurer, yet she has a dark side that in this passage is lexically associated with primal ooze, fluids, and menstruation.' (12)
      - 'Solomon's Mountains, for instance, swell gently up from the plain, and on the top of each there is "a vast round hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast" (286). These mountains are subject to erotic embellishment because they are described as being veiled in "curious gauzy mist," and "cloud-clad privacy" which the explorers are obliged to penetrate.' (12)
- - - - 'whilst Haggard’s writings do consolidate certain prejudices, they also explore the possibility of moving beyond a colonialist identity politics reliant on conceptions of racial otherness. I want to pursue the idea that Haggard’s work contains two, seemingly irreconcilable, impulses. One is to lament the decline in Britain’s colonial status (in works published between 1887 and 1923) and the other is to positively explore a new (putatively postcolonial) identity politics. This paradox can be historically accounted for as a consequence of the refashioning of colonialist subjectivity, made necessary by Britain’s colonial demise.' (Smith, 104)
      - the apparent paradox of an imperialism that openly embraces the primitive.' (Deane, 205)
      - 'Casting off mid-Victorian constructions of middle-class Christian manliness, these romances emphasize new masculine qualities - raw strength, courage, instinctive violence, bodily size, and homosocial commitment to other men - that could become a bridge uniting the ancient and modern in ways that trump other cultural differences and even, as I shall suggest, cross boundaries of race.' (Deane, 206)