Gothic Othering and English Progress

‘While the Gothic was certainly associated with the supernatural, it was predominantly a theory of English progress rooted in Anglo-Saxon and medieval history.’ (Nick Groom). Discuss.

In Gothic Renaissance, Bronfen and Neumeier provide a framework for analysing Gothic sensibility avant la lettre. They argue that texts produced periods of transition define the present by looking back at the ‘prior historical moment from which it developed,’ and presenting it ‘as the embodiment of a barbarism that must, once more, be overcome.’[1] They identify a ‘double backwards gaze,’ in which ‘both the mid-sixteenth and the late eighteenth century are constitutively troubled by previous cultural energies, either erupting again or refusing to be suppressed.’[2] However, this notion of the double backwards gaze is applicable earlier: just as the Early-Modern self is troubled by the Medieval culture, the Medieval self is troubled by a culture that predates Englishness itself. Bowen calls this Gothic motif of interaction between past and present ‘clashing time periods’[3] and draws a line of connection with Freud’s notion of the uncanny: ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’[4]. In Groom’s terms, this essay will analyse Joynes’ Medieval Ghost Stories and Baldwin’s Beware the Cat to examine how the literary Gothic defines its cultural moment, variously implying, facilitating, and troubling English progress through a process of temporal Othering; making the past uncanny.

For Bronfen and Neumeier, the Renaissance is the ‘the inaugural moment,’ of English Gothic sensibility[5]. However, since the Gothic is centred on English identity, we might turn to its origin in Bede’s 8th century vision of the ‘collective identity of’ the ‘English people’ as ‘the race of the Angles or Saxons’ united in their ‘adherence to the Christian faith.’[6] Given that an identity to consolidate/challenge is a pre-requisite for the Gothic, Bede’s early Medieval English identity must be treated as the genre’s inauguration. This identity necessitated an Other by which to define itself, turning to two ‘antiquated’ pre-Christian races in the Viking invaders and the native Celts to fill the role. This Other is represented in Medieval Ghost Stories through the central ghosts and revenants, which Bowen sees as the embodiment of clashing time periods as they ‘disrupt our sense of what is present and what is past.’[7] Disruptive ghosts and revenants provide the medieval writers a means for the ‘articulation of anxieties about processes of cultural transformation,’[8] underway between the 8th and 12th centuries, as England sought to unite as Christians by surmounting a Celtic/Danish pagan past.

Beowulf (c. 700-1000 AD) ‘contains both Christian and pre-Christian elements,’[9] making it emblematic of the Anglo-Saxon/Viking divide in medieval England. It can be read as an allegory for the pagan brutality of the invasive Vikings as Grendel, the text’s monster, is described as the ‘murderous intruder’[10] who ‘tore apart the entrance to the hall,’[11] in which the allegorical Englishmen live. Moreover, he is explicitly non-Christian, a ‘demon foe,’ one of ‘Cain’s kindred,’[12] tied to both the Satanic (demon) and human (Cain) Other of Christian tradition. This non-Christian Other disrupts the Christian self, as he ‘seized a sleeping warrior... Bit his body, drank blood from his veins, swallowed bite after bite,’[13] enacting the horror of an antiquated invader preventing England from progressing by draining the nation of its resources. Joynes suggests that ‘the monstrous presence of... Revenants’ like Grendel in medieval Christian literature indicates ‘the persistence of pre-Christian belief in the popular culture,’[14] in spite of attempts to repress paganism in England. In this sense Grendel is uncanny, he is ‘in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is… old-established in the mind,’ made frightening ‘through the process of repression.’[15] Freud writes that in societies which have ‘surmounted’ belief in ‘the return of the dead,’ the new beliefs (i.e. Christianity) are unstable and when something recalls the ‘discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny.’[16] Hence, when the Anglo-Saxon encounters the pseudo-revenant Grendel, they are attuned to old pagan beliefs that persist in their culture. Bronfen and Neumeier explain that though transgressive Gothic monsters trouble ‘identity categories... they never fully shatter these;’ they ‘all find their predestined death,’ and identity ‘is once more stabilized.’[17] Beowulf’s implication that the past survives within the present challenges Anglo-Saxon identity, and so Beowulf, ‘the strongest of men in this life’s day,’ (his ‘presentness’ underlined in ‘this life’s day’) must ‘cast-out’ Grendel,[18] his defeat symbolic of the possibility for the progress of English identity once the Vikings are expelled and paganism is left in the past.

By 1066 though, the Vikings had indeed been expelled and so the emphasis of English literary Gothic sensibility transferred from an invasive past to one that solely pursued through cultural influence. This pursuing past is embodied by another Northern European revenant that haunted medieval literary culture: the wild hunt, a legendary undead army that hunted for sinners to join its ranks. Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium (c. 1180) deals with this trope but also integrates Celtic folklore, with this blending of traditions indicating the persistent presence of paganism in English culture even centuries after Beowulf. In his ‘Tale of King Herla’ the eponymous ‘king of the ancient Britons’ (counter-intuitively) represents the present, due to his opposition to the ‘pygmy’ king who Joynes imagines as ‘one of the ‘little people’ of Celtic folklore.’[19] The former is ‘enticed into an agreement,’ by the latter, in which the pygmy bestows ‘gold and crystal[s]’ on the Briton court on the condition that ‘Herla... and his retinue’ visit the ‘home of the pygmies.’[20] The mystical pagan past is shown to be intensely alluring, but the ending nevertheless proves the allure to be deceptive. When the men return to their ‘own country’ after visiting the pygmies’, a shepherd informs them that ‘over two hundred years have passed,’ and that ‘the Saxons drove the native people from’ their land[21]. Worse still, Herla and his retinue are cursed to wander ‘endlessly’ as a ‘wild march,’[22] themselves becoming monstrous figments of the past. The tale warns against the dangers of succumbing to the temptations of the pagan past, telling Anglo-Saxon readers that those who do so risk being doomed to pursue a progressing English identity and worse, risk being driven from the land as their predecessors were.

Perhaps the most subtle yet striking example of the past disrupting the present is found in another of Map’s tales: ‘The Demon at the Cradle’. This story borrows a further aspect of Germanic folklore: the Doppelganger. In the story, the firstborn child of a knight and a noblewoman has its ‘throat cut in its cradle on the first morning after its birth,’[23] and the same thing happens to their second and third children. On the night of the fourth’s birth a stranger arrives, keeping watch over the child and discovering that the culprit is ‘an old lady’ who the others recognise ‘as the noblest and most respectable woman in the city.’[24] It is revealed that the culprit is a ‘demon’, the ‘double in every way’ of the respectable woman[25]. On the surface, the tale is another allegory for the danger of a non-Christian, demonic past (‘old lady’) violently disrupting the progress of Christian English identity, represented by the innocent child. However, undoubtedly the more interesting aspect of the story is its use of the doppelganger. Freud describes the ‘extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception,’ of the double, calling it a ‘thing of terror.’[26] The uncanny effect produced by the double, which seems to equivalate self and other, belies the intense anxiety felt by Anglo-Saxon Christians that the pagan Other might be intrinsically tied to the Christian self. The most unsettling prospect for Anglo-Saxons was not that the Germanic/Celtic pagan Other might return to haunt the English Christian self, but that it might be an essential part of the self, a prospect that throws Bede’s conception of the English into disarray.

Again though, the ‘challenge to the order of things’ must be ‘stabilized.’[27] In Beowulf, the solution to the disruption of English identity is the violent expulsion of the Other. However, in William Malmesbury’s tale ‘The Witch of Berkeley’ (from De Gestis Regum, c. 1125), faith is shown to be the only means of progress. It tells of a woman adept in ‘ancient methods of augury and soothsaying,’[28] pagan arts of the past that must be resisted at all costs. The penalty for temptation is made clear, as her practises lead to ‘the death of her son, and the catastrophic annihilation of all her family’s hopes.’[29] Again, time is central to this punishment as progress (connoted by ‘hopes’), is hyperbolically shown to be impossible to those who embrace the past. What’s more, due to her ‘enslave[ment] to the artifice of the devil,’ she is ‘dragged’ away by a ‘demonic creature,’[30] as a non-Christian Other literally pulls her back from the present. Malmesbury’s witch reveals that she had hoped her ‘miserable soul might be eased in the end by the comforts of [her children’s] faith,’ and that she ‘thought of [them] as [her] champions against the demons… guardians against a most savage enemy.’[31] This passage echoes Beowulf’s epic lexis; the ‘valiant warrior’[32] is no longer a physical combatant but a spiritual one. Just as Beowulf was the ‘defender of nobles’ against ‘the adversary of God,’[33] the witch’s Christian children are her champions, fighting an almost Psychomachic battle against the demonic and disruptive past.

In conclusion, the inaugural moment of English Gothic sensibility can be seen as the very inauguration of English literature itself. Even from its origin in Bede’s prophetic writings, the English self has been defined through the process of Gothic negation, as the Northern European/Celtic pagan past is employed as an Other against which to define the anxious Anglo-Saxon Christian self in order to imply a progress from sin to virtue.

Ironically, in the wake of the Reformation, this version of the Christian self which Medieval ‘Gothicists’ went to such pains to construct became the very Other by which the Renaissance English self was defined. Bronfen and Neumeier suggest that ‘the early modern imagination struggles with and against the barbarism of supernatural thinking it seeks to supersede.’[34] The ‘supernatural thinking’ in question is tied to medieval Catholicism, whose teachings were seen as archaic when set against Protestant ‘discourses of scientific rationality.’[35] Baldwin wrote Beware the Cat ‘in the first half of 1553, in the last days of the reign of Edward VI,’[36] who had ‘vainly’ attempted to ‘expel from the English body politic,’ its ‘infection by… outmoded Catholic values,’ leading to ‘schizophrenic confusion over [England’s]… identity.’ [37] Malsen argues that the text ‘marks itself out as the product of [this] period of high anxiety.’[38]

On the surface, Beware the Cat’s treatment of Catholics seems to fit comfortably into the mould of temporal Othering present in Medieval Ghost Stories. Baldwin depicts Catholics not through revenants, but through another uncanny creature: the cat. Derrida highlights their uncanny nature by reminding us of the ‘embarrassment’ one feels when caught naked by ‘the eyes of a cat,’ whose sentience we seem to have repressed but emerges in a moment that makes us question the boundary between human self and animal Other[39]. The connection between cat and Catholic is made clear in ‘the obvious pun:’ the latter word contains the former,[40] though this is all the more manifest in their actions. Just as cats notoriously operate in the night, the Latin Mass is ‘said privily and nightly’ in the bedrooms of the ‘old’ despite being ‘on penalty… forbidden. [41] A textual aside assures us that this mass is an ‘old error,’ ‘hard to be removed,’[42] highlighting the Edwardian occupation with discarding remnants of the past. The Latin Mass draws comparison with cats too, as ‘cats, like Catholics, speak a language which is not accessible to the bulk of Edward’s human subjects.’[43] Additionally, the dedication of the feline queen Grimalkin’s followers is likened to that of the Pope ‘in whose cause all his clergy would not only scratch and bite, but kill and burn to powder,’[44] with the simile implying the barbarism of the Catholic past. Predictably, the most disparaging depiction of Catholics centres on that most contentious locus of Catholic/Protestant conflict: Transubstantiation. Wald sees the episode in which Grimalkin ‘consumed all the sheep,’[45] as a metaphor for ‘the insatiable appetites of Catholics,’ who eat a “sacrificed’ lamb’ (i.e. Christ, the lamb of God) during Mass[46]. The nearby aside ‘Cats did kill and eat a man,’[47] seems to confirm the implication that both these monstrous cats and the barbaric Catholics were guilty of consuming human flesh. Following this, Grimalkin pursues the men on horseback in hopes of eating ‘them too’[48], recalling the motif of the wild hunt in its presentation of the past emerging to pursue and consume present. The Othering of Catholics through these uncanny, elusive cats reflects the anxieties of Protestants who worried ‘the Edwardian administration,’ might be ‘incapable of extirpating the clandestine Catholic practices it had banned.’[49]

Yet, Baldwin refuses to allow us to make a direct equivalence between cat and Catholic. Having concocted a substance that allows him to understand cats, the third part of Master Streamer’s oration recounts the words of a cat who reveals the aforementioned night-time masses, deceptions, and various forms of adultery commited by his Catholic owners.[50] This aligns cats with Edward’s Protestant authorities who sought to uncover the clandestine existence of the remaining English Catholics. Consequently, Malsen argues that ‘all we know of the cats is that they will expose whatever is… secret,’[51] and the aside ‘cats are admitted to all secrets,’[52] assents to this. For Groom, the essential secret, the ‘awful truth’ that ‘the modern Protestant state of England,’ ‘held… at its core’ was that ‘it had come into being at a terrible human and cultural cost,’ namely the Reformation’s ‘violence on a terrifying scale.’[53] Therefore, Baldwin’s cats are not necessarily Catholics, but harbingers of the truth about the Reformation’s ‘thoroughly destructive,’ and distinctly Gothic, ‘attitude to the [Catholic] past.’[54] Their uncanny nature implies this, as Freud tell us ‘everything that is’ uncanny ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.’[55] The terrifying violence is alluded to early on, as Streamer mentions that ‘quarters of men… do stand on poles,’ outside his window, calling it an ‘abhominable sight.’[56] Maslen sees this as a reference to the rebellion of 1549, which opposed Edward’s English prayer book and resulted in the rebels’ corpses being displayed as such[57]. He writes:

Baldwin’s employer… had printed that prayer-book; so Baldwin… [was likely]… sensitive to these grisly reminders of the violence… [of]… what we might call the Englishing of the English.[58]

Here, the text’s only reanimated bodies represent the reanimated memory of violence against Catholics in the name of progress, so it is no surprise that the Protestant Streamer opposes their display. The clearer manifestation of a resurgent Catholic truth comes later, however, as Streamer begins to understand the cats. Stenner suggests that ‘sound functions as a literary device in… Beware the Cat,’[59] and this is clear when, after taking his concoction, Streamer’s hearing is assaulted by ‘an outbreak of Rabelaisian heteroglossia:’ [60] ‘the barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, rumbling of rats, gaggling of geese, humming of bees…’[61] Though this sonic assault is not exclusively feline, it comes as a result of Streamer’s attempt to uncover the cats’ secrets, and thus can be interpreted as indicative of these secrets also. Maslen reads the outbreak as ‘a vivid metaphor for… competing discourses,’[62] and for Hadfield, the passage’s dialogic nature suggests ‘that beneath the apparently united appearance of English life there is a whole cacophony of voices,’ namely Catholic victims, that ‘pose a threat to’[63] Protestantism. Next, the toll of ‘the greatest bell in St. Botolph’s,’ leads him to think ‘all the devils in Hell had broken loose and were come about,’ him[64]. This recalls the resurgent demons of Beowulf and The Witch of Berkeley, similarly representing a destructive returning past. Here though, the past is aural; a Gothic truth that erupts to disrupt the present, with the church bell signifying the repressed betrayal of Christian morality at the heart of English Protestant identity.

 Significantly, Streamer learns this secret through a symbolic embrace of Catholicism, as his concoction is ‘baked like… bread,’ and contains numerous organs (‘cat’s liver and a piece of the kidney’ etc.[65]); ‘the bread contains the body in a literal sense.’[66] He indulges in Catholic ritual and immediately ‘a thousand things which I had not thought of in twenty years before came so freshly to my mind.’[67] These resurgent memories can be interpreted as a warning against the dangers of blurring the line between Protestant and Catholic, of not delineating past and present. Bronfen and Neumeier write that ‘by giving voice to the… returns of repressed knowledge, Gothic sensibility draws attention to the earlier cultural energies that will never fully be overcome,’[68] and so Beware the Cat simultaneously seeks to delineate past and present, to facilitate progress by Othering the uncanny Catholic past, and belies the impossibility of this task.

To conclude, the uncanny cats do not suggest progress from the Othered Catholic past to the present Protestant self, but rather call this progress into question. It ‘does not ‘fit into any straightforward model of Protestant propaganda; rather… in breaking down a number of binary oppositions… between self and other, it struck a note of profound paranoia,’[69] indicative of the mood of Edwardian England. The title signifies not ‘Beware the Catholic’ but ‘Beware the Catholic truth’. In this way, it is prophetic of the ‘myth of English… progress,’ soon to develop, which ‘unsurprisingly repressed,’ the ‘inconvenient fact’ of Catholic genocide[70]: ‘Silence is the best friend that shame hath,’[71]observes Baldwin in an aside. Thus, through his uncanny cats, the writer does adhere to the Gothic theory of English progress, of delineating past and present, established in Medieval Ghost Stories, even if he highlights its fictitious nature.

Footnotes

[1] Elizabeth Bronfen and Beate Neumeier, ‘Introduction’ in Gothic Renaissance, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). pp. 1-14. (pp. 3-4).

[2] Bronfen and Neumeier, p. 4.

[3] John Bowen, “Gothic Motifs”, The British Library, 2014 <https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs> [Accessed 16 January 2022].

[4] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, quoted in Bowen.

[5] Bronfen and Neumeier, p. 7.

[6] Simon Keynes, ‘England 700-900’ in The New Cambridge Medieval History, eds. by Rosamond McKitterick, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). pp. 18-42. (p. 18).

[7] Bowen.

[8] Bronfen and Neumeier, p. 5.

[9] Andrew Joynes, Medieval Ghost Stories, (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2001). (p. 126).

[10] Joynes, p. 130.

[11] Joynes, p. 128.

[12] Joynes, pp. 127-128.

[13] Joynes, p. 129.

[14] Joynes, p. 122.

[15] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1910). pp. 129-253. (p. 241).

[16] Freud, p. 247.

[17] Bronfen and Neumeier, p. 3.

[18] Joynes. P. 130.

[19] Joynes, pp. 86-87.

[20] Joynes, pp. 87-88.

[21] Joynes, p. 89.

[22] Joynes, p. 89.

[23] Joynes, p. 94.

[24] Joynes, p. 94.

[25] Joynes, p. 94.

[26] Freud, p, 236.

[27] Bronfen and Neumeier, p. 3.

[28] Joynes, p. 78.

[29] Joynes, p. 78.

[30] Joynes, pp. 78-79.

[31] Joynes, p. 78.

[32] Joynes, p. 129.

[33] Joynes, p. 129.

[34] Bronfen and Neumeier, p. 4.

[35] Bronfen and Neumeier, p. 6.

[36] Christina Wald, ‘William Baldwin: Beware the Cat’ in The Reformation of Romance : The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction, (De Gruyter: Berlin, 2014). pp. 42-59. (p. 42).

[37] Robert Maslen, “The Cat Got Your Tongue’: Pseudo-Translation, Conversion, and Control in William

Baldwin's “Beware the Cat”’, Translation and Literature , 8, (1999). pp. 3-27. (p. 4).

[38] Maslen, p. 3.

[39] Jacques Derrida and David Wills, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, Critical Inquiry, 28, (2002). pp. 369-418. (p. 372).

[40] Maslen, p. 18.

[41] William Baldwin, Beware the Cat, (Huntington Library: San Marino, 1988). (pp. 37, 39).

[42] Baldwin, p. 37.

[43] Maslen, p. 18.

[44] Baldwin, p. 15.

[45] Baldwin, p. 13.

[46] Wald, p. 45.

[47] Baldwin, p. 14.

[48] Baldwin, p. 12.

[49] Maslen, p. 12.

[50] Baldwin, p. 50.

[51] Malsen, p. 21.

[52] Baldwin, p. 38.

[53] Nick Groom, “The Iconoclasts”, in The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 24-33. (pp. 24-25).

[54] Groom, p. 24.

[55] Freud, p. 225.

[56] Baldwin, p.11.

[57] Maslen pp. 19-20.

[58] Maslen, pp. 19-20.

[59] Rachel Stenner, ‘Listening to warning bells in Beware the Cat’, Early Modern Soundscapes, 2019, <https://emsoundscapes.co.uk/beware-the-cat/>.

[60] Malsen, pp. 16-17.

[61] Baldwin, p. 32.

[62] Maslen, pp. 16-17.

[63] Andrew Hadfield, ‘William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat and the question of Anglo‐Irish literature’, Irish Studies Review, 6, (1998), pp. 237-243. (p. 239).

[64] Baldwin, pp. 32-33.

[65] Baldwin, p. 27.

[66] Wald, p. 57.

[67] Baldwin, p. 28.

[68] Bronfen and Neumeier, p. 11.

[69] Hadfield, p. 241.

[70] Groom, p. 25.

[71] Baldwin, p. 49.

Bibliography

Baldwin, William, Beware the Cat, (Huntington Library: San Marino, 1988). (pp. 37, 39).

Bowen, John, “Gothic Motifs”, The British Library, 2014 <https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs> [Accessed 16 January 2022].

Bronfen, Elizabeth and Neumeier, Beate, ‘Introduction’ in Gothic Renaissance, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). pp. 1-14. (pp. 3-4).

Derrida, Jacques and Wills, David, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, Critical Inquiry, 28, (2002). pp. 369-418. (p. 372).

Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1910). pp. 129-253. (p. 241).

Groom, Nick, “The Iconoclasts”, in The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 24-33. (pp. 24-25).

Hadfield, Andrew, ‘William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat and the question of Anglo‐Irish literature’, Irish Studies Review, 6, (1998), pp. 237-243. (p. 239).

Joynes, Andrew, Medieval Ghost Stories, (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2001). (p. 126).

Keynes, Simon, ‘England 700-900’ in The New Cambridge Medieval History, eds. by Rosamond McKitterick, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). pp. 18-42. (p. 18).

Maslen, Robert, “The Cat Got Your Tongue’: Pseudo-Translation, Conversion, and Control in William Baldwin's “Beware the Cat”’, Translation and Literature, 8, (1999). pp. 3-27. (p. 4).

Stenner, Rachel, ‘Listening to warning bells in Beware the Cat’, Early Modern Soundscapes, 2019, <https://emsoundscapes.co.uk/beware-the-cat/>.

Wald, Christina, ‘William Baldwin: Beware the Cat’ in The Reformation of Romance: The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction, (De Gruyter: Berlin, 2014). pp. 42-59. (p. 42).