[Tom] Recently, Professor Alison Milbank published a book called 'God
and the Gothic.' So I thought it would be interesting
to invite her to come in today
and to tell us why study God Gothic in a theology department.
Well, it's easy to see why you should study God, but to study God and
the Gothic in a Theology Department?
[Alison Milbank] That is a good question and
many Gothic scholars would
ask the same question because the way they see it,
Gothic are tales of incarceration and entrapment,
often by monastic tyrants and usurpers,
and the protagonist escapes.
And this is usually interpreted as
the narrative of the enlightenment itself,
in which society escapes
from superstition and religious entrapment.
Therefore, it is routinely read as
a secularizing narrative, but I seek to argue the opposite.
I begin my book by showing that in fact,
these narratives are replayings of the reformation, of
Protestant maidens escaping from Catholic entrapment.
And an early Gothic novel by Horace Walpole,
The Castle of Otranto, almost has the story
of Henry the eighth and his wives and the divorce itself
in the narrative, which is ironized and made fun of.
So it can be seen,
and I do argue that it is in
the beginning a very Protestant narrative.
John Foxe, for example,
in the Reformation period,
the historian, wrote stories about
heroines like Anne Askew who is incarcerated in
the tower by the Catholic authorities and
is not daunted and makes
a mental escape even though she is tortured.
So in the beginning,
Protestantism is gothic, if you like.
And Foxe talks about escaping from Cain's castles,
which are the monastic orders.
But even Foxe in the very beginning
realised that an awful lot had been lost.
And in fact, the Gothic describes a double gesture,
a gesture of escape from a Catholic past
and then nostalgia for that which you have lost.
And in fact, Foxe was aware that they had destroyed
the monastic libraries and was very sad about that,
even though that was the effect of the dissolution.
And he sought also to argue that Protestantism
was the true heir of Christianity.
But it wasn't a new thing,
but went back to the beginning and there had in
fact been a usurper in between.
And so I argue that this is a kind of buried narrative
between, behind the early Gothic fictions.
And there are of course,
a whole body of fictions that come out of
Scotland which are Calvinist in origin.
And I would include in that The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Stevenson,
as well as James Hogg's Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner.
And this is truly Calvinist.
It's about duality,
and Calvinism in its origin is about double predestination,
about questioning whether you are saved or not, and Dr Jekyll's
problem is that he has this Calvinist duality.
You might even say a Christian duality.
We are both beast
and angel said Pascal,
but he can't deal with it.
He can't deal with his duality.
So his problem is trying to close it down and so
my book tries to argue that Calvinism often provides
quite helpful kinds of
anthropologies for writing Gothic fiction.
And in fact, we read the double as again, a secularizing thing,
whereas it's often a kind of entry into a religious problem.
The problem with Paul in the book of Romans:
'The good I would do,
I don't do.
The bad I would not do,
that I do.' That's what
Stevenson's about. So in the 19th century,
Gothic can be seen as going deeper into the self.
And I tried to show that this only deepens its religious engagement.
As in the work of Irish,
our Anglo Irish gothic writers like Sheraton Le Fanu,
and Bram Stoker in Dracula.
And there I argue that what they are
seeking through the little group of
people who are after
the vampire Dracula in the novel of the same name,
is a kind of Christian ecumenism where
Catholics and Protestants joined together to defeat the vampire,
partly through textual sources,
quasi-Bibles, if you like,
and witnesses, and partly through Catholic sacramental practices,
united in acts of self-sacrifice.
And I read the whole Gothic tradition in
the Protestant mode, through Maturin all the way up to
Stoker as a form of
finding peace between different kinds of Christians.
And then in the 20th century,
I move into mystical Gothic,
Gothic of Christian occultists,
people like Arthur Machen and even Evelyn
Underhill who, for a short while, belonged
to the Order of the Golden Dawn.
And I seek in their writings an
attempt to deal with materialism and
argue that the way down into the darkness is the way
up -- a bringing of the material to full presence.
So the whole thing, which ends up with M. R. James and Meade
Faulkner, antiquarian ghost story writers,
is thoroughly Christian and even Anglican,
because it's seeking a mediation between material and spiritual,
between Catholic and Protestant.
And it finds its full place in a Theology Department where we're
ready to read those texts on
their own terms and not merely subvert them.
[Tom] Alison, that is just a simply wonderful introduction.
And if you want to know more, go and read Alison's book.