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This book accounts for the resurgence of Gothic, and its immense popularity, during the British fin de siècle. In particular, Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative "abhuman" identity in its place. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, strongly indebted to nineteenth-century scientific, medical and social theories, including evolutionism, criminal anthropology and degeneration theory.
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Acknowledgments (xi)
Introduction
The abhuman (3)
Metaphysical estrangement (12)
Part I: The Gothic Material World
1. The revenge of matter (23)
2. Symptomatic readings (39)
Part II: Gothic Bodies
3. Evolutionism and the loss of human specificity (55)
4. Entropic Bodies (65)
4.1. Degenerate sub-species (66)
4.2. Abjecting whiteness: H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (79)
5. Chaotic bodies (89)
5.1. The body as palimpsest (90)
5.2. "Generalized animalism": Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau (102)
Part III: Gothic Sexualities
6. Uncanny female interiors (117)
6.1. "The inner chambers of all nameless sin": Richard Marsh's The Beetle (124)
7. Abjected masculinites (142)
Afterword
8. Narrative chaos (153)
8.1. The Three Imposters: Arthur Machen's urban chaosmos (159)
Notes (168)
Works Cited (191)
Index (200)
Review of The Gothic Body
Review Author: Julia P. Kielstra
Kelly Hurley likes her subject. How else could the rigor and extent of her analysis, the humor of her chapter subtitles (such as "The Revenge of Matter"), and the lightness of her prose be explained when, as she says in a footnote, "In general in this study, I have given extensive analysis only to those texts that leave me slightly ill" (175)? When reading the book, the uneasy juxtaposition of this light style and her heavy subject rather surprisingly works well; the reader is spared an unforgiving examination of nausea, disgust, and terror, and instead is presented with a thorough literary analysis which avoids obsessive detail. Hurley's style and subject, however, are not always compatible and do contribute, in the end, to a failure to draw satisfying conclusions.
Such a failure is relatively minor, however, as Hurley's cross-disciplinary approach begins to sharpen new intellectual tools. Hurley writes that the "topic of this book is the ruination of the human subject" (3): she examines the ways in which the human body is destroyed, both physically and metaphorically, in Gothic literature, linking that destruction both to late-nineteenth-century medical and pseudo-medical developments and to social theories of degeneration and evolution popular at that time. Rather than addressing the Gothic as a "purely reactive" genre, Hurley argues that "[t]he province of the nineteenth-century human sciences was after all very like that of the earlier Gothic novel: the pre-Victorian Gothic provided a space wherein to explore phenomena at the borders of human identity and culture... precisely those phenomena that would come under the purview of social medicine in later decades" (5-6). This is a view that is gradually coming to be accepted by critics and one that is helpfully strengthened by Hurley's work. By focusing on scientific and pseudo-scientific texts and their relation to literary ones, Hurley diffuses a potentially unappealing subject (the disgusting and nauseating aspects of some Gothic texts) and demonstrates the importance of cross-disciplinary work to Gothic literary studies. More importantly, she highlights the place of the Gothic in Victorian thought, showing it to be a site of originality and intellectual achievement, instead of only thrills and gratuitous violence.
In order to facilitate her use of both literary and scientific texts, Hurley uses contemporary literary theory and criticism, such as that of Julia Kristeva, Mary Poovey, and Rosemary Jackson, to structure her argument and to provide a vocabulary for her theoretical stance. As with all books that rely heavily on the language of literary criticism, her usually light prose can very occasionally become oppressive with its jargon. Hurley's most important borrowing is the term "abhuman," which she takes from the novelist William Hope Hodgson. She writes that "[t]he abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other" (3-4). This concept of the Gothic body is key to Hurley's discussions of H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Time Machine, Richard Marsh's The Beetle, and Arthur Machen's The Three Imposters and The Great God Pan, the novels on which she most closely and extensively focuses. The abhuman subject is the central concern of the first of Hurley's three sections in her book. She argues that "[w]ithin a materialist reality, no transcendent meaningfulness anchors the chaotic fluctuability of the material universe... Within such a reality... bodies are without integrity or stability; they are instead composite and changeful" (9). Hurley stresses the amorphousness of the abhuman body and its inability to avoid becoming nothing more than a "Thing" when she writes with her characteristic tone, "Nothing illustrates the Thing-ness of matter so admirably as slime" (34). Despite her use of both opaque critical language and an often light-hearted tone, Hurley's argument is sound and draws together the various strands of medical and literary texts convincingly.
Hurley's second section "situates the Gothic's making-abhuman of the human body within a range of evolutionist discourses" (10). She examines the links between animal bodies and human bodies, and between animal and human behaviour, which were being forged by Lombroso, Darwin, and Huxley at the fin de siecle. Wells's two novels feature prominently in this section, and by focusing primarily on these texts, Hurley shows herself capable of marshalling her evidence well, but perhaps too well; her initial arguments concerning the abhuman are marred by a preference for listing all the quotations she has found to support her work, rather than by choosing and analysing one or two more carefully. However, she admirably teases out not only the relationship of scientific discourse to the fictional Gothic, but also the byproducts of such a relationship: disgust and nausea, the physical results of scientific propositions too terrible for readers -- and characters -- of Gothic novels to contemplate calmly.
The doctrine of materialism, the underlying philosophy of the sciences which Hurley examines, becomes especially disgusting when "[i]t dwells obsessively on the horrific prospect of a human being conceived in utterly material terms" (117). Victor Frankenstein's experiment looks simplistic and harmless compared to the work of late-Victorian Gothic characters: Dr. Black, for example, in Machen's "The Inmost Light", performs terrifying neurological operations on his own wife. According to Hurley, part of the cause for the nausea and disgust Machen's characters and readers experience is due to the abhuman sexuality that is posited in this story: the last part of Hurley's study is concerned with "Victorian gender ideology," which was "a site of contestation on a number of social and discursive fronts" (10). The contradictions inherent in late-Victorian gender studies and representations reinforce Hurley's argument that, within Gothic literature, it is difficult if not impossible to create a solid and unified representation of the human body. Even that body's gender, seemingly one of the most basic and obvious identifying traits, is constantly called into question.
Hurley draws out the rhetorical implications of such an impossibility of stable representation in her "Afterword," in which she examines metaphors of the labyrinth and plot devices such as the chance encounter, mistaken identity, and impostors. This final part, like the other three in Hurley's book, is oddly truncated: she seems reluctant throughout to draw firm conclusions from her arguments. Rather, the nature of her continually shifting and changing subject seems to have infused itself into her discussion, making it difficult to arrive at a satisfying end; she herself concludes where she begins, with a quote from Machen's The Three Imposters, without suggesting further implications for her work. The combination of a light style and a heavy subject, though resulting in an interesting and enjoyable book to read, seems also to result in Hurley's inability to address the issues her topic raises with the depth required to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. The book is successful in that it aligns different genres in an original and informative way; it fails, however, to show the wider implications for work of this kind. This failure is especially disappointing as cross- disciplinary work is increasingly essential to literary studies. Hurley's book does, however, suggest many ways such work can be carried out in an intelligent and original manner.
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