DECAY, DEATH & DARING

”Fuseli’s protagonists are similarly given names that just ‘Sound’ right, his characters are equally formulaic, and it is in this disregard for narrative convention, and the moral instruction that was meant to be achieved through a coherent and legible story, that Fuseli can be considered as a kind of Gothic artist. Fuseli’s exclusive emphasis on a single moment of drama which can not be contextualised by reference to a larger narrative forces the viewer to attend to the formal arrangement of bodies in order to extricate any sort of content. The ‘message’ or narrative content is secondary to the experience of the image, and Fuseli’s artistic performances are about the play of fundamentally vacuous signs, rather than interior or hidden messages.”….

Henry Fuseli Thor Battering The Mitgard Serpent 1790 Oil on canvas, 1310 x 910 mm

Henry Fuseli Thor Battering The Mitgard Serpent 1790 Oil on canvas, 1310 x 910 mm

Matthew Lewis and his ”The Monk” represented the peak, or ”reductio ad absurdum” , of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel. it borrowed an antique architectural background from Horace Walpole and the wild impieties of William Beckford’s ”Vathek” , and finally incorporated the ethereal world of dungeons, chains and shadows found in Ann Radcliffe’s ”The Mysteries of  Udolpho”. But he pushed the limit further by heaping innumerable images of death and decay alongside elaborate pictures of lust and license. Here, he oudid the Elizabethan poets. Shakespeare himself, in ”Romeo and Juliet” , shows a greedy appetite for horrors; but Juliet, immured in the tomb of the Capulets, has an easy fate compared with Lewis’s Antonia, who is eventually ravished by the infamous monk near ”three putrid half-corrupted bodies”.

Fuseli. ''This play is a comedy. Titania, queen of the fairies, has had magic ointment put on her eyelids while she sleeps; this makes her fall in love with the first person she sees on awakening. That person happens to be a human being, Bottom. He is a weaver who has gone into the wood with his friends to rehearse a play in which he wears an ass's head.''

Fuseli. ''This play is a comedy. Titania, queen of the fairies, has had magic ointment put on her eyelids while she sleeps; this makes her fall in love with the first person she sees on awakening. That person happens to be a human being, Bottom. He is a weaver who has gone into the wood with his friends to rehearse a play in which he wears an ass's head.''

Lewis’s ”The Monk” was not, however, the end of the Gothic novel; at the beginning of the next century the form was still so widely popular that Jane Austen gave us her famous dialogue between two impressionable young novel addicts, Catherine Morland, the heroine of ”Northanger Abbey,” and her beloved companion Isabella Thorpe. Isabella has just lent her friend a copy of Mrs. Radcliffe’s masterpiece.

”In Northanger Abbey, Austen specifically parodies Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, a stock novel in the Gothic genre. Her main character, Catherine Morland, is the exact opposite of the Gothic heroine; she is ugly, boring, and has trouble attracting a man. Catherine also finds herself in situations that are decidedly normal and plain, but she believes are truly supernatural. In these ways, Austen parodies the Gothic genre, but manages to create a unique novel.” Chapter Six:


''Henry Fuseli Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel's Spear (Satan flieht, von Ithuriels Speer beruht) 1779 Oil on canvas, 2305 x 2763 mm Lent by the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart''

''Henry Fuseli Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel's Spear (Satan flieht, von Ithuriels Speer beruht) 1779 Oil on canvas, 2305 x 2763 mm Lent by the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart''

”But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?”

“Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.”

“Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?”


h! Yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me — I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.”

“Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”

“Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?”

“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocketbook. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”

“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

''Henry Fuseli Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma exhibited 1783 Oil on canvas, 991 x 1257 mm Presented by the National Art Collections Fund 1941''

''Henry Fuseli Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma exhibited 1783 Oil on canvas, 991 x 1257 mm Presented by the National Art Collections Fund 1941''

Jane Austen missed much of the point that the superficial signs of the Gothic are not significant for the literal content they may convey; on the contrary, it is the subjective frisson generated by the play of those signs that counts. The Gothic romance connected with a cult of sensibility; a new emphasis on the value and virtue of personal feelings over social conventions. It was a backlash;   the Gothic demands a way of reading that meant that the question of exemplary masculine action is almost irrelevant. The whole story cannot be known, so it is a momentary action, conveyed in a semantic vacuum, which defines the hero.

The gothic world is defined by an absence of content;  it is defined through the shifting processes of personal interaction and exchange that typify commercial society rather than the fixed certainties of ‘genealogy’  that were the point of departure in conventional narrative imagery. An emphasis on outmoded, and exaggerated styles of chivalry offered a form of release from what was considered then the corruption of modern life. There was an element of social and political radicalism that was articulated even if this meant becoming absurd.

Nor was the vogue now confined to foolish young women who frequented the Bath circulating library. Before 1811 Shelley had written two romances, ”Zastrozzi” and St. Irvyne” , of the most extravagantly Gothic type; mary Shelley, in 1818, produced ”Frankenstein” , a far more interesting and original story; and in 1819 Dr. John Polidori, Byron’s private traveling physician, endeavored to take the literary world by storm with his necrophilic tale ”The Vampyre”. ”Melmoth the Wanderer” , the work of an Irish clergyman, Charles Robert Maturin, from whom Oscar Wilde claimed descent, was published in the year 1820; and Thomas De Quincey wrote ”The Avenger” as late as 1838.

Thus, the Gothic novel lingered on, like some aged saurian that had managed to survive the heyday of the giant reptiles, while all around it the climate was slowly changing. The year 1836 had seen the emergence of a great new literary star; ”Pickwick Papers” was soon followed by ”Oliver Twist” and ”Nicholas Nickelby” . A new spirit of Cockney realism had begun to illuminate the English novel, and as it gained brilliance, the specters of Gothic fancy flickered and paled and dissolved, at last, into broad Victorian daylight.

Fuseli. ''Years later, the poet Lord Byron tried to find out the source of Fuseli's characters for his painting Ezzelin and Meduna (1779, Soane Museum), only to be informed by the artist that these had been invented by him.''

Fuseli. ''Years later, the poet Lord Byron tried to find out the source of Fuseli's characters for his painting Ezzelin and Meduna (1779, Soane Museum), only to be informed by the artist that these had been invented by him.''

The Gothic visual art is personified by Henry Fuseli,   an artist whose work, despite its many risible and superficial qualities, was richly involved in a historical moment wherein the status of Gothic fantasy, and the attendant issues about the nature of cultural representation, the national past, and the formation of gender identity, underwent significant transformations. Gothic Romance, in literature, in performance, and in Fuseli’s art, was emerging as a cultural form whose debased and often incoherent and incomprehensible  qualities were acknowledged even by its supporters. Yet it was a form that could convey the consequences of Britain’s imperial troubles in a very real way,  and provide a means of addressing and working-through urgent social and political anxieties.

Wright of Derby Sir Brooke Boothby  1781.

Wright of Derby Sir Brooke Boothby 1781.

The fantastical and medievalising imagery associated with the literary genre of Gothic Romance and the implication of visual artists like Fuseli in the wider culture of the Gothic in such a complete a form of popular culture in a complex  complex manner by framing the social and political narrative in contexts heretofore non-existent in the popular culture.  Combining elements of both high culture and sensationalist entertainment, the high-minded and the downright silly, and public and the personal, these literary and artistic representations were a form of cultural goods  that were difficult to situate in relation to the shifting and necessarily uneasy territories of cultural performance and consumption of the 1770s and 1780s, when in Britain social, aesthetic and political values were being thoroughly interrogated in the face of the profoundly divisive historical trauma of the American Revolution.

''This is the first illustrated edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, originally published in 1818. Von Holst’s design evokes the heroic, heavy-limbed figures of Fuseli. The setting, with its dramatic lighting and medieval tracery, is thoroughly Gothic in style.''

''This is the first illustrated edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, originally published in 1818. Von Holst’s design evokes the heroic, heavy-limbed figures of Fuseli. The setting, with its dramatic lighting and medieval tracery, is thoroughly Gothic in style.''

In London in 1779, Fuseli   showed a series of works at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions, based on subjects from English literature, the Classics, and subjects of his own invention,  notably the famous Nightmare exhibited in 1782 , that had swiftly confirmed his reputation as a painter of the horrible, fantastic and perverse.  These preoccupations were folded into his public image as a wild, anti-social eccentric, much given to foul language and daring proclamations against conformity delivered in his distinctive Swiss accent. Rumours of his indulging in opium use and eating raw pork to fuel his sickly imagination lent a pathological element to his public reputation, making him one of the best-known, and certainly most controversial, artists of the day. Whether viewed as a genius or as a fraud, Fuseli’s reputation was as a kind of magician, occupied with arcane and supernatural matters; a persona that was widely adopted by or accentuated by other Gothic artists which often assumed occult tendencies and a marked anti-Catholic bias.

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