The Grotesque in 19th-Century English Fiction and Prose

Introduction: The Grotesque as a Rhetorical Mode

One crucial way in which English fiction and English non-fiction prose in the nineteenth century inform each other is in the development of the grotesque as a rhetorical mode. Although "grotesque" is a somewhat loose critical category, it is nonetheless common in critical discourse of the period and since, and generally refers to the exaggeration of unnaturalness, ugliness, or strangeness, usually pushed to an effect quite near comedy. Certainly the grotesque in nineteenth-century English literature is observable as an emergent mode. To turn, in poetry, from Wordsworth to such later works as Tennyson's "Saint Simeon Stylites," Browning's "Caliban Upon Setebos," or the Death's Jest-Book of Thomas Lovell Beddoes is to witness the emergence of a poetic grotesque style that had not previously existed.

The use of the grotesque in nineteenth-century prose — fictional or otherwise — is, as this paper will argue, a mode of mockery, which therefore carries an implicit element of critical purpose.

Gothic vs. Grotesque: Origins and Distinctions

What did exist before the nineteenth century, and what may be considered the possible progenitor of the grotesque as a category in prose, is the Gothic. However, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic strain in English literature is not to be conflated with the grotesque. While Gothic fiction in William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, and "Monk" Lewis certainly exploited grotesque-seeming elements, those elements generally lacked the comic edge visible in the grotesque: they are meant to produce horror, but not laughter or critical distance. The grotesque, by contrast, carries that comic edge and the capacity for mockery that gives it its critical power.

Early Nineteenth Century: Austen and Coleridge in 1817

To look at two early nineteenth-century examples of the emergence of the grotesque from Gothic, we may consider a convenient pair — one fictional and one non-fictional — both published in 1817. These are Austen's Northanger Abbey and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Any discussion of the Gothic is obliged to take account of Austen's first complete novel, if only because it is intended, through mockery, to do away with the Gothic mode altogether. It is important to note that for Austen, the Gothic mode is still defined by fear — it is a work intended to produce sensations of terror in the reader. Austen therefore allows her "heroine" Catherine Morland (a word that must be placed in ironic quotation marks, since Catherine's self-dramatization as a Gothic "heroine" is signposted in the novel's opening sentence) to experience those terrors even though the reader knows there is nothing to be afraid of:

Catherine, as she crossed the hall, listened to the tempest with sensations of awe; and, when she heard it rage round a corner of the ancient building and close with sudden fury a distant door, felt for the first time that she was really in an abbey. Yes, these were characteristic sounds; they brought to her recollection a countless variety of dreadful situations and horrid scenes, which such buildings had witnessed, and such storms ushered in; and most heartily did she rejoice in the happier circumstances attending her entrance within walls so solemn! She had nothing to dread from midnight assassins or drunken gallants. (Austen, Chapter 21)

The "dreadful situations and horrid scenes" which Austen deliberately leaves unenumerated are familiar to any reader of Gothic fiction, but Austen's point is that they are unrealistic flights of fancy. In some sense, Austen remains very much a late eighteenth-century rationalist, and her ironic distance holds the imaginative excess of Gothic at arm's length.

Turning to Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, published in the same year, we may find the same dialectic of rationalist skepticism — with an element of mockery — meeting imaginative excess, though with an altogether different result. In Chapter IX of the Biographia, Coleridge is describing the limits set upon philosophy and science by respectable consensus:

Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last two or three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science….Therefore the true depth of science, and the penetration to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living ground of all things. These, then, because their names had never been enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the registered livery-men as interlopers on their rights and privileges. All without distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those, whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the most part, poor copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration; but the truly inspired likewise, the originals themselves. And this for no other reason, but because they were the unlearned, men of humble and obscure occupations. (Coleridge, Biographia, Chapter IX)

To a certain extent, Coleridge's polemical point here is consistent with his early radical politics and his emergence from the lively intellectual community of London's dissenting academies at a time when religious non-conformists — like the Unitarian Coleridge — were not permitted to attend Oxford or Cambridge. He is correct that science and philosophy were more active among "humble and obscure" persons, such as Joseph Priestley or Anna Letitia Barbauld, who had emerged from the dissenting academies because they were barred by religion or gender from Oxbridge intellectual respectability. What is crucial to note, however, is that Coleridge identifies "grotesque" as the term of dismissal applied to those lively and unfettered imaginations he is otherwise at pains to valorize.

Both Austen and Coleridge, in other words, understand that the imaginative excess associated with the grotesque is something that could be readily dismissed through mockery in 1817. Austen would harness that mockery to dismiss the vogue for Gothic fiction, whereas Coleridge would move beyond the mockery to show where, in philosophy and science, imagination is most vital — even if not quite socially respectable.