Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic

Abstract

Why identify a nautical Gothic?On the surface, as it were, intersections between the Gothic and the sea are so visible that the main question is why they are so rarely examined.Ships can be isolating, claustrophobic structures; ocean depths conceal monsters, secrets, bodies; the sea and its weather provide storms, sunsets, and remote locales for sublime and terrifying experiences; deep water is a useful metaphor for the interiority of the self; the ocean's precarious surface interfaces between life and death, chaos and order, self and other.And the list could go on.In nautical and maritime writing, however, Gothic conventions are often transformed, offering opportunities for rethinking or extending the scope of the Gothic in literary culture, as well as for how we might read some of its best-known fictions.Recent scholarship calls for recognition that the sea is more than just 'the backdrop to the stage on which the real action is seen to take placethat is, the landor […] as the means of connection between activities taking place at coasts and in their interiors'. 1 Treating nautical Gothic as a straightforward transposition of landward Gothic concerns to maritime settings would yield a fairly limited account of itand also do a disservice to the role of the sea in global history and ecology.So, while the articles in this special issue tackle nautical tropes in Gothic literary texts, they also do much more, repositioning the sea at the heart of their historical and analytical enquiry.'A sort of nautical gothic' A nautical Gothic lens focuses on how the sea is represented in Gothic literatureand on how it is represented Gothically in literature (including non-fiction).As a mode, style, or mood, it takes many forms and many kinds of text may swerve through it.In 1986, Dennis Berthold used the term to distinguish between the fantastic and the realistic in sea writing: in Byron's Don Juan (1819), he writes, 'the reader wanders about in a maritime fantasy.This is the stuff of which [Edgar Allan Poe's] Pym is made, a sort of nautical gothic which later writers, more experienced with ships and sailing, would strive to correct.' 2 By a 'sort of' nautical Gothic, Berthold suggests its incompatibility with nautical realities; Gothic registers offer erroneous versions of the maritime that require to be 'corrected'.That Gothic narratives do often have strong elements of romance, supernatural and fantasy (Poe had almost no firsthand knowledge of sailing) 3 need not divorce them entirely from meaningful expression of nautical experience, nor mean that sea literature cannot veer and back through the Gothic at times.Margaret Cohen demonstrates how James Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover (1827), for example, employs detailed accounts of seamanship to Gothic effect, showing how productive it can be to consider nautical realism and the Gothic together.4 Seafaring itself -or at least its representations in writing -often has strikingly Gothic dimensions.'The ship,' wrote one late-nineteenth-century sailor, invoking the vertigo of nightmares to describe movement through heavy seas, 'appears on occasions to be falling long distances through hideous space.' 5 And Gothic seas need not even be storm-fuelled: 'There is,' wrote another sailor fifty years previously,

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