Gothic Visions, Romantic Acoustics

Citation

Townshend D (2005) Gothic Visions, Romantic Acoustics. In: Miles R (ed.) Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era. Romantic Circles Praxis. College Park, MD: University of Maryland. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/gothic/townshend/townshend.html

Abstract
This essay approaches the relationship between the Gothic and the rise of high Romantic aesthetics by means of a distinction between sight and sound, vision and hearing. Proceeding through a rereading of Wordsworth and Coleridge's respective condemnations of Gothic romance, the essay argues that early versions of the Romantic aesthetic sought to stake out its differences from the perceived cultural taint of the Gothic by effecting a crucial shift from the eye to the ear, substituting for the florid visuality of Gothic romance the cadences, metres and rhymes of the Romantic poetic acoustic. While the visuality of the Gothic rendered it hardly distinguishable from the camera obscura and other populist modes of entertainment of its day, the Romantic response sought to privilege the subject's perception of sound over vision by installing the figures of the nightingale and Aeolian harp at the centre of its poetic alternative. Illustrating this consistent privileging of sound over sight in a range of poetic contexts, the essay turns to consider the case of Ann Radcliffe's own acoustic revision in The Italian of the visual excesses of Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk, maintaining that if Radcliffe did indeed enjoy the approval of the Romantic literati, this was partly the result of her similar offering up of sound as a positive alternative to the perceived dangers of sight and heightened visibility.