The Subterraneous Passage; Or, Gothic Cell - Sarah Wilkinson
This week for the MA module “The Rise of the Gothic”, I, along with one of my classmates (colleagues, perhaps? Peers? I don’t know), have been studying The Subterraneous Passage; Or, Gothic Cell, by Sarah Wilkinson. It was published in 1803 as a bluebook, which was a very cheap form of print distribution and therefore meant that books finally got to the masses and were no longer reserved for the intellectually and financially elite (in those days intellectual and financial elitism were usually synonymous).
The first thing that struck me, before I’d even opened the text, was a pondering on whether that this novella (used loosely) being a bluebook reflects in some way the quality of the writing it contains; was Sarah Wilkinson not good enough a writer to have her work put to print by one of the more credible publishing houses? From what I thought of this text, I would guess that no, she wasn’t, although she has still produced a very enjoyable snippet of literature.
The pace of this novella is incredibly varied and Wilkinson’s narration throughout is abrupt and without unnecessary wordiness. In some respects this was a welcome change from the likes of Ann Radcliffe, who seem to write an awful lot of description to say very little. However, in omitting fanciful descriptive passages, Wilkinson also omits a lot of detail that could have been either very enjoyable for the reader, or useful for the development of the plot, or both. For example, Wilkinson’s narration glosses over the story of Bertha, Bertrand Dubois’ widow, in the barest essentials, and I for one would have rather enjoyed a little more elaboration on this aspect of the story, not because it adds depth to the plot to be more explicit, but because it is so very cathartic to hear of the misfortunes of others. It also rather annoyed me that it is ignored until the end that Emily is pregnant, and very pregnant at that, when something scandalous and incredibly Gothic could have been made of her perhaps unwilling submission to her husband’s passions.
The ending of the novella, I found, culminated rather speedily and in something of an undignified manner, really. Reading it felt a lot like being told “the bad guys die (including the baby, so there is no trace of the villainy left), so does one of the good guys, then finally everyone lives happily ever after until they die of old age. The end.” It was almost as dissatisfying as Charlotte Bronte’s famous “reader, I married him” epilogue appended to the end of Jane Eyre (which incidentally is the sole reason that Wuthering Heights beats it to the top spot in the rankings of my favourite book of all time). It was very predictable in that Emily finally managed to secure a happy marriage with a man she loves (hurrah for the Romance genre) and everything transpired more or less exactly as one would predict - clearly Wilkinson was not one for duping the reader as Radcliffe liked to do.
The written style throughout is what I would call “quite formal”, but not exceptionally. Wilkinson makes a few colloquial grammatical slips that betray her education as having been not quite of the standard as her more expensively published and elitist contemporaries, using “was” instead of “were”, for example, and the abrupt, matter of fact style she adopts, without much decorative language, is also a tell of this to me.
For me, this text was very much driven by plot rather than the eloquence of the language. I have to admit that I actually prefer this style of writing in general, and padded out with some additional gory detail and maybe a pretend ghost or two to highlight the guilt of the villains, this short snippet has the making of an absolutely rivetting novel. I don’t know much about Wilkinson’s background or what happened to her after this was published in 1803, but I would love to know if she ever made this into what it has the potential to be.
Wilkinson, Sarah [1803] The Subterraneous Passage; Or, Gothic Cell (2004) Zittaw Press
