A Gothic Unconscious
Salisbury Cathedral as Metaphor and Symptom in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8863296 |
|---|---|
| Authors | George Sadaka (0000-0001-8989-8483, Lebanese American University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 100 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 407-421 |
| Publication date | 2019-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0013838x.2018.1558704 |
| OpenAlex | W2919803903 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 14 |
Salisbury Cathedral is a Gothic image that has not been tackled before by any critical account of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. I argue that the cathedral is an (in)visible image that enunciates the desire of this novel to supersede its metonymic spoofing of Gothic romances in favour of realism, and to embed resistance to the phallocentric Gothic. I argue that Salisbury is one big metaphor that stops the metonymization of Gothic simulacra in the sequential order of narrative. I also regard Salisbury as a Lacanian symptom that represses (as unterdrückt in Freudian terms) Austen’s view of the resistance and survival of oppressed women which she previously and slightly expresses in her juvenile History of England (1791) through her critique of the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII. The symbolic enunciation of Salisbury as metaphor enables me to see it also as a symptom of feminine repression that gains a dimension of anthropomorphic emancipation whereby destroyed abbeys may be seen as destroyed women (victims of metonymy) and intact abbeys may be considered as surviving women (victors of metaphor)
Art · Art history · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Psychoanalysis · Unconscious mind · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · History · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |