Reviewed by:

• Servants and the Gothic, 1764–1841: A Half-told Tale by Kathleen Hudson
• Elizabeth Neiman (bio)

Servants in long-eighteenth-century gothics are peripheral and yet ever-present; they act as appendages to protagonists and villains alike. Kathleen Hudson draws this stock figure out from the shadows, showing how servants perform a protean identity that destabilizes master narratives about Enlightenment selfhood and society. Hudson breaks new ground with her contention that servants—as liminal figures that raise uneasy questions about identity—are metafictional devices and even authorial metonyms. Beginning with Horace Walpole’s debt in The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Shakespearean comic servants, Hudson pairs gothic novels with theatrical adaptations to call attention to the physicality of performance, even in prose. In examining the “convention” of the hidden manuscript, for example, Hudson shows that servants frequently appear as actual artifacts, as living and breathing manuscripts. As they tell their stories to the eager protagonist, they perform relationships between authors and readers. Hudson’s introduction identifies the gothic’s preoccupation with servant storytellers as part and product of generally widespread anxieties among the middle and upper classes [End Page 295] in a rapidly changing commercial economy. Throughout the book, Hudson illustrates that gothic novels reproduce the expected—didactically faithful or villainous servants—and yet simultaneously, whether wittingly or not, also “Gothicize” these stereotypes through servants’ performances of social class and gender. These performances, which often seem emotional and irrational, blur boundaries between self/other and master/servant. Tracing how this unsettling performance plays out across a wide literary field, Hudson contributes to recent work that illuminates commonalities among so-called “masculine” and “feminine” gothics and “market-driven” and “political” ones.

Servants and the Gothic is ambitious in its reach. Hudson looks both before and beyond the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era gothic to suggest that its servant storytellers recall pre-Enlightenment folklore even while exerting a proto-postmodern tug on dominant narratives with continued resonance today (see her reading of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049). Of particular importance is the assessment in chapter 2 of popular gothics like Ann Radcliffe’s alongside political ones by William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, as this comparison shows that in popular and political texts alike, servants unsettle dominant narratives (both in-text and contextually). Hudson builds on this framework in chapter 3 by reminding us that the imposing and handsome Moor of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1808) is, after all, a servant. As the Devil in disguise, Zofloya intentionally performs servility. This performance is increasingly clear to readers, though not to the imperious anti-heroine Victoria, whose own (unwitting) performance as mistress leads her to lose control of herself and her narrative. As Hudson underscores, Zofloya’s performance of servitude underwrites Victoria’s downfall, making Zofloya an authorial figure. Hudson establishes that Dacre’s variation on the stock-gothic servant as storyteller enables her to recycle stereotypes about blackness as dangerous and Other, in contrast to abolitionist literature, in which Black characters appear as victims and abolitionists as saviours. Hudson infers that Zofloya’s performance of servility and his eventual mastery over Victoria destabilizes this binary, constructed by white British authors, that distinguishes the white British subject from African Other, whether that Other is figured as demon or victim.

Servants are so pervasive by the 1810s, Hudson contends in the final chapter, that whether present or absent, the servant figure sparks in novations. First, Hudson notes the further popularizing of the form via chapbooks (“trade gothics” are much shorter than gothic novels and are often by anonymous and obscure authors). Second, she identifies second-generation Romantics like Walter Scott, James Hogg, and Mary Shelley, who use gothic conventions to forge new ground. Hudson evaluates Scott’s historical romances of the late 1810s and 1820s, Hogg’s metatextual The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), and Shelley’s Frankenstein (both the 1818 and 1831 versions), along with Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823 [End Page 296] theatrical adaptation, Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein. But Hudson does...

审核人：

• 仆人和哥特式，1764-1841年：凯瑟琳·哈德森（Kathleen Hudson）讲的一个半讲故事
• 伊丽莎白·内曼（生物）

十八世纪哥特式的仆人是外围的，而且永远存在。他们充当主角和恶棍的附属物。凯瑟琳·哈德森（Kathleen Hudson）从阴影中勾勒出这只股票，展示了仆人如何表现出千变万化的身份，这破坏了关于启蒙运动自我和社会的主要叙事的稳定性。哈德森以她的论断开辟了新天地，她认为仆人（作为对身份提出不安问题的门卫人物）是超小说的装置，甚至是作者的代名词。从霍勒斯·沃波尔（Horace Walpole）在奥特朗托城堡（The Castle of Otranto）的债务开始哈德逊（1764）对于莎士比亚的漫画仆人来说，是将哥特式小说与戏剧改编结合起来的，以唤起人们对表演物理性的关注，甚至在散文中也是如此。例如，在检查隐藏的手稿的“惯例”时，哈德森（Hudson）表明，仆人经常作为实际的文物出现，就像生活和呼吸的手稿一样。当他们向急切的主人公讲述他们的故事时，他们在作者和读者之间建立关系。哈德森的介绍将哥特人对仆人讲故事的关注作为中产阶级和上层阶级普遍焦虑症的一部分和产物[End Page 295]在快速变化的商业经济中。在整本书中，哈德森都举例说明了哥特小说再现了期望的对象（在学说上忠实或卑鄙的仆人），同时，无论是有意还是无意，它们都通过仆人在社会阶层和性别上的表现来“刻板化”这些陈规定型观念。这些似乎常常令人激动和不合理的表演模糊了自己/他人与主人/仆人之间的界限。为了追踪这种令人不安的表现如何在广泛的文学领域中发挥作用，哈德森为最近的工作做出了贡献，阐明了所谓的“男性”和“女性”哥特式以及“市场主导”和“政治”之间的共性。

仆人和哥特人的野心勃勃。哈德逊在18世纪和浪漫主义时期的哥特之前和之后都进行了研究，表明它的仆人讲故事的人回想起启蒙运动之前的民间传说，甚至在今天对主流叙事施加了原始的后现代的拉锯，并且今天仍在不断地引起共鸣（请参阅她对丹尼斯·维伦纽夫的《银翼杀手》的阅读）2049）。尤为重要的是在第二章中对流行哥特式艺术的评估，例如安德·拉德克利夫（Ann Radcliffe）和威廉·戈德温（William Godwin）和玛丽·沃尔斯通克拉夫特（Mary Wollstonecraft）的政治性文学的评估，因为这种比较表明，在通俗文本和政治文本中，仆人都无法使占主导地位的叙事（无论是在文本方面还是在上下文方面）都难以解决。哈德森在第3章中以此框架为基础，提醒我们夏洛特·达克雷（Charlotte Dacre）的佐夫洛亚（Zofloya）雄伟而英俊的沼地（1808）毕竟是仆人。作为变相的恶魔，佐夫洛亚有意执行奴役。对于读者来说，这种表现越来越清晰，尽管对于顽强的反女英雄维多利亚（Victoria）而言，情况并非如此，维多利亚作为情妇的自己（不知情的表现）使她失去了对自己和叙事的控制。正如哈德森所强调的那样，佐夫洛伊亚的奴役表现支撑了维多利亚的倒台，使佐夫洛伊亚成为一位权威人物。哈德逊认为，达克雷（Dacre）对这位哥特哥特式仆人讲故事的说法使她能够重新利用关于黑人作为危险主义者和其他人的刻板印象，而与废奴主义文学相反，在黑人文学中，黑人角色是受害者，而废奴主义者则是救世主。哈德逊（Hadson）推断，佐菲罗亚（Zofloya）的奴役表现以及他最终对维多利亚的掌控破坏了这种二元关系的稳定性，

哈德森在最后一章中争辩说，到1810年代，仆人是如此普遍，以至于无论有没有人，仆人的身影都在不断创新。首先，哈德森（Hudson）注意到通过抄本进一步普及了这种形式（“贸易哥特式”比哥特式小说要短得多，并且常常是匿名的和晦涩的作者）。其次，她确定了第二代浪漫主义者，例如沃尔特·斯科特（Walter Scott），詹姆斯·霍格（James Hogg）和玛丽·雪莱（Mary Shelley），他们利用哥特式的约定开拓了新的领域。哈德森评估斯科特的历史在1810年代末和1820年代的传奇故事，霍格的metatextual回忆录和正当罪人自白（1824），和雪莱的弗兰肯斯坦（无论是1818年和1831年版本），与理查德布林斯利皮克的1823沿[尾页296]戏剧适应，假定; 或科学怪人的命运。但是哈德森确实...