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Museums of the Mind: The Gothic and the Art of Memory

The most ancient myths tell of the transgressive nature of the backward glance. Lot's wife heedlessly looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. No sooner has Orpheus glanced at Eurydice, than she is lost to him forever. Yet the Gothic, which emerges in an increasingly secularized society, is a genre that glorifies transgression. Indeed its window on the past suggests the Claude glass as the emblematic artifact of late eighteenth-century English culture. This small convex mirror, originally used by landscape painters, became obligatory equipment for the English tourist seeking picturesque views of nature. Spectators sought out precisely determined viewing stations, turned their backs to the natural scene and viewed it in the glass, framed like a picture and transformed by the mirror's tinted background foils into an image in the style of the then-fashionable painter, Claude Lorrain.' As its name suggests, the gothic purports to represent a distant, even primitive past. It is nevertheless wholly a product of its day, an eighteenth-century framing of time gone by. This paper will embrace the view that the Gothic, examined in novels by William Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, is part of a search for a sacred that is, of necessity, personalized, and that it is driven by the eighteenthcentury cult of sensibility, through which "we are forever urged to escape from the anxiety of emptiness and to seek, through outside sensations and fleeting thoughts, a fullness and intensity that must be continually renewed."2