Positive Liberty

Gothic fiction is not often remembered as an important genre in the literature of liberty. This is unfortunate, since some truly great works have much to offer the liberty-minded, such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, which provides, among other things, a scathing indictment of how liberty without responsibility degenerates into dangerous license, thus rescuing the best of Wollstonecraft and Godwin from the worst of Romanticism.

I hope you will forgive the self-promotion, but last month, Valancourt Books published a new edition of an important Gothic classic, Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s 1845 epic The Magic Goblet, the first English edition in well over a century. (It is edited by yours truly.) The author, Emilie Flygare-Carlén, worked her way up from humble beginnings as a fisherman’s daughter to become the first “professional novelist” in Sweden, and certainly one of Europe’s most celebrated women novelists. Her writing also underscores the themes of liberty in the Gothic tradition. The Magic Goblet, for example, reflects profound frustration with social institutions that inhibit economic mobility and self-betterment, as well as with the dependent, unequal status of women in her country. After reading the novel, one is not surprised to learn that Flygare-Carlén championed education and supported women’s suffrage. Because of her honest depictions of divorce and unwed motherhood, The North American Review in 1845 called The Magic Goblet a “wild phantasmagoria of unmixed and unaccountable evil.” Not a flattering review, perhaps, but hey, it sold books.

At its heart, Gothic literature was and is subversive literature, defying conventions, pushing boundaries, and questioning coercive powers. Now that the Gothic is gaining new attention from the academy (see, for example, the journals Gothic Studies and The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies), and new and innovative Gothic-specific presses are emerging (such as Valancourt Books, Zittaw Press, and Whitlock Publishing), perhaps it is a good time for libertarians to revisit one of the great subversive genres of literature.

Trackback URI |