“Perversity as one of the Fine Arts: creative acts of destruction in some gothic novels”

Abstract

Perversity as one of the Fine Arts: creative acts of destruction in some gothic novels.

Maria Antónia Lima (University of Évora, PORTUGAL)

Since “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe, American Gothic fiction, perhaps influenced by the example of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, has been recurrently interested in exploring themes which deal with paradoxical acts of creation, where very high cultivated people ( writers, artists and scientists) suffer from a psychic disintegration, that turn them into doubles. The duplicity of their personality leads them to play the role of creators and destroyers, artists and murderers, heroes and villains. To illustrate this subject, some contemporary works of gothic fiction will be mentioned, such as Joyce Carol Oates’ Beasts, where we can find a charismatic sculptress and a painter, who are masters in the art of crime that makes them to commit murders as if they were artistic acts of destruction. Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper will also be referred as a representative work, where an intelligent investigation presents the very disturbing theory of connecting the 19th century English painter, Walter Richard Sickert, with the murders committed by Jack, the Ripper. This will allow us to approach the subject of artistic responsibility, through the examples of some dark characters that turn themselves into true authors of evil. It’s important to notice that gothic fiction has always produced stories of transgression that show the creative process as a destructive practice common to Science and Art. These doubts about creation have nowadays originated a certain anxiety and nostalgia about the loss of certain aesthetical and ethical values, which led some authors to criticize the creator’s role. Gothic writers are particularly very willing to acknowledge that aggressiveness is inherent in artistic creation, because it possesses the same Dionysian force that is part of a very ambivalent Nature, simultaneously creative and destructive. As C. G. Jung once said, “a creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his demon.”