Merchant, P.

English

Canterbury Research and Theses Environment

Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s Gothic Voices “I ran down & got the meat chopper & smashed in panels of door…” This is the moment when the carefully concocted topsy-turviness for which Vice Versâ had made Thomas Anstey Guthrie famous (as ‘F. Anstey’) tips over into the raw terror of The Shining. Now that a manuscript of 1888 which Anstey kept under wraps has, in suitably Gothic style, come to light – and is forthcoming from Valancourt Books – a new dimension to his writing is emerging. “The Statement of V.M. patient at Bethnal House Asylum” was a remarkable experiment on Anstey’s part, which not only saw him inhabit a female consciousness (the V stands for Violet, though this Violet is less for shrinking than for door-smashing) but drew upon an interest in mental and neurological disorders that for Anstey was increasingly close to home. His brother Leonard, later a leading neurologist, was about to start work at the Regent’s Park Hospital for Nervous and Epileptic Diseases; and his sister’s father-in-law had been Medical Superintendent at Bethnal House itself. What Violet suffers, auditory hallucinations and “the awful frenzy of a maddened brain,” was to be downplayed in the novel into which, after seven years, Anstey would transform his suppressed manuscript. The Statement of Stella Maberly reverts to paradoxical topsy-turviness and deploys the supernatural simply for the sake of the substitution – a Una replaced by a Duessa – with which it enables Anstey to thicken the plot. But the painfully psychologised Gothic of the forgotten Ur-“Statement” is more compelling by far. 

"Thomas Anstey Guthrie's gothic voices"

https://repository.canterbury.ac.uk/download/ea3990460c93a951c14fa5664ce2d984fc0f98cbef3d57c8bf01d954328fc7e4/37386/16554_ABSTRACT%20for%20Gothic%20Voices.pdf

"Thomas Anstey Guthrie's gothic voices"

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Canterbury Research and Theses Environment