88
LESLIE FIEDLER
this place is disguised-as a fashionable milliner's shop in Reynolds',
for instance, though it may simply be buried away out of sight, as in
Lippard. In any event, it must finally be revealed, exposed-in an
age where exploitation, social and sexual, is no longer blatant and
open as in pre-Revolutionary days, but concealed behind the facade
of "business as usual."
The classic Gothic Novel was radical in its politics, but radical
in an oddly retrospective way; which is to say, its authors attacked
the inherited evils of the past as represented especially by the Inquisi–
tion and the remnants of the Feudal aristocracy. The writers of pop–
ular Gothic, on the other hand, fought against the new masters, not
the old, the hidden rather than open exploiters: factory owners, cap–
italists, merchants, as well as the pimps and thugs who serve them,
and the lawyers and clergy who provide them cover and camouflage.
The popular novel thinks of itself, then, as exposing, revealing, muck–
raking; and in this sense, it is closely allied with the illustrated comic
newspaper, which appeared just before it, to provide the "inside
dope" on those in power-stripping the rich and beautiful naked
to provide the impotent poor a kind of vicarious revenge, as well as
a sexual
frisson.
Unlike such newspapers, however, the popular novel
was aimed not merely at provoking a snigger and grin but a real
shudder of horror as well, repulsion tempered with wonder and awe.
The popular novel did not utterly reject the
comic,
but it yearned for
the "marvelous," too. And here James Fenimore Cooper provided
a more useful model than, say,
Figaro in London
or
Figaro in Shef–
field
or
Figaro in Birmingham,
which were already being published
in the early 1830's.
Cooper may seem, at first glance, an oddly inappropriate guide
for writers about urban life; but there is, as those authors make suf–
ficiently manifest, a sense in which the City can, indeed
must,
come
to represent for modem man, as the Ocean and Forest had for his
ancestors, what remains hidden and uncontrollable in his own psyche,
what survives in him of "The Wilderness": the primitive world out
of which his waking self has emerged long since, but to which his
dreaming self returns. Intending. to build a shelter, a refuge against
all that was savage and dark around him, man had (he discovered as
the mid-nineteenth century approached) constructed in his cities only
a new kind of jungle, a jungle of stone and glass, into which he
