Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"A Tomb of One's Own: The Female Gothic and Sarah Rogers Haight's Night in the Necropolis"
Abbey Zink
Department of English, Northern Illinois University
abbey@inil.com or azink@niu.edu
In Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (1997), Teresa A. Goddu argues that the "gothic seeps into other genres and appears in unlikely places" (8). Evidence of such seeping into the travel writing genre can be seen in Letter 12 of the first volume of Sarah Rogers Haight's Letters from the Old World by a Lady of New York (1840). For the most part, Haight's narrative is fairly typical of its time and of her position as a New York society matron known for extravagant soirees. But Haight's narrative takes a decidedly gothic turn when she recounts in Letter 12 the night that she and her party spend in a large tomb near Grand Cairo.
Like other practitioners of the female gothic, Haight invokes supernatural imagery as a way to explore and/or discuss issues that otherwise would be off limits. In this manner, she struggles to articulate her fears about being surrounded by Other and, indeed, of being Other herself. Reading much like a nineteenth-century version of a Martha Stewart parody, the opening of this letter is indicative of the way in which Haight tries at first to revision (and perhaps redefine) her anxiety through the familiar language of home and all that it represents. Indeed, as her remarks suggest, she immediately focuses her attentions toward the challenge of turning the tomb into a suitable home and proudly reports that "being well swept out, and spread with carpets and mattresses around the sides, it formed a tolerably comfortable parlour, with divans & c. In the centre [sic] a table was arranged, by placing several canteen boxes side by side, which, with a clean white tablecloth and sundry articles of dinner furniture, wore a quite promising aspect" (133). But this bizarre domestic scene and the success of the party's "soiree in the tomb" (134) soon give way to more serious considerations.
Haight's attempts at sleeping are interrupted by thoughts of the dead occupant of her chamber and whether that occupant would be upset to know that "[her] dinner had been, perhaps, cooked with its former earthly tenement" (134) as fuel for the campfire. While her husband and his gentlemen friends sleep, she arises "from motives of curiosity, or from a troubled conscience like another Lady Macbeth" and investigates her surroundings in a night of truly "Egyptian darkness" (135). Her anxieties come to the forefront in the gothic language she uses to describe the servants and "half-naked Bedouins" (135) who mingle beside campfires outside the chamber. Her "imagination transform[s] the hooded females who flitted by the blaze into Hecates and witches, the swarthy myrmidons into devils incarnate, and the half-consumed mummy-fuel into some victim they were tormenting" (135). These images and the "now and then" shrill ejaculation from a female, or a coarse laugh from the savage-looking beings by the fire" frighten Haight more than "anything I had ever seen before in real life, or in the mock horrors of Der Freischutz" (135). By the end of her account of this night in "the center of the greatest Necropolis the world ever knew" (136), Haight admits that "although I am not in the least superstitious, I do not think I shall ever be persuaded to sleep again in a tomb" (144-145).
While Haight's use of the female gothic may emerge from the setting of this particular letter, it nonetheless offers a fascinating glimpse into the dark side of American women's travel abroad in the early nineteenth century. Her night in the mummy's tomb provides her with the narrative latitude (through the gothic) to explore her first experience of "bivouack[ing] for a night, or maki[ing] a meal seated a la Turc upon the ground" (134). In other words, despite her best efforts, she is forced outside the comfort zone of her usual domestic setting. If only momentarily, she considers the implications of appropriating the mummy's tomb, of being surrounded by Other and of being Other herself in terms of gender, culture, and class. Moreover, she confronts -- if only briefly -- her mortality when she reflects that "I had been informed that many of [the pyramids] are computed to contain each a million of bodies, standing tier up tier, until they reach within a few feet of the spot where I then lay. I inquired of myself, with such a Necropolis, what must been the city of the living?" (137). Indeed, while she may never "be persuaded to sleep again in a tomb, "Haight will someday become a citizen of some Necropolis, and her night amidst the inhabitants of this particular Necropolis has forced her to consider -- again, if only briefly -- some of the implications of cultural imperialism and woman's place within it.
Abbey Zink
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
(815) 753-6609
abbey@inil.com or azink@niu.edu
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