Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion

GOTHIC LITERATURE A Gale Critical Companion

GALE CRITICAL COMPANION ADVISORY BOARD

Barbara M. Bibel Librarian Oakland Public Library Oakland, California

Mary Jane Marden Collection Development Librarian St. Petersburg College Pinellas Park, Florida

James K. Bracken Professor and Assistant Director University Libraries The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio

Heather Martin Arts & Humanities Librarian University of Alabama, Sterne Library Birmingham, Alabama

Dr. Toby Burrows Principal Librarian The Scholars’ Centre University of Western Australia Library Nedlands, Western Australia Celia C. Daniel Associate Librarian, Reference Howard University Washington, D.C. David M. Durant Reference Librarian Joyner Library East Carolina University Greenville, North Carolina Nancy Guidry Librarian Bakersfield Community College Bakersfield, California

Susan Mikula Director Indiana Free Library Indiana, Pennsylvania Thomas Nixon Humanities Reference Librarian University of North Carolina, Davis Library Chapel Hill, North Carolina Mark Schumacher Jackson Library University of North Carolina Greensboro, North Carolina Gwen Scott-Miller Assistant Director Sno-Isle Regional Library System Marysville, Washington Donald Welsh Head, Reference Services College of William and Mary, Swem Library Williamsburg, Virginia

Preface ............................................................. xix Acknowledgments .......................................... xxiii Chronology of Key Events ............................. xxxiii

VOLUME 1 Gothic Literature: An Overview Introduction ..................................................... 1 Representative Works ....................................... 2 Primary Sources ................................................ 4 Overviews ....................................................... 16 Origins of the Gothic ..................................... 40 American Gothic ............................................ 57 European Gothic ............................................ 74 Further Reading ............................................ 104 Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ John Aikin (1747-1822) and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld (1743-1825) ................................. 7 On the Subject Of ѧ Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) .............................................. 15 On the Subject Of ѧ Edmund Burke (1729?-1797) ............................................. 30

On the Subject Of ѧ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) ............................. On the Subject Of ѧ Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) .............................................. On the Subject Of ѧ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) .............................................. On the Subject Of ѧ William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) ............................

Society, Culture, and the Gothic Introduction ................................................. Representative Works ................................... Primary Sources ............................................ Overviews ..................................................... Race and the Gothic .................................... Women and the Gothic ............................... Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ Clara Reeve (1729-1807) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Sophia Lee (1750-1824) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Ray Bradbury (1920-) .................................................... On the Subject Of ѧ Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) and “The Yellow Wallpaper” ..............................................

48 68 76 94

107 109 110 127 180 210 228

112 119 143 172 199

213

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Foreword by Jerrold E. Hogle ............................ xiii

CONTENTS

Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures Introduction ................................................. Representative Works ................................... Primary Sources ............................................ Overviews ..................................................... Haunted Dwellings and the Supernatural ... Psychology and the Gothic ......................... Vampires ....................................................... Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron (1788-1824) ............... On the Subject Of ѧ H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) ............................... On the Subject Of ѧ Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-) .................................................... On the Subject Of ѧ Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and “The Uncanny” .......... On the Subject Of ѧ Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ John William Polidori (1795-1821) .............................. On the Subject Of ѧ Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) ..............................

Performing Arts and the Gothic Introduction ................................................. Representative Works ................................... Primary Sources ............................................ Drama ........................................................... Film ............................................................... Television ...................................................... Music ............................................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ James Boaden (1762-1839) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Clive Barker (1952-) .................................................... On the Subject Of ѧ Boris Karloff (1887-1969) and Frankenstein ................ On the Subject Of ѧ Bela Lugosi (1882-1956) and Dracula ........................ On the Subject Of ѧ Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ F. W. Murnau (1888-1931) and Nosferatu ..................... On the Subject Of ѧ Shirley Jackson (1919-1965) ............................................

231 233 236 249 264 301 342 385

241 260 275 291

480 486 506 525

478 487 491 497 510 522

308 333

Author Index .................................................. 531

362

Title Index ...................................................... 535

377

389 391 394 401 415 452 461 473

399 411 416 425

Subject Index .................................................. 545

VOLUME 2 Margaret Atwood 1939Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, critic, and author of children’s books Introduction ..................................................... 1 Principal Works ................................................ 3 Primary Sources ................................................ 4 General Commentary ...................................... 5 Title Commentary .......................................... 17 Further Reading .............................................. 24 Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from Lady Oracle ................................................ 18

436 451 464

Visual Arts and the Gothic Introduction ................................................. 475 Representative Works ................................... 476 Primary Sources ............................................ 477

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Overviews ..................................................... Architecture .................................................. Art ................................................................. Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: On the Subject Of ѧ Suger of St. Denis (1081-1151) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ William Blake (1757-1827) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892) .................................. On the Subject Of ѧ L. N. Cottingham (1787-1847) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Edward Gorey (1925-2000) ............................................ On the Subject Of ѧ Washington Allston (1779-1843) ............................................

Jane Austen 1775-1817 English novelist Introduction ................................................... Principal Works .............................................. Primary Sources .............................................. Title Commentary .......................................... Further Reading .............................................. Sidebars: About the Author: “Gothic Extravagance” in Northanger Abbey ..................................

25 27 27 31 46

37

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49 50 51 54 61 76

55 68

William Beckford 1760-1844 English novelist and travel writer Introduction ................................................... 79 Principal Works .............................................. 81 Primary Sources .............................................. 81 Title Commentary .......................................... 85 Further Reading ............................................ 101 Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from “Nymph of the Fountain,” written c. 1791 ...................................................... 84 About the Author: An early review of Vathek ....................................................... 86 About the Author: Byron notes Vathek as a source for oriental elements in The Giaour ....................................................... 95

Charlotte Brontë 1816-1855 English novelist and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: William Dean Howells lauds the title character of Jane Eyre .................................................. About the Author: Susan M. Waring praises Villette .........................................

Emily Brontë 1818-1848 English novelist and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................

103 105 105 107 114 129

116 121

131 133 133 135

Further Reading ............................................ 150 Sidebars: About the Author: H. F. Chorley’s negative response to Wuthering Heights .................................................... 137 About the Author: Charlotte Brontë’s Preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights ................................... 147

Charles Brockden Brown 1771-1810 American novelist, essayist, and short story writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: William Hazlitt assesses Brown’s literary talent .............. About the Author: John Keats on Wieland ...................................................

Angela Carter 1940-1992 English novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, scriptwriter, and author of children’s books Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: James Brockway on Carter’s “Gothic Pyrotechnics” in Fireworks .................................................

Wilkie Collins 1824-1889 English novelist, short story writer, travel writer, and playwright Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Geraldine Jewsbury on the beauty of The Moonstone ............ About the Author: T. S. Eliot on Collins and Charles Dickens ................. About the Author: Charles Dickens remarks to Wilkie Collins on Collins’s talent ......................................................

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153 155 155 156 162 177

163 171

179 181 181 182 200

191

201 202 203 205 211 228

207 215

223

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Joanna Baillie 1762-1851 Scottish poet, playwright, editor, and critic Introduction ................................................... Principal Works .............................................. Primary Sources .............................................. General Commentary .................................... Title Commentary .......................................... Further Reading .............................................. Sidebars: About the Author: An excerpt from a death notice in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine ................................................... About the Author: An early reviewer applauds Baillie’s talent ...........................

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Charles Dickens 1812-1870 English novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Archibald C. Coolidge Jr. on Dickens’s childhood memories and the Gothic ...................... About the Author: Michael Hollington on “Dickensian Gothic” ........................

Isak Dinesen 1885-1962 Danish short story writer, autobiographer, novelist, playwright, and translator Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: John Updike on Dinesen’s “Divine Swank” in Seven Gothic Tales .............................................

Daphne du Maurier 1907-1989 English novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, and editor Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Basil Davenport on Rebecca as a melodrama .........................

William Faulkner 1897-1962 American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Max Putzel on Faulkner’s Gothic ...................................

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229 231 231 234 242 255

237

William Godwin 1756-1836 English philosopher, novelist, essayist, historian, playwright, and biographer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe reviews Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers ........................................... From the Author: An excerpt from the Preface to Fleetwood ................................

321 323 324 327 338

328 330

252

257 259 259 261 278

270

279 280 281 282 291

285

293 295 296 297 306 319

304

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749-1832 German poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, essayist, critic, biographer, memoirist, and librettist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: From the Author: Sir Walter Scott’s translation of Goethe’s “Der Erlkonig” (“The Erl-King”) .....................................

Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864 American novelist, short story writer, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Edgar Allan Poe reviews Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales ... About the Author: Herman Melville reviews Mosses from an Old Manse .........

E. T. A. Hoffmann 1776-1822 German short story writer, novella writer, novelist, and music critic Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................

341 342 343 344 349 362

350

363 365 366 368 382 385

369 380

387 388 389 391 401 419

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James Hogg 1770-1835 Scottish poet, novelist, short story and song writer, journalist, editor, playwright, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: George Saintsbury on The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner ..................................

421 423 424 425 428 438

Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Edwin F. Casebeer on the influence of King’s life on his works ......................................................

482 483 485 494 504

492

Author Index .................................................. 511 Title Index ...................................................... 515 Subject Index .................................................. 525

430

VOLUME 3 Washington Irving 1783-1859 American short story writer, essayist, historian, journalist, and biographer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Donald A. Ringe on Irving’s Gothic .......................................

Henry James 1843-1916 American novelist, short story and novella writer, essayist, critic, biographer, autobiographer, and playwright Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Virginia Woolf on James’s ghost stories ..............................

441 443 444 446 456 459

450

461 464 465 466 470 478

471

Stephen King 1947American novelist, short story writer, novella writer, scriptwriter, nonfiction writer, autobiographer, and author of children’s books Introduction ................................................. 481

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1814-1873 Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and editor Introduction ..................................................... 1 Principal Works ................................................ 3 Primary Sources ................................................ 3 General Commentary ...................................... 5 Title Commentary .......................................... 16 Further Reading .............................................. 27 Sidebars: About the Author: S. M. Ellis on Le Fanu’s horror fiction ............................. 6 About the Author: Edna Kenton on Le Fanu’s legacy ....................................... 22

Matthew Gregory Lewis 1775-1818 English novelist, playwright, diarist, prose writer, and poet Introduction ................................................... Principal Works .............................................. Primary Sources .............................................. General Commentary .................................... Title Commentary .......................................... Further Reading .............................................. Sidebars: About the Author: Lord Byron on “Monk” Lewis .......................................... About the Author: Joseph James Irwin on Lewis’s mastery of horror and terror .........................................................

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31 33 34 36 46 70

42

62

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Sidebars: About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Hoffmann’s talent and mental state ..... 392 About the Author: Palmer Cobb on Hoffmann’s genius ................................. 412

CONTENTS

Charles Robert Maturin 1780-1824 Irish novelist and playwright Introduction ................................................... 73 Principal Works .............................................. 74 Primary Sources .............................................. 75 General Commentary .................................... 76 Title Commentary .......................................... 84 Further Reading ............................................ 104 Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from Maturin’s Preface to Melmoth the Wanderer ................................................... 85 About the Author: An excerpt from an early review of Melmoth the Wanderer ................................................... 98

Herman Melville 1819-1891 American novelist, short story writer, and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Jay MacPherson on Melville’s “The Bell Tower” and Frankenstein ............................................ About the Author: Excerpt from an early review of Moby-Dick ......................

Toni Morrison 1931American novelist, essayist, playwright, critic, author of children’s books, and editor Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: From the Author: An excerpt from the conclusion of Beloved .............................

Joyce Carol Oates 1938American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, playwright, author of children’s books, nonfiction writer, and poet Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................

x

107 109 110 111 118 132

111 125

135 136 137 138 142 160

151

163 165 167 168 178

Further Reading ............................................ 185 Sidebars: From the Author: Oates’s “Reflections on the Grotesque” ................................. 179

Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849 American short story writer, poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and critic Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: D. H. Lawrence on the purpose of Poe’s tales ..................... About the Author: H. P. Lovecraft on Poe’s literary innovations ......................

Ann Radcliffe 1764-1823 English novelist, poet, and journal writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Radcliffe’s talent ..................................... About the Author: Edith Birkhead on Radcliffe and the Gothic ........................ About the Author: Devendra P. Varma on Radcliffe’s legacy ...............................

Anne Rice 1941American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Angela Carter on Rice’s self-consciousness ........................ From the Author: Rice on her fears .........

187 190 190 193 205 228

203 219

231 233 233 238 245 260

238 246 253

263 265 266 277 286

267 278

Sir Walter Scott 1771-1832 Scottish novelist, poet, short story writer, biographer, historian, critic, and editor Introduction ................................................. 289

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1797-1851 English novelist, editor, critic, short story and travel writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Marilyn Butler on Shelley’s life and its impact on Frankenstein ............................................ About the Author: Ellen Moers on motherhood, the Female Gothic, and Frankenstein ............................................ About the Author: Sir Walter Scott on Frankenstein and the use of the supernatural in fiction ...........................

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1894 Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and playwright Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: John Addington Symonds on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ...... From the Author: Stevenson’s dedication in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .......................

Bram Stoker 1847-1912 Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................

292 293 297 317

Sidebars: About the Author: Montague Summers on the enduring nature of Dracula ........ 395 About the Author: An excerpt from an early review of Dracula ..................... 405

298

Horace Walpole 1717-1797 English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian, essayist, playwright, and letter writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Frederick S. Frank on The Mysterious Mother ....................... About the Author: Sir Walter Scott offers high praise for Walpole and The Castle of Otranto ..................................... About the Author: H. P. Lovecraft on Walpole’s influence on the Gothic ........

306

319 321 321 327 335 356

328

338

349

359 361 362 364 382

365 373

385 387 387 393 427

429 432 432 434 454

434

435 443

Edith Wharton 1862-1937 American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and autobiographer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Annette Zilversmit on Wharton’s “Pomegranate Seed” .......

457 460 460 462 485

Oscar Wilde 1854-1900 Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, critic, poet, and short story writer Introduction ................................................. Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ General Commentary .................................. Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: Julian Hawthorne on The Picture of Dorian Gray .................

487 489 490 493 502 517

467

503

Author Index .................................................. 523 Title Index ...................................................... 527 Subject Index .................................................. 537

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Principal Works ............................................ Primary Sources ............................................ Title Commentary ........................................ Further Reading ............................................ Sidebars: About the Author: William Hazlitt on Scott’s achievements as a writer of prose ....................................................... About the Author: Maria Edgeworth, in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, 1814 .......

Gothic initially—Walpole saw it as a combination of the supernatural “ancient” and the more realistic “modern” romance—have made it unstable from the start and so have led it to “expatiate” widely and wildly (Walpole’s own word in his 1765 Preface) and hence to carry its volatile inconsistency into every form it has assumed, from its beginnings in mid-eighteenth century England to its current profusion throughout the Western world at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Yet what are the traits that hold “the Gothic” together, if only just barely, as it spreads itself like one of its specters or monstrosities across literary, dramatic, and other audio-visual forms? As the following essays and excerpts show, all truly Gothic stories or stagings take place, at least part of the time, in some sort of antiquated (sometimes falsely antiquated) space, be it a castle, ruin, crumbling abbey, graveyard, old manor house or theater, haunted wilderness or neighborhood, cellar or attic full of artifacts—or aging train station, rusted manufacturing plant, or outdated spaceship. This space, reminiscent of medieval “Gothic” castles or churches but often existing long after those in more modern recastings of their features, threatens to overwhelm and engulf protagonists (including readers or viewers) in the setting’s vastness, darkness, and vaguely threatening, even irrational, depths. That is usually because this space is haunted or invaded by some form of ghost,

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FOREWORD

These very useful Critical Companion volumes offer a wide range of historical accounts about, literary excerpts from, and critical interpretations of a long-standing mode of fiction-making that has come to be called “the Gothic.” Though this label has most often been attached to “terrifying” or “horrific” pieces of prose fiction ever since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (the founding text of this form, first published in 1764) added the subtitle A Gothic Story to its Second British Edition of 1765, the hyperbolic and haunting features of this highly popular, but often controversial, mode have proliferated across the last twoand-a-half centuries in an increasing array of forms: novels, prose “romances,” plays, paintings, operas, short stories, narrative and lyric poems, “shilling shocker” tales, newspaper serials and crime-reports, motion pictures, television shows, comic books, “graphic” novels, and even video games. That variety of presentation is what now makes “the Gothic” the best phrase for describing this ongoing phenomenon. It has proven to be a set of transportable features more than it has been a single genre. Its variations are not so much similar in compositional form as they are inclined to share certain settings, symbols, situations, psychological states, and emotional effects on readers or audiences, all of which appear at least somewhat in The Castle of Otranto but have gone on to vary greatly in their manifestations over time. The incompatible generic ingredients of the

FOREWORD

specter, or monster, a frightening crosser of the supposed boundaries between life and death, natural and supernatural, or “normal” and “abnormal.” Usually this figure betokens some hidden “primal crime” buried from sight ages ago or having occurred in the recent past, the truth about which at least seems to lie in the darkest depths, or deepest darkness, of the antiquated space. Gothic protagonists and their readers or viewers, faced with this haunting in such a setting, are thus pulled back and forth (like the Gothic as a mode) between older and newer states of being, longing to escape into the seeming safety of one or the other but kept in a tug-of-war of terrifying suspense between the powers of the past and the present, darkness and daylight, insane incoherence and rational order. At the same time, the extreme fictionality of all these elements is so emphasized in the melodramatic exaggeration of Gothic description and characterizations that the threats in these situations are made to seem both imminent (about to appear) and immanent (sequestered within) and yet safely distant, at least for readers or audiences. As in the “scary movies” of more recent times, many of which employ or derive from the Gothic, the spectators of such fictions can experience the thrill of fear that the threats really arouse and at the same time feel entirely safe from those threats because it is all so obviously artificial and unlikely to become real or lead to real consequences. Any fiction that does not have all these basic features to some extent is not really “Gothic” through and through, although many adjacent fictions (such as those of Charles Dickens or Herman Melville or most films directed by Alfred Hitchcock or M. Night Shyamalan) use pieces of the Gothic to arouse some of the suggestions and effects associated with it. Even when fictions are thoroughly Gothic, however, as are the ones most emphasized in these volumes, they can vary widely across a continuum between terror and horror. Near the end of her life and career, Ann Radcliffe, arguably the most influential British author of Gothic romances in the turbulent 1790s (including The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian), composed a dialogue “On the Supernatural in Poetry” that appeared posthumously with her last novel, Gaston de Blondeville, in 1826. There her fictional interlocutors make a clear distinction between devices that invoke “the terrible” (a suspenseful uncertainty about hidden possibilities that could be violent or repulsive or supernatural but rarely appear in such extreme forms) and blatant descriptions that

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expose “the horrible” (the unambiguously violent, deadly, grotesque, and even horrifically supernatural, so much so that the line between what is “sanctioned” and “forbidden” has been crossed without a doubt). Radcliffe herself, as her novels show, clearly prefers the suggestiveness of terror, to the point where her violence is more potential than actual and the apparently supernatural is always explained away, as is the case with many of her successors in Gothic writing. She thereby places herself and her imitators squarely in the tradition of the “sublime” defined as the safely fearful or awesome by Edmund Burke in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Gothic “horror,” by contrast, became most epitomized in Radcliffe’s time by Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), filled as it is, not just with a vociferous anti-Catholicism that Radcliffe shares, but with explicit sexual intercourse, incestuous rape and murder, the brutal dismembering of a tyrannical nun by a mob, and the physical appearance of Satan himself as homosexually seductive. The blatantly stagey hyperbole of Lewis’s style makes all this less immediate than it might otherwise be, but it also defines the “horrible” extreme of the Gothic continuum that locates the mere potentiality of “terror” at its opposite end. It thus helps establish a polarity across which the Gothic has played ever since, as it wafts between, say, Daphne du Maurier’s Radcliffean Rebecca (1938) and William Peter Blatty’s horrific The Exorcist (1971) and their ongoing imitators of both types. The Gothic is set off from other forms of fiction by its Walpolean features but also demarcated within itself by its leanings at times towards “terrific” suspense, on the one hand, and graphic “horror,” on the other. The two come together mostly in extreme cases such as Stoker’s original novel Dracula (1897), where suspenseful intimations about the Count’s vampiric nature in “sublime” Transylvania give way to his graphic gorging of himself with the blood of a married woman before witnesses in Victorian London, after which he breaks all “normal” gender boundaries by drawing the same woman to his breast to suck up his own already vampiric blood. It is this whole range of Gothic possibilities that the following excerpts and accounts explore, since this anamorphic (or self-distorting) and metamorphic (or shape-shifting) form of fiction has been pulled between these extremes, we now see, from its earliest manifestations. The tension between the terrifying and the horrible in the Gothic, moreover, has developed

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As supernatural levels of being have become increasingly doubted in the post-Renaissance world of the West, the terrors or horrors generated from within have become a staple of the Gothic and projected onto its haunted settings, just as much as older beliefs in seductive Satan-figures have continued to be in the vein of The Monk, The Exorcist, or Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (19762001). The most debated Gothic story in Western history may be Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

(1898), in which the highly repressed governess of two children in a castellated old estate-house is convinced she sees the ghosts of her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and Jessel’s lower-class lover, Peter Quint, but may just as likely be projecting them onto the estate-world she observes as she sublimates her own desires for an absentee Master far above her in social station. Even today, as parts of these volumes show, readers and viewers cannot be sure when they begin Gothic tales or films— though they often find out in “twist” endings (in such pictures as The Sixth Sense and The Others)— whether the haunting specters they see are the delusions of characters or unambiguously otherworldly, outside any psychological point of view. We sometimes long for the comfort of supernatural visitations but fear how much this longing comes from irrational psychic forces in ourselves and others, and the Gothic plays on and explores these apprehensions, as it has for over two hundred years. But this last point demands a fuller answer to the most lingering question about the conflicted oddity that is the Gothic as it multiplies into all the forms explored in these volumes: Why do we have this malleable symbolic mode in AngloEuropean Western culture and its former colonies, and why does this anamorphic form, torn as it is between extremes (supernatural/realistic, horrible/ terrifying, really frightening/merely fictional, ontological/psychological, and others), persist from The Castle of Otranto in the 1760s through Frankenstein and Dracula to films, novels, and video games of today, some of which keep repeatedly adapting some of those older stories for new audiences? Numerous answers are offered in the definitional and interpretive essays that follow, as well as in some Gothic tales themselves, here excerpted at their most indicative moments. But I would like to begin the discussion by suggesting the most overriding reasons why the Gothic has arisen and why it persists as a cultural formation clearly needed, as well as wanted, by Western readers and audiences. To begin with, “the Gothic” comes about at a time in the West when the oldest structures of Christian religiosity (including Roman Catholicism) and social hierarchies seemingly predetermined to the advantage of hereditary aristocrats (symbolized by their castles or estate-houses) are starting to fragment and decay, as in Walpole’s principal Ghost (who appears initially in pieces), even as these receding forms hang on as standard grounds of being in the minds of many. At such a time, the older symbols of power seem increas-

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into another continuum of symbolic possibilities—the “psychological” versus “ontological” or supernatural Gothic—especially since 1800. If Radcliffe’s heroines in the 1790s think themselves into states of fear that are finally based on associations of ideas not corroborated by the outside world, it is a small step from there to the projection of a whole state of mind into an external space that is vast, dark, and threatening more because of drives inside the observer than its own separate features. Hence the tormenting Spirits that rise in the Higher Alps at the bidding of the title character in Lord Byron’s Gothic verse-drama Manfred (1817) are, as he admits, “The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark, / The lightning of my being” as much as anything else. At about the same time, though, Dr. John Polidori, Byron’s personal physician and occasional lover, forecasts the late Victorian coming of Dracula with his Byronic novella The Vampyre (1819), in which the predatory Lord Ruthven seems threatening at first only in the suspicious thoughts of the hero (Aubrey) until the latter faces the horror that his own sister “has glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE,” which Ruthven turns out to have been for centuries. In this latter case, Gothic monstrosity is granted the ontological state of being quite outside any observer, a distinct existence confirmed from multiple points of view, as in Stoker’s Dracula. Throughout the nineteenth century, starting with the Romantic era of Byron and Polidori, the Gothic careens incessantly between the strictly psychological, where ghosts or monsters are more mental than physical, and the unabashedly supernatural in which an other-worldly horror violently invades the space of the self from outside its boundaries. When both are involved, though, the nineteenth century tilts more often towards rooting the supernatural in the psyche. That is certainly the case in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), now the most famous Gothic tale in history, where the half-fantastic creature composed from multiple carcasses is mostly an outsized sewing-together of his creator’s most repressed, libidinous, and boundary-crossing impulses.

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ingly hollowed out, like the ruins of medieval Gothic structures, while they also seem locations that vaguely harbor historical foundations for human minds newly liberated by the rational and scientific Enlightenment that is overthrowing the older orders by degrees in the eighteenth century. In this situation, while beliefs about the selfdetermining (rather than strictly hereditary) individual start to gain ascendancy and give greater weight to personal psychology over predetermined roles, Westerners face an existential anxiety about where they really come from and the orders to which they belong when the bestknown external indicators of those groundings are becoming empty repositories, realms filled up with the nostalgic desires projected into them more than the metaphysical and cultural certainties once manifested by them. As Leslie Fiedler has shown by exposing the basis of the American Gothic in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), this uprooted, yet rootseeking, condition for Westerners around 1765 makes them hover between longings for past securities, though these are also seen as primitively irrational and confining, and longings for rebellion against those patriarchal schemes, which simultaneously produce a sense of guilt about the overthrow of those “fathers,” making that revolution a sort of “primal crime.” Guilt, after all, is what Walpole’s Prince Manfred feels when he finds that his own grandfather once murdered the original founder of Otranto and usurped its birthright from the latter’s heirs, the same way as the rising middle class of the eighteenth century (the main readership of the Gothic as time went on) probably felt about gradually decimating the very power-bases it now sought to occupy in place of the aristocracy. In addition, Fiedler writes, this sense of haunted guilt and uncertainties about middle-class entitlement raised “the fear that in destroying the old ego-ideals of Church and State, the West has opened a way for the inruption of darkness: for insanity and the disintegration of the self.” The Gothic of Walpole and its acceleration by the 1790s in Radcliffe and Lewis come about, since fictions always respond to the needs of their audiences, to address and symbolize this cultural and psychological condition of early capitalist and pre-industrial modernity. That is why the early Gothic places both desires for lost foundations and fears about the irrational darkness lying outside the limits of newly enlightened reason in the same antiquated spaces and their mysterious depths, which Gothic characters from Manfred to Lewis’s monk then seek to penetrate

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or recover and escape or destroy so as to construct a sense of identity that is somehow both grounded and self-determined. The Gothic is a powerful symbolic indicator, then, of the social and psychic contradictions out of which the modern Western self emerged and keeps emerging, and we need and want it, I would argue, to keep retelling that story that is so basic to our modern sense of ourselves. The story has kept developing in the West, however, and the Gothic has developed with it. As the ideological belief in personal self-making becomes even more accepted towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the individual mind comes to be viewed as the dynamic, but also anxious, site of its own “ghosts” and increasing depths. Ann Radcliffe and many of her contemporaries accept the basic premises of empirical psychology, which claims (since John Locke in the 1690s, anyway) that the human mind begins as a near-vacancy and gradually accumulates and organizes the memories it retains (hence the “ghosts”) of earlier and more recent sense-perceptions. Adult observations in later life are therefore colored by the associations of previous, and now ghost-like, impressions that are applied to the intake of newer phenomena. Terry Castle can consequently see in The Female Thermometer (1995) that the Radcliffean Gothic turns landscapes as well as characters into “spectralized” thoughts within reflective states of mind that make nature seem already painted (and thus filtered by perceivers) and people already colored by older sayings and texts about their “types.” To observe at any moment in the Gothic from the 1790s on is to call attention, at least some of the time, to the lenses of perception and the gradually accumulated psychic layers of associated memories that are projected onto any object contemplated or produced by the perceiving self. Ruins and old houses, as well as Frankenstein-ian creatures, are now filled with dark indications of deep past threats because the mind transfers its own layers of developing perceptions, as well as middle-class guilt, into what it sees and thus confronts its own “doubling” there, its deepest internal memories reembodied in perceptions of external depths now haunted by mental ghosts. When Victor Frankenstein first sees the face of his finished creature in Mary Shelley’s Gothic book, he falls into a regressive dream in which the mottled visage of his fabrication from dead bodies becomes linked to his longing for his own deceased mother, whose corpse he preconsciously has seen himself re-embracing while

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It is no wonder, then, that the Gothic comes to be torn constantly between terror and horror, on one level, and the psychological and the clearly supernatural, on another. Terror offers the uneasy comfort that what we fear, being mentally constructed for the most part, could be non-existent in the end (as in Radcliffe’s conclusions), except in our own minds. Such solipsism, however, can also be seen as a myopic middle-class or even aristocratic avoidance of the violent upheavals and even greater displacements of older orders brought on by the exploding mercantile and industrial economies—and the racist imperialism that went with them—in the nineteenth century. Consequently, this era’s Gothic invasions of the isolated psyche by “horror,” the external violence and many forms of non-middle-class “ugliness” that cannot be wished away as mere thought, force this counter-awareness on audiences, albeit through extreme fictionality, increasingly so in the form of the vampire made prominent by Polidori. By the time of the serialized Varney the Vampire (1847), usually attributed to Thomas Peckett Prest, and the many stagings of vampire plays in Victorian England, France, and America, this Gothic monster can symbolize many potential invaders of middle-class security simultaneously, from vengeful old aristocrats to foreign and racial “others” to diseases of the blood made more virulent by urban growth, foreign tourism, and the expansion of prostitution. The nineteenth century in the West, we can say, needs the Gothic to carry out and fictively obscure the cultural hesitation at the time between middle-class withdrawal into increasing private spaces, including sheer thought (which thereby confronts its own deep irrationalities), and the need of the same people to face the horrors of growing cities and empires with their illnesses, “unclean” impoverished laborers, exploited women, and enslaved “colored” races.

What the Gothic does in part, among its reaction to these changes, is to increase the struggle between its psychological and supernatural tendencies. First, it becomes the source of many symbols for the concept of the “unconscious” that Sigmund Freud, building on many others, brought into wide prominence by the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Especially insofar as the Gothic has gradually become a realm of mental projection and of the mind forced back to the beginnings and hauntings of its own development, it has provided the archaic depths, dim repositories, memory-traces, accumulations of memories layer upon layer, and primal states (including regressions back to “mother” or sheer vacancy) from which Freud and his contemporaries craft their description of the unconscious and its sublimation by pre-conscious and conscious levels of thought. In the early twentieth century, the Gothic therefore comes to be seen as primarily psychological in the sense of psychoanalytic, as long having manifested in its haunted spaces and the mental quandaries of its characters the processes of thought described by Freud, even though it is more accurate to say that the Gothic first helped make Freud’s schemes conceivable and expressible. Back in Freud’s formative period, though, the assertion of the human species’s long physical evolution by Charles Darwin and others from the 1850s on challenges the layerings of personal consciousness with a biologically historical progression beyond, yet still working inside, individual people. The Gothic reacts by reinvoking its old invasions of supernatural, or at least trans-individual, forces to show psychological projections running up against pervasive external drives that may really control the psyche after all. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) may seem to suggest a psychological bifurcation in the Victorian self, with Jekyll as internalized superego and Hyde as raging libido, but the Doctor’s attempts to control this internal split finally cannot prevent the “troglodytic” emergence of all that remains primitively devolved in his superficially evolved condition. Even more dramatically, Stoker’s Count Dracula arouses and enacts unconscious libidinal desires by being a devolved, “child-brain” force supernaturally driving across centuries that invades “civilized” England with all the diseases and the racial and animalistic “others” that the supposedly evolved want to keep distant from themselves and cannot. The Turn of the Screw plays out an undecidability between the dominance of the psychological and

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he tries to make life out of death without the biological involvement of a woman. By 1820 at least, the Gothic has become the fictional locus where outward quests for self-completion now are seen as mainly inward probings through the archaic layers of the self. Gothic “objects,” from antiquated locations to other people to mere things, have thus become manifestations of the perceiver’s own growing depths of thought in which the desire for pre-rational foundations is actually pursuing “the mother” conceived of as the initial interplay of self and other that produces the confused beginnings, later repressed, of all thought, sensation, and memory.

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the power of the supernatural because the nineteenth-century West in its final years needs ways to articulate that it is frantically at odds with itself over what to believe about the deepest foundations of life. The Gothic from its beginnings and as it evolves with the cultural changes around it, in other words, turns out to be the modern Western world’s most striking, if most conflicted, symbolic method for both confronting and disguising its own unresolved struggles with incompatible beliefs about what it means to be human. Walpole’s Castle starts the tradition by leaving its readers caught where most of them already were: between longings for a fading hierarchical order underwritten by supernatural assurances (“ancient romance”) and desires for greater selfdetermination based on free re-imaginings of uprooted older perceptions (“modern romance”). Radcliffe and Lewis, during the revolutionary 1790s, help readers confront and prevent cultural dissolution by offering reassurances that spectral perceptions of danger to the self can finally control the terror those specters produce and shocking revelations at the same time that current upheavals are but symptoms of multiple irrationalities that established religion and governments have tried to repress only to force them towards more extreme violence. Frankenstein offers a condemnation and a celebration of the scientific and industrial advances puzzled over by its readers, along with symbols for the unsettled debate over whether life is externally infused (by, say, some ultimate Father) or internally generated (primarily within the mother whom Victor both remembers and tries to forget). Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula both blame individual free will for inviting its underlying depravities into consciousness and point to attacks on the evolved Anglo race by “devolved” levels of humanity from other times and places. In extreme forms of expression that allow us to perceive or avoid such levels in our thinking, the Gothic holds up to us our conflicted conservative and progressive tendencies in the full cry of their unresolved tug-of-war in our culture and in ourselves. Our hesitation between psychological and supernatural causes for events or

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between inherited and self-determined foundations of identity or between feeling controlled by our pasts and asserting our capacities to alter ourselves decisively in the present: all these stillactive antinomies of modern existence are what the Gothic is fundamentally generated to articulate and to obscure. Over one hundred years after Stoker’s Dracula, of course, the kinds of tendencies we are torn between have changed somewhat, as the more recent Gothic certainly shows. We both want to transcend, even forget, and want to throw ourselves fully into the past (or is it fully past?) condition of slavery and racism that haunts the history of America in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). We want to preserve childhood innocence and see it as really filled with dark drives to be conquered and controlled in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and Daniel Mann’s Willard (1982) as well as The Exorcist and its “prequels” and sequels on film. We paranoiacally want to find evidence of old conspiracies that explain our current confusions of values and see them as but the imaginings of diseased nostalgic minds in the quite Gothic X-Files television series (1993-2002) or the four Alien films (1979-97) full of Gothic echoes. Still, the Gothic, as the accounts and excerpts in these volumes will reveal in fuller detail, remains one of the key ways we come to terms, while also avoiding direct confrontation, with the betwixtand-between, regressive-progressive, seemingly predetermined-hopefully undetermined nature of modern life. The Gothic is complex and tangled in its proliferations, but fairly simple in its aims: it allows us to play with our inexplicable and haunted modern lives in some fictional safety while concurrently helping us give shape and form to the conflicted beings we really are. I therefore invite our readers to enjoy and ponder the following descents into the Gothic maelstrom of pleasure and fear that reveals so much about modern Western existence. —Jerrold E. Hogle, Ph.D. University of Arizona

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In response to a growing demand for relevant criticism and interpretation of perennial topics and important literary movements throughout history, the Gale Critical Companion Collection (GCCC) was designed to meet the research needs of upper high school and undergraduate students. Each edition of GCCC focuses on a different literary movement or topic of broad interest to students of literature, history, multicultural studies, humanities, foreign language studies, and other subject areas. Topics covered are based on feedback from a standing advisory board consisting of reference librarians and subject specialists from public, academic, and school library systems. The GCCC is designed to complement Gale’s existing Literary Criticism Series (LCS), which includes such award-winning and distinguished titles as Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (NCLC), Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (TCLC), and Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC). Like the LCS titles, the GCCC editions provide selected reprinted essays that offer an inclusive range of critical and scholarly response to authors and topics widely studied in high school and undergraduate classes; however, the GCCC also includes primary source documents, chronologies, sidebars, supplemental photographs, and other material not included in the LCS products. The graphic and supplemental material is designed to extend the usefulness of the critical essays and

provide students with historical and cultural context on a topic or author’s work. GCCC titles will benefit larger institutions with ongoing subscriptions to Gale’s LCS products as well as smaller libraries and school systems with less extensive reference collections. Each edition of the GCCC is created as a stand-alone set providing a wealth of information on the topic or movement. Importantly, the overlap between the GCCC and LCS titles is 15% or less, ensuring that LCS subscribers will not duplicate resources in their collection. Editions within the GCCC are either singlevolume or multi-volume sets, depending on the nature and scope of the topic being covered. Topic entries and author entries are treated separately, with entries on related topics appearing first, followed by author entries in an A-Z arrangement. Each volume is approximately 500 pages in length and includes approximately 50 images and sidebar graphics. These sidebars include summaries of important historical events, newspaper clippings, brief biographies of important figures, complete poems or passages of fiction written by the author, descriptions of events in the related arts (music, visual arts, and dance), and so on. The reprinted essays in each GCCC edition explicate the major themes and literary techniques of the authors and literary works. It is important to note that approximately 85% of the essays reprinted in GCCC editions are full-text, meaning

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The Gale Critical Companion Collection

PREFACE

that they are reprinted in their entirety, including footnotes and lists of abbreviations. Essays are selected based on their coverage of the seminal works and themes of an author, and based on the importance of those essays to an appreciation of the author’s contribution to the movement and to literature in general. Gale’s editors select those essays of most value to upper high school and undergraduate students, avoiding narrow and highly pedantic interpretations of individual works or of an author’s canon.

Scope of Gothic Literature Gothic Literature, the fourth set in the Gale Critical Companion Collection, consists of three volumes. Each volume includes a detailed table of contents, a foreword on the subject of Gothic literature written by noted scholar Jerrold E. Hogle, and a descriptive chronology of key events throughout the history of the genre. The mainbody of volume 1 consists of entries on five topics relevent to Gothic literature and art, including 1) Gothic Literature: An Overview; 2) Society, Culture, and the Gothic; 3) Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures; 4) Performing Arts and The Gothic; and 5) Visual Arts and the Gothic. Volumes 2 and 3 include entries on thirty-seven authors and literary figures associated with the genre, including such notables as Matthew Gregory Lewis, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Bram Stoker, as well as entries on individuals who have garnered less attention, but whose contributions to the genre are noteworthy, such as Joanna Baillie, Daphne du Maurier, Washington Irving, Edith Wharton, and Oscar Wilde.

Organization of Gothic Literature A Gothic Literature topic entry consists of the following elements: • The Introduction defines the subject of the entry and provides social and historical information important to understanding the criticism. • The list of Representative Works identifies writings and works by authors and figures associated with the subject. The list is divided into alphabetical sections by name; works listed under each name appear in chronological order. The genre and publication date of each work is given. Unless otherwise indicated, plays are dated by first performance, not first publication. • Entries generally begin with a section of Primary Sources, which includes essays, speeches,

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social history, newspaper accounts and other materials that were produced during the time covered. • Reprinted Criticism in topic entries is arranged thematically. Topic entries commonly begin with general surveys of the subject or essays providing historical or background information, followed by essays that develop particular aspects of the topic. For example, the Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures entry in volume 1 of Gothic Literature begins with a section providing primary source material that demonstrates gothic themes, settings, and figures. This is followed by a section providing topic overviews, and three other sections: Haunted Dwellings and the Supernatural; Psychology and the Gothic; and Vampires. Each section has a separate title heading and is identified with a page number in the table of contents. The critic’s name and the date of composition or publication of the critical work are given at the beginning of each piece of criticism. Unsigned criticism is preceded by the title of the source in which it appeared. Footnotes are reprinted at the end of each essay or excerpt. In the case of excerpted criticism, only those footnotes that pertain to the excerpted texts are included. • A complete Bibliographical Citation of the original essay or book precedes each piece of criticism. • Critical essays are prefaced by brief Annotations explicating each piece. Unless the descriptor “excerpt” is used in the annotation, the essay is being reprinted in its entirety. • An annotated bibliography of Further Reading appears at the end of each entry and suggests resources for additional study. In some cases, significant essays for which the editors could not obtain reprint rights are included here. A Gothic Literature author entry consists of the following elements: • The Author Heading cites the name under which the author most commonly wrote, followed by birth and death dates. Also located here are any name variations under which an author wrote. If the author wrote consistently under a pseudonym, the pseudonym will be listed in the author heading and the author’s actual name given in parenthesis on the first line of the biographical and critical information. Uncertain birth or death dates are indicated by question marks.

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• The Introduction contains background information that introduces the reader to the author that is the subject of the entry. • The list of Principal Works is ordered chronologically by date of first publication and lists the most important works by the author. The genre and publication date of each work is given. Unless otherwise indicated, plays are dated by first performance, not first publication. • Author entries are arranged into three sections: Primary Sources, General Commentary, and Title Commentary. The Primary Sources section includes letters, poems, short stories, journal entries, and essays written by the featured author. General Commentary includes overviews of the author’s career and general studies; Title Commentary includes in-depth analyses of seminal works by the author. Within the Title Commentary section, the reprinted criticism is further organized by title, then by date of publication. The critic’s name and the date of composition or publication of the critical work are given at the beginning of each piece of criticism. Unsigned criticism is preceded by the title of the source in which it appeared All titles by the author featured in the text are printed in boldface type. However, not all boldfaced titles are included in the author and subject indexes; only substantial discussions of works are indexed. Footnotes are reprinted at the end of each essay or excerpt. In the case of excerpted criticism, only those footnotes that pertain to the excerpted texts are included. • A complete Bibliographical Citation of the original essay or book precedes each piece of criticism. • Critical essays are prefaced by brief Annotations explicating each piece. Unless the descriptor “excerpt” is used in the annotation, the essay is being reprinted in its entirety. • An annotated bibliography of Further Reading appears at the end of each entry and suggests resources for additional study. In some cases, significant essays for which the editors could not obtain reprint rights are included here. A list of Other Sources from Thomson Gale follows the Further Reading section and provides references to other biographical and critical sources on the author in series published by Gale.

Indexes The Author Index lists all of the authors featured in the Gothic Literature set, with references to the main author entries in volumes 2 and 3 as well as commentary on the featured author in other author entries and in the topic volumes. Page references to substantial discussions of the authors appear in boldface. Authors featured in sidebars are indexed as well. The Author Index also includes birth and death dates and cross references between pseudonyms and actual names, and cross references to other Gale series in which the authors have appeared. A complete list of these sources is found facing the first page of the Author Index. The Title Index alphabetically lists the titles of works written by the authors featured in volumes 2 and 3 and provides page numbers or page ranges where commentary on these titles can be found. Page references to substantial discussions of the titles appear in boldface. English translations of foreign titles and variations of titles are cross-referenced to the title under which a work was originally published. Titles of novels, plays, nonfiction books, films, and poetry, short story, or essay collections are printed in italics, while individual poems, short stories, and essays are printed in roman type within quotation marks. The Subject Index includes the authors and titles that appear in the Author Index and the Title Index as well as the names of other authors and figures that are discussed in the set. The Subject Index also lists hundreds of literary terms and topics covered in the criticism. The index provides page numbers or page ranges where subjects are discussed and is fully cross referenced.

Citing Gothic Literature When writing papers, students who quote directly from the GL set may use the following general format to footnote reprinted criticism. The first example pertains to material drawn from periodicals, the second to material reprinted from books. Markley, A. A. “The Godwinian Confessional Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 4, no. 1 (spring 2003): 4-16; reprinted in Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, vol. 3, ed. Jessica Bomarito (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), 29-42. Mishra, Vijay. “Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime,” in The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 19-43; reprinted in Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, vol. 1, ed. Jessica Bomarito (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006), 21117.

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• A Portrait of the Author is included when available.

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Gothic Literature Advisory Board The members of the Gothic Literature Advisory Board—reference librarians and subject specialists from public, academic, and school library systems—offered a variety of informed perspectives on both the presentation and content of the Gothic Literature set. Advisory board members assessed and defined such quality issues as the relevance, currency, and usefulness of the author coverage, critical content, and topics included in our product; evaluated the layout, presentation, and general quality of our product; provided feedback on the criteria used for selecting authors and topics covered in our product; identified any gaps in our coverage of authors or topics, recommending authors or topics for inclusion; and analyzed the appropriateness of our content and presentation for various user audiences, such as high school

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students, undergraduates, graduate students, librarians, and educators. We wish to thank the advisors for their advice during the development of Gothic Literature

Suggestions are Welcome Readers who wish to suggest new features, topics, or authors to appear in future volumes of the Gale Critical Companion Collection, or who have other suggestions or comments are cordially invited to call, write, or fax the Product Manager. Product Manager, Gale Critical Companion Collection Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 1-800-347-4253 (GALE) Fax: 248-699-8054

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Copyrighted material in Gothic Literature was reproduced from the following periodicals: Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), v. 2, spring, 2003. Copyright © 2003 Americana: The Institute for the Study of American Popular Culture. Reproduced by permission.—American Transcendental Quarterly, v. 9, March 1, 1995; v. 1, 2001. Copyright © 1995, 2001 by The University of Rhode Island. Both reproduced by permission.—Arizona Quarterly, v. 34, 1978 for “The Gothic Formula of ‘Bartleby’” by Steven T. Ryan. Copyright © 1978 by Arizona Board of Regents, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Bucknell Review, v. XII, May, 1964. Reproduced by permission.—Col-

lege English, v. 27, March 1, 1966 for “Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde” by Masao Miyoshi. Republished in The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians, New York University Press, 1969, University of London Press, 1969. Copyright © 1966 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Comparative Literature Studies, v. 24, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Costerus, v. I, 1972. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Critical Survey, v. 15, September, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Critical Survey. Republished with permission of Critical Survey, conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.— Dalhousie Review, v. 47, summer, 1967 for “Terror Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories” by Raymond Thorberg. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, March 1, 2001 for “The Gothic IMAGINARY: Goethe in Strasbourg” by Kenneth S. Calhoon. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Dickens Quarterly, September 1, 1989; v. 16, September 1, 1999. Copyright © 1989, 1999 by the Dickens Society. Both reproduced by permission.—Dickens Studies Newsletter, v. VI, September 1, 1975. Copyright © by the Dickens Society. Reproduced by permission.—Dickensian, September 1, 1977 for “The Fall of the House of Clennam: Gothic Conventions in Little Dorrit” by

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/ Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this edition of Gothic Literature. Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

David Jarrett. Reproduced by permission of the author.—The Edgar Allan Poe Review, v. IV, spring, 2003 for “The Godwinian Confessional Narrative and Psychological Terror in Arthur Gordon Pym” by A.A. Markley. Copyright © 2003 The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.— Eighteenth-Century Fiction, v. 15, January 1, 2003. Copyright © 2003 Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University. Reproduced by permission.—ELH, v. 48, autumn, 1981; v. 59, spring, 1992; v. 70, winter, 2003. Copyright © 1981, 1992, 2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All reproduced by permission.—ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, v. 18, 1972 for “Poe and the Gothic Tradition” by Maurice Lévy. Translated by Richard Henry Haswell. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the translator.—European Romantic Review, v. 13, June 1, 2002 for “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya” by Anne K. Mellor. Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals—Faulkner Journal, v. II, fall, 1986. Copyright © 1987 by Ohio Northern University. Reproduced by permission.—German Life and Letters, v. XVIII, 1964-1965. Copyright © 1964-1965 Basil Blackwell Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.—Gothic. New Series, v. I, 1986; 1987; v. II, 1987. Copyright © 1986, 1987 by Gary William Crawford. All reproduced by permission of the author.—Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, v. X, August 1, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by the Institute for Evolutionary Psychology. Reproduced by permission.— Journal of Popular Culture, v. 13, 1979; v. 26, winter, 1992; v. 30, spring, 1997. Copyright © 1979, 1992, 1997 Basil Blackwell Ltd. All reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.— Literature/Film Quarterly, v. 21, 1993. Copyright © 1993 Salisbury State College. Reproduced by permission.—Malahat Review, 1977 for “Atwood Gothic” by Eli Mandel. Copyright © The Malahat Review, 1977. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of the author.— Mississippi Quarterly, v. XLII, summer, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Mississippi State University. Reproduced by permission.—Modern Fiction Studies, v. XVII, summer, 1971; v. 46, fall, 2000. Copyright © 1971, 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Both reproduced by permission.—Mosaic, v. 35, 2002; v. 35, March 1, 2002. Copyright © Mosaic 2002. All acknowledgment of previous publication is herewith made.—Narrative, v. 12, January 1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by the Ohio State University. Reproduced by permission.—The Nation and The Athenaeum, v. XXXIII, May 26, 1923. Copyright 1923 New

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Statesman, Ltd. Reproduced by permission.—New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1953 for “The Macabre and the Unexpected” by John Barkham. Copyright 1953, renewed 1981 by The New York Times Company. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of John Barkham.—Papers on Language and Literature, v. 20, winter, 1984; v. 37, winter, 2001. Copyright © 1984, 2001 by The Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Both reproduced by permission.— Princeton University Library Chronicle, v. XLIV, spring, 1983 for “A Story Replete with Horror” by Williston R. Benedict. Copyright © 1983 by Princeton University Library. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, v. 9, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by the American Conference on Romanticism. Reproduced by permission.—Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1994. Copyright © 1994 The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Reproduced by permission.—Review of English Studies, v. XIX, 1968. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—The Saturday Review of Literature, v. XVIII, September 24, 1938 for “Sinister House,” by Basil Davenport. Copyright © 1938, renewed 1966 Saturday Review Magazine, © 1979 General Media International, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Studies in American Fiction, v. 7, spring, 1979. Copyright © 1979 Northeastern University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, v. 39, autumn, 1999. Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in the Literary Imagination, v. VII, spring, 1974. Copyright © 1974 Department of English, Georgia State University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in the Novel, v. IX, summer, 1977. Copyright © 1977 by North Texas State University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in Romanticism, v. 40, spring, 2001. Copyright 2001 by the Trustees of Boston University. Reproduced by permission.— Studies in Scottish Literature, v. XXVIII, 1993. Copyright © G. Ross Roy 1993. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Studies in Short Fiction, v. 21, fall, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Studies in Short Fiction. Reproduced by permission.— Studies in Weird Fiction, spring, 1990; winter, 1994; v. 24, winter, 1999. Copyright © 1990, 1994, 1999 Necronomicon Press. All reproduced by permission of the author.—Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment III, v. 305, 1992 for “The Gothic Caleb Williams” by Betty Rizzo. Copyright © 1992 University of Oxford. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Victorian Newsletter, fall, 2002 for “Who Is Heathcliff? The Shadow Knows” by Marilyn Hume. Reproduced by permission of

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Copyrighted material in Gothic Literature was reproduced from the following books: Andriano, Joseph. From Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Atwood, Margaret. From The Animals in That Country. Atlantic-Little Brown Books, 1969. Copyright © 1968 by Oxford University Press (Canadian Branch). All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, in Canada by Oxford University Press.—Auerbach, Nina. From Our Vampires, Ourselves. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Baldick, Chris. From an Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer. Edited by Douglas Grant. Oxford University Press, 1989. © Oxford University Press 1968, Introduction and Select Biography © Chris Beldick 1989. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.— Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. From The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Copyright © 1982 by Associated University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Bell, Michael Davitt. From The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation. The University of Chicago Press, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Bleiler, E. F. From “Introduction: William Beckford and Vathek,” in Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Vampyre. Edited by E.F. Bleiler. Dover Publications, 1966. Copyright © 1966 by Dover Publications, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Botting, Fred. From Gothic. Routledge, 1996. Copyright © 1996 Fred Botting. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Botting, Fred. From “Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution, and Monstrosity,” in Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution and Monstrosity. Edited by Allison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest. Routledge, 1993. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, the editor, and author.—Botting, Fred. From Gothic. Routledge, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Fred Botting. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the pub-

lisher and the author.—Brantly, Susan C. From Understanding Isak Dinesen. University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Copyright © 2002 University of South Carolina Press. Reproduced by permission.—Brennan, Matthew C. From The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Camden House, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by the Editor and Contributors. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Brown, Jane K. and Marshall Brown. From “Faust and the Gothic Novel,” in Interpreting Goethe’s Faust Today. Edited by Jane K. Brown, Meredith Lee, and Thomas P. Saine. Camden House, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Camden House, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—BulwerLytton, Edward George. From “Glenallan,” in Gothic Tales of Terror. Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain. Taplinger Publishing Company, Inc., 1972. Copyright © 1972 selection and original material by Peter Haining. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Burns, Sarah. From Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America. University of California Press, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by The Regents of the University of California. Reproduced by permission.— Casebeer, Edwin F. From “Stephen King’s Canon: The Art of Balance,” in A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison. University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by the University of South Carolina. Reproduced by permission.—Clery, E. J. From “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s,” in Reviewing Romanticism. Edited by Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis. MacMillan Academic and Professional Ltd., 1992. Editorial matter and selection Copyright © Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis, 1992. Text Copyrights © Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, 1992. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Clery, E. J. From Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley. Northcote House Publishers, Ltd., 2000, 2004. Copyright © 2000 and 2004 by E. J. Clery. Reproduced by permission.—Clery, Emma. From “Against Gothic,” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Conger, Syndy M. From “An Analysis of The Monk and Its German Sources,” in Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretive Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels. Edited by Dr. James Hogg. Institut Fur Englische Sprache Und Literatur, 1977. Copyright © 1976 by Syndy M. Conger. Reproduced by permission.—Conger, Syndy McMillen. From “The Reconstruction of the Gothic Feminine

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the publisher and author.—West Virginia University Philological Papers, v. 42-43, 1997-1998. Reproduced by permission.—Wordsworth Circle, v. 31, summer, 2000; v. 34, spring, 2003. Copyright © 2000, 2003 Marilyn Gaull. Both reproduced by permission of the editor.

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Ideal in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Eden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 Eden Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author.— Davenport-Hines, Richard. From Gothic. North Point Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Richard Davenport-Hines. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC. In the United Kingdom, Canada and the British Commonwealth by the author.—Dinesen, Isak. From “The Monkey,” in Seven Gothic Tales. Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc., 1934; The Modern Library 1939. Copyright © 1934 by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc. Renewed 1961 by Isak Dinesen. Reproduced by permission of the Rungstedlund Foundation. In the United States by Random House, Inc.—du Maurier, Daphne. From Rebecca. Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1938. Copyright 1938 Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc. Renewed 1965 by Daphne du Maurier Browning. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London on behalf of The Chichester Partnership.—Duthie, Peter. From Plays on the Passions. Broadview Press, Ltd., 2001. Copyright © 2001 Peter Duthie. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Faulkner, William. From “A Rose for Emily,” in Collected Stories of William Faulkner. Vintage International, 1995. Copyright 1930, renewed 1958 by William Faulkner. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. In the United Kingdom by the Literary Estate of William Faulkner.—Fedorko, Kathy A. From Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. The University of Alabama Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Fiedler, Leslie. From Love and Death in the American Novel. Revised edition. Stein and Day, 1966. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Leslie Fiedler.—Fisher, IV, Benjamin F. From “Gothic Possibilities in Moby-Dick,” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Frank, Frederick S. From “The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved,” in AMS Studies in Eighteenth Century: Vathek and the Escape from Time: Bicentenary Revaluations. Edited by Kenneth W. Graham. AMS, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Freud, Sigmund. From The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. Penguin, 2003. Translation and editorial matter Copyright © 2003 by David McLintock. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd. In the United States and the Philippines by the Literary Estate of David McLintock.—Frisch, Shelley L. From “Poetics of the Uncanny: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sand-

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man,’” in The Scope of the Fantastic: Theory, Technique, Major Authors. Edited by Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce. Greenwood Press, 1985. Copyright © 1985 by The Thomas Burnett Swann Fund. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.—Gamer, Michael. From an Introduction to The Castle of Otranto. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Gamer. Penguin Books, 2001. Editorial matter copyright © Michael Gamer, 2001. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Geary, Robert F. From “Carmilla and the Gothic Legacy: Victorian Transformations of Supernatural Horror,” in The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 Bowling Green State University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Goddu, Teresa A. From Gothic America: Narrative, History, and the Nation. Columbia University Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.—Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. From Faust: Part One. Translated by David Luke. Oxford University Press, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by Oxford University Press. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Graham, Kenneth W. From “Emily’s Demon-Lover: The Gothic Revolution and The Mysteries of Udolpho,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression. Edited by Kenneth W. Graham. AMS Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Griffith, Clark. From “Poe and the Gothic,” in Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom. Edited by Richard P. Veler. Chantry Music Press, Inc., 1972. Copyright © 1972 by Chantry Music Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of Clark Griffith.—Gross, Louis S. From Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day of the Dead. UMI Research Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 Louis Samuel Gross. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Hannaham, James. From “‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either’: Goth and the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music,” in Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Edited by Christoph Grunenberg. MIT Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Reproduced by permission of The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.—Haslam, Richard. From “Maturin and the ‘Calvinist Sublime,’” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Heilman, Robert B. From “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’ Gothic,” in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays

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Gothic,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Eden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 by Eden Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Johnson, Greg. From Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Twayne Publishers. Reproduced by permission of Thomson Gale.— Keats, John. From “A letter to Richard Woodhouse on September 21, 1819,” in Selected Letters of John Keats, Revised Edition. Edited by Grant F. Scott. Harvard University Press, 2002. Copyright © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1986 by Herschel C. Baker, the Executor of the author Hyder Edward Rollins. Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Harvard University Press.—Kerr, Elizabeth M. From “Otranto to Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s Gothic Heritage,” in William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain. National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1979. Copyright © 1979 by Kennikat Press Corp. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of the author.—King, Stephen. From “The Modern American Horror Movie—Text and Subtext,” in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. Everest House, 1982, Berkeley Books, 2001. Copyright © 1981 by Stephen King. All other rights expressly reserved. Used by permission of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. In North America with permission of the author.—King, Stephen. From Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. Everest Publishing Group, 1982. Copyright © 1981 by Stephen King. All other rights expressly reserved. Used by permission of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. In North American with permission of the author.—Lamont, Claire. From “Jane Austen’s Gothic Architecture,” in Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition. Edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson, with Jane Stevenson. Rodopi, 1995. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Lanone, Catherine. From “Verging on the Gothic: Melmoth’s Journey to France,” in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960. Edited by Avril Horner. Manchester University Press, Mancheter, UK, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Lawler, Donald. From “The Gothic Wilde,” in Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Edited by C. George Sandulescu. Colin Smythe, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by The Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco. Reproduced by permission.—Le Tellier, Robert Ignatius. From Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Novel. Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 The Edwin Mellen Press.

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Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse. Edited by Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. University of Minnesota Press, 1958. Copyright © 1958 by the University of Minnesota. Renewed 1986 by Robert Charles Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Heller, Tamar. From Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. Yale University Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Yale University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hoeveler, Diane Long. From “Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism: The Case of ‘The Mortal Immortal,’” in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein: Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Birth. Edited by Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Associated University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Hoffmann, E. T. A. From an Introduction to The Best Tales of Hoffmann. Edited by E. F. Bleiler. Dover Publications, Inc., 1967. Copyright © 1967 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hoffmann, E. T. A. From “The Sand-Man,” in The Best Tales of Hoffmann. Edited and with an introduction by E. F. Bleiler. Translated by J. T. Bealby. Dover Publications, Inc., 1967. Copyright © 1967 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hogle, Jerrold E. From “Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic: Dracula and Theatricality at the Dawn of Simulation,” in Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis, and the Gothic. Edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith. MacMillan Press Ltd., 1998. Selection and editorial matter Copyright © William Hughes and Andrew Smith, 1998. Text Copyright © Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Horner, Sue and Zlosnik, Avril. From “Daphne du Maurier and Gothic Signatures: Rebecca as Vamp(ire),” in Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality. Edited by Avril Horner and Angela Keane. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and authors.—Howells, Coral Ann. From Margaret Atwood. Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996. Copyright © 1996 Coral Ann Howells. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Ingebretsen, Edward J. From “Anne Rice: Raising Holy Hell, Harlequin Style,” in The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Edited by Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Reproduced by permission.—James, Sibyl. From “Gothic Transformations: Isak Dinesen and the

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All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.— Leatherdale, Clive. From Dracula: The Novel and the Legend: A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece. Third Edition. Desert Island Books, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Clive Leatherdale. Reproduced by permission.—Lougy, Robert E. From Charles Robert Maturin. Bucknell University Press, 1975. Copyright © 1975 by Associated University Presses, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Mack, Douglas S. From “Aspects of the Supernatural in the Shorter Fiction of James Hogg,” in Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition. Edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson, with Jane Stevenson. Rodopi, 1995. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.— Magistrale, Tony. From “‘More Demon than Man’: Melville’s Ahab as Gothic Villain,” in Spectrum of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Sixth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Edited by Donald Palumbo. Greenwood Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Donald Palumbo. Reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.— Martindale, Andrew. From Gothic Art. Thames and Hudson, 1967. Copyright © 1967 Thames and Hudson Ltd, London. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Maturin, Charles Robert. From “Leixlip Castle,” in Gothic Tales of Terror: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, Europe, and the United States, 1765-1840. Edited by Peter Haining. Taplinger Publishing Company, Inc., 1972. Selection and original copyright © 1972 by Peter Haining. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Miall, David S. From “The Preceptor as Fiend: Radcliffe’s Psychology of the Gothic,” in Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters. Edited by Laura Dabundo. University Press of America, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by University Press of America, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Mighall, Robert. From A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 Robert Mighall. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Milbank, Alison. From “From the Sublime to the Uncanny: Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction,” in Gothick Origins and Innovations. Edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage. Rodopi, 1994. Copyright © Editions Rodopi B.V. Reproduced by permission.—Mishra, Vijay. From The Gothic Sublime. State University of New York Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 State University of New York. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the State University of New York Press.—Morrison, Toni. From Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1993. Copyright © 1992 by

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Toni Morrison. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.—Morrison, Toni. From Beloved. Vintage Books, 2004. Copyright © 1987, 2004 by Toni Morrison. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.—Neumeier, Beate. From “Postmodern Gothic: Desire and Reality in Angela Carter’s Writing,” in Modern Gothic: A Reader. Edited by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith. Manchester University Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Oates, Joyce Carol. From “Temple,” from Demon and Other Tales. Necronomicon Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Reproduced by permission of The Ontario Review, Inc.— Oates, Joyce Carol. From The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Pennyroyal Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.—Oates, Joyce Carol. From “Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque,” in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. Dutton, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. In the United Kingdom by John Hawkins & Associates, Inc.— Polidori, John. From “The Vampyre: A Tale,” in The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Edited by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. Oxford University Press, 1997. Editorial Matter Copyright © 1997 by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Prawer, S. S. From Caligari’s Children: the Film as Tale of Terror. Da Capo Press, 1989. Copyright © 1980 S. S. Prawer. Reproduced by permission of the author.— Punter, David. From The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2. Longman, 1996. Copyright © 1996 Addison Wesley Longman, Ltd. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Limited.—Punter, David. From The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2. Longman, 1996. Copyright © 1996 Addison Wesley Longman Limited. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Limited.— Punter, David. From “Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/ Transgression. Edited by Kenneth W. Graham. AMS, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by AMS Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Radcliffe, Ann. From “The Haunted Chamber,” in Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain. Edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Taplinger Publishing Company, Inc., 1972. Selection and original material copyright © Peter Hain-

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Frankenstein’s Monster,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Eden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 by Eden Press, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of Marcia Tillotson.—Valente, Joseph. From Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. University of Illinois Press, 2002. Copyright © 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.—Vincent, Sybil Korff. From “The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle,” in The Female Gothic. Edited by Juliann E. Fleenor. Elden Press, 1983. Copyright © 1983 Eden Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Warfel, Harry R. From Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist. 1949. University of Florida Press, 1949. Copyright © 1949 University of Florida. Renewed 1977 by Jean Dietze. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Weissberg, Liliane. From “Gothic Spaces: The Political Aspects of Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Modern Gothic: A Reader. Edited by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith. Manchester University Press, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.—Wharton, Edith. From The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton. Scribner, Simon & Schuster, 1973. Copyright © 1973 by William R. Tyler. Reproduced by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan and the Literary Estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.—Williams, Anne. From Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Williamson, Paul. From an Introduction to Gothic Sculpture 1140-1300. Edited by Nikolaus Pevsner. Yale University Press, Pelican History of Art, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Paul Williamson. Reproduced by permission.—Wisker, Gina. From “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen—Angela Carter and Horror,” in Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Clive Bloom. Pluto Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Lumiere (Cooperative) Press Ltd. Reproduced by permission.— Wolfreys, Julian. From “‘I Wants to Make Your Flesh Creep’: Notes toward a Reading of the Comic-Gothic in Dickens,” in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. Palgrave, 2000. Selection and editorial matter © Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Preface and Chapter 3 © Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Chapter 10 © Ruth Robbins, 2000.

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ing, 1972. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Railo, Eino. From The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. Routledge, 1927. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Ranger, Paul. From Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820. The Society for Theatre Research, 1991. Copyright © 1991 Paul Ranger. Reproduced by permission.—Rank, Otto. From “The Double as Immortal Self,” in Beyond Psychology. E, Hauser, 1941. Copyright © 1941 by Estelle B. Rank. Renewed 1969 by Estelle B. Simon. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of the author.—Robertson, Fiona. From Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction. Clarendon Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Fiona Robertson. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Sage, Victor. From Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness. Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Victor Sage. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Savoy, Eric. From “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy. University of Iowa Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by the University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Senf, Carol A. From The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Reproduced by permission.—Shelley, Percy Bysshe. From “The Assassins,” in Gothic Tales of Terror. Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain. Copyright © 1972 selection and original material copyright by Peter Haining. Reproduced by permission of the editor.—Shetty, Nalini V. From “Melville’s Use of the Gothic Tradition,” Studies in American Literature: Essays in Honour of William Mulder. Edited by Jagdish Chander and Narindar S. Pradhan. Oxford University Press, 1976. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1976. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press India, New Delhi.—Showalter, Elaine. From Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Clarendon Press, 1991. Copyright © 1991 Elaine Showalter. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.—Summers, Montague. From The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. The Fortune Press, 1938. Reproduced by permission.—Thomas, Ronald R. From Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious. Cornell University Press, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.—Tillotson, Marcia. From “‘A Forced Solitude’: Mary Shelley and the Creation of

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapters 1, 2, 4-9, 11, 12 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd, 2000. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Womack, Kenneth. From “‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the LateVictorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. Palgrave, 2000. Selection and editorial matter © Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Preface and Chapter 3 © Julian Wolfreys, 2000. Chapter 10 © Ruth Robbins, 2000. Chapters 1, 2, 4-9, 11, 12 © Palgrave Publishers Ltd, 2000. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.—Wood, Martin J. From “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature,” in The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Reproduced by permission.—Wood, Robin. From “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Edited by Robin Wood and Richard Lippe. Festival of Festivals, 1979. Copyright © Robin Wood, Richard Lippe, and Festival of Festivals. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Wright, Angela. From “European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine,” in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960. Edited by Avril Horner. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Manchester University Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and author.

Photographs and Illustrations in Gothic Literature were received from the following sources: A Description of Strawberry Hill, by Horace Walpole, frontispiece.—Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter Scott, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.— Ainsworth, William Harrison, photograph. © Getty Images.—Allston, Washington, photograph. The Library of Congress.—American Gothic, painting by Grant Wood, 1930, photograph. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago. Reproduced by permission.—Atwood, Margaret, photograph by Christopher Felver. Copyright © Christopher Felver/Corbis.—Austen, Jane, engraving.—Baillie, Joanna, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch/Corbis.— Balshazzar’s Feast, painting by Washington Allston, ca. 1817-1843. © The Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Art Library.—Beckford, William, photograph. © Michael Nicholson/Corbis.—Bergman, Ingrid and Heywood Morse in the 1959 film

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adaptation of Turn of the Screw by Henry James, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Bierce, Ambrose, drawing by J. J. Newbegin, 1896.—Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, engraving. © Hulton Getty/ Liaison Agency.—Brontë, Charlotte, illustration. International Portrait Gallery.—Brontë, Emily, painting by Bramwell Brontë.—Brown, Charles Brockden, print.—Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Burke, Edmund, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Capote, Truman, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.—Carter, Angela, photograph. © Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, c. 1790, illustration.— Castle of Wolfenbach; a German Story, by Eliza Parsons, 1793, title page.—Christine, movie still, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Collins, William Wilkie, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Cooper, Alice, performing on the In Concert television show on November 24, 1972, photograph. © Bettmann/ Corbis.—Dickens, Charles, photograph. Hesketh Pearson.—Dinesen, Isak, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann.—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Spencer Tracy as Dr. Jekyll, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.— Dracula, Helen Chandler, as Mina Seward, with Bela Lugosi, as Count Dracula, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.— Dracula’s Guest, written by Bram Stoker, title page.—du Maurier, Daphne, photograph. © Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.—Faulkner, William, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1831, illustration. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustration. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Gargoyle of 15th Century Spanish Building, photograph. © Manuel Bellver/Corbis.—Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, c. 1890, photograph.—Godwin, William, painting by James Northcote. From Vindication of the Rights of Women, by William Godwin, 1802.— Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, illustration. © Corbis.—Hawthorne, Nathaniel, photograph.—Hoffmann, E. T. A., photograph. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Hogg, James, photograph. © Rischgitz/ Getty Images.—Irving, Washington, photograph. The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.—James, Henry, photograph.—Jane Eyre, Orson Welles as Edward Rochester, with Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—King, Stephen, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann.—Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, photograph.—Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving, illustration. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Lewis, Matthew Gregory, photograph by H. W. Pickersgill.—Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, title page. © Getty

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poster. © A.I.P./The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents, by Ann Radcliffe, 1797 edition, title page.—The Mysteries of Udolpho, frontispieces by Ann Radcliffe.—The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, written by Edgar Allan Poe, title page. Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. Reproduced by permission.—The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story, by Clara Reeve, 1778, illustration.—The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times, by Sophia Lee, 1786, title page.—The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1980, photograph. © Warner Bros./The Kobal Collection.—The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, an Opera, by Henry Siddons, 1794, title page.—The Table of the Seven Deadly Sins, painting by Hieronymous Bosch, c. 1480-1490, Northern Renaissance, photograph. © Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis.—The Temptation of Ambrosio, from Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, illustration.—The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins, title page. Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. Reproduced by permission.—Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin, title page.—Twin Peaks, scene from the television series by David Lynch, 1990, photograph. © Corbis Sygma.—Veidt, Conrad and Lil Dagover in the 1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, photograph. © John Springer/Corbis.—von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, photograph. © Bettmann/ Corbis.—Waddy, F., satirical caricature in “Once a Week,” 1873. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Walpole, Horace, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Wharton, Edith, 1905, photograph. The Library of Congress.— Wieland; or, The Transformation, by Charles Brockden Brown, Philadelphia, David McKay, Publisher, 1881, title page.—Wilde, Oscar, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, movie poster, photograph. © CinemaPhoto/Corbis.

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Images.—Lovecraft, H. P., photograph.—Lugosi, Bela, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Maturin, Charles Robert, photograph. © The Granger Collection, New York.—Melville, Herman, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Morrison, Toni, photograph. Copyright © Nancy Kazerman/ ZUMA/Corbis.—Nave of Basilique de Saint-Denis, June 19, 1996, photograph. © Robert Holmes/ Corbis.—Nightmare, painting by Henri Fuseli, 1791. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—Nosferatu, Max Schreck (Count Orlok) standing on deck of ship, 1922, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—O’Connor, Flannery, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos.—Oates, Joyce Carol, photograph. © Nancy Kaszerman/Corbis.— Peck, Gregory, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Poe, Edgar Allan, photograph.—Polidori, John William, painting by F. G. Gainsford, c. 1816, photograph. © The Granger Collection, New York.—Psycho, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) approaching the motel, photograph. © Underwood and Underwood/Corbis.—Reeve, Clara, photograph. © Getty Images.— Rice, Anne, photograph. © Mitchell Gerber/Corbis.—Roettgen Pieta, wood carving, c. 1300, photograph. © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.— Schiller, Friedrich von, engraving. The German Information Center.—Scott, Sir Walter, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, illustration.—Son of Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis.—Stevenson, Robert Louis, engraving. The Library of Congress.—Stoker, Bram, photograph. © HultonDeutsch Collection/Corbis.—The Castle Spectre, by Matthew Gregory Lewis, illustration. Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced by permission.—The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Roger Corman, photograph. © A.I.P./The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—The Haunting, 1963, movie still. © MGM/The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—The Island of Dr. Moreau,

1220

● Suger of Saint Denis is born in Saint Denis, France.

■ Construction of the Cathedral of Amiens in France.

1127

■ Master Elias of Dereham begins designing the Salisbury Cathedral in England.

■ Abbot Suger of Saint Denis begins redesigning the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis in France.

1151 ● Abbot Suger of Saint Denis dies on 13 January in St. Denis, France.

C. 1163 ■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris in France.

1245 ■ Construction of the current Westminster Abbey in London, England.

C. 1329 ■ Andrea Pisano begins his bronze sculptures for the Baptisery in Florence, Italy.

1485 C. 1175 ■ Construction of the current Canterbury Cathedral in England.

■ Hieronymus Bosch completes the painting Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins.

C. 1600-01 C. 1194 ■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres (also known as Chartres Cathedral) in France.

■ William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is staged.

C. 1606 ■ William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is staged.

C. 1211 ■ Construction of the current Cathedral of Notre Dame de Rheims (also known as Rheims Cathedral) in France.

1717 ● Horace Walpole is born on 24 September in London, England.

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1081

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1727

1762

■ Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions is published.

● James Boaden is born on 23 May at White Haven in Cumberland, England.

1729

● Joanna Baillie is born on 11 September in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland.

● Edmund Burke is born on 12 January in Dublin, Ireland.

1764

● Clara Reeve is born on 23 January in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

● Ann Radcliffe is born on 9 July in London, England.

1742

■ Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is published.

■ Batty and Thomas Langley’s Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved is published.

1770 ● James Hogg is born in Ettrick, Selkirkshire, Scotland.

1749 ● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is born on 28 August in Frankfurt, Germany.

1771 ● Charles Brockden Brown is born on 17 January in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1750 ● Sophia Lee is born in London, England. ■ Horace Walpole and Richard Bentley begin designing Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s residence in Twickenham, England.

● Sir Walter Scott is born on 15 August in Edinburgh, Scotland.

1772 1753 ■ Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom is published.

● Samuel Taylor Coleridge is born on 21 October in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England.

1773 1756 ● William Godwin is born on 3 March in Wisbeach, England.

■ John Aikin and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld’s Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J. and A. L. Aikin is published.

1775

1757 ● William Blake is born on 28 November in London, England.

● Matthew Gregory Lewis is born on 9 July in London, England.

■ Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is published.

● Jane Austen is born on 16 December in Steventon, Hampshire, England.

1776 1759 ● Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller is born on 10 November in Marbach, Germany.

● Ernst Theodor Wilhelm (later E. T. A.) Hoffmann is born on 24 January in Königsberg, Germany.

1760

1777

● William Beckford is born on 29 September in London, England.

■ Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story is published.

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1791

■ Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue is published as The Old English Baron.

■ Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest is published.

1779

1792

● Washington Allston is born on 5 November in South Carolina.

● Percy Bysshe Shelley is born on 4 August in Field Place, Sussex, England.

1780

■ Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects is published.

● Charles Robert Maturin is born on 25 September in Dublin, Ireland.

1793 1781 ■ Henry Fuseli completes the painting The Nightmare.

■ Mrs. Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach; A German Story is published.

1794 1783

■ James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest is produced.

● Washington Irving is born on 3 April in New York City.

■ J. C. Cross’s The Apparition is produced.

■ Sophia Lee’s The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times is published.

1786

■ William Godwin’s Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams is published. ■ Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with some pieces of Poetry is published.

■ The unauthorized translation of William Beckford’s Vathek is published as An Arabian Tale.

■ Henry Siddons’s The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliff is produced.

1787

1795

● Lewis Nockalls Cottingham is born on 24 October at Laxfield, Suffolk, England.

● John William Polidori is born on 7 September in England.

■ William Beckford’s Vathek is published.

1788 ● George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron is born on 22 January in London, England.

1789 ■ James Cobb’s The Haunted Tower is produced. ■ George Colman the Younger’s The Battle of Hexham is produced.

1790 ■ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Ein Fragment is published. ■ Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance is published.

1796 ■ Marquis von Grosse’s Genius (Horrid Mysteries) is published. ■ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance is published.

1797 ● Horace Walpole dies on 2 March in London, England. ● Edmund Burke dies on 9 July in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England. ● Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) is born on 30 August in London, England. ■ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre: A Drama is produced.

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1778

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1798

1806

■ Regina Maria Roche’s Children of the Abbey is published.

■ Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor is published.

■ The first volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is published.

1807 ● Clara Reeve dies on 3 December in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

■ Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation is published.

1808

1799

■ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust—Der Tragödie erster Teil (Faust: Part One) is published.

■ Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker and the first volume of Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 are published.

1800 ■ Washington Allston completes the painting Tragic Figure in Chains. ■ The second volume of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 is published.

1809 ● Edgar Allan Poe is born on 19 January in Boston, Massachusetts.

1810 ● Charles Brockden Brown dies on 22 February in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Zastrozzi, A Romance is published.

1802

1811

■ The second volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is published.

■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance is published.

1812 ● Charles Dickens is born on 7 February in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England.

1803 ● Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer) is born on 25 May in London, England. ● Thomas Lovell Beddoes is born on 30 June in Clifton, Shropshire, England. ● Alexander Jackson Davis is born on 24 July in New York City.

■ The third volume of Joanna Baillie’s A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy is published. ■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt is published.

1813

1804 ● Nathaniel Hawthorne is born on 4 July in Salem, Massachusetts.

■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale is published.

1805

1814

● William Harrison Ainsworth is born on 4 February in Manchester, England.

● Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is born on 28 August in Dublin, Ireland.

● Friedrich von Schiller dies on 9 May in Weimar, Germany.

■ Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since is published.

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1821

● Charlotte Brontë is born on 21 April in Thornton, Yorkshire, England.

● John William Polidori commits suicide on 27 August in London, England.

■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Third is published.

■ Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater is published.

■ Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep is published.

1822

■ Jane Scott’s The Old Oak Chest is produced.

● E. T. A. Hoffmann dies on 25 June in Berlin, Germany.

1817

● Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns on 8 July in the Gulf of Spezia near Lerici, Italy.

● Jane Austen dies on 18 July in Winchester, Hampshire, England. ■ Washington Allston begins the painting Belshazzar’s Feast. ■ George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Manfred, A Dramatic Poem is published. ■ E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (“The Sandman”) is published.

1818 ● Matthew Gregory Lewis dies on 16 May during a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Jamaica to England. ● Emily Brontë is born on 30 July in Thornton, Yorkshire, England. ■ Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion is published. ■ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is published.

1819 ● Herman Melville is born on 1 August in New York City. ■ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci is produced. ■ Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. is published.

1823 ● Ann Radcliffe dies on 7 February in England. ■ Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein is produced.

1824 ■ William Wilkie Collins is born on 8 January in London, England. ● Sophia Lee dies on 13 March in Clifton, England. ● Lord Byron dies on 19 April in Cephalonia, Greece. ● Charles Robert Maturin dies on 30 October in Dublin, Ireland. ■ Catherine Gore’s The Bond, a Dramatic Poem is produced. ■ James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is published. ■ Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller is published.

1825 ■ James Fenimore Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston is published.

■ John William Polidori’s The Vampyre; a Tale is published.

1826

1820

1827

■ John Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems is published.

● William Blake dies on 12 August in London, England.

■ Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer is published.

■ Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean. A Tale is published.

■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Glenallan is published.

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1816

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1830

1842

● Christina Rossetti is born on 5 December in London, England.

■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni is published. ● Ambrose Bierce is born on 24 June in Horse Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio.

1832 ● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dies on 22 March. ● Sir Walter Scott dies on 21 September in Abbotsford, Scotland. ■ Architect Alexander Jackson Davis completes Glen Ellen, the Baltimore, Maryland residence of Robert Gilmor III.

1843 ● Henry James is born on 15 April in New York City. ● Washington Allston dies on 9 July in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ■ A. W. N. Pugin’s Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England is published.

1844

1834 ● Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies on 25 July in England.

● William Beckford dies on 2 May in England.

1845 1835 ● James Hogg dies on 21 November in Scotland.

■ Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is published. ■ Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales by Edgar A. Poe and The Raven and Other Poems are published.

1836 ● William Godwin dies on 7 April in London, England. ■ Thomas Cole completes the painting Ruined Tower.

1837 ■ Charles Dickens’s Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club is published under the pseudonym Boz. ■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales is published.

1846 ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Lucretia; or, The Children of Night is published. ■ Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina (The Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg) is published.

1847 ● L. N. Cottingham dies on 13 October in London, England. ● Bram Stoker is born on 8 November in Clontarf, Ireland. ■ Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. An Autobiography is published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.

1838 ■ Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is published. ■ Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is published.

1839 ● James Boaden dies on 16 February in England.

■ Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. ■ Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, written by either Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer, is published.

1848

1840

● Emily Brontë dies on 19 December in Haworth, Yorkshire, England.

■ Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is published.

■ Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man, and The Ghost’s Bargain is published.

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1857

● Thomas Lovell Beddoes commits suicide on 26 January in Basel, Switzerland.

■ Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret is published. ■ Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit is published.

● Edgar Allan Poe dies on 7 October in Baltimore, Maryland.

■ G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-wolf is published.

1850

1859

● Robert Louis Stevenson is born on 13 November in Edinburgh, Scotland.

● Washington Irving dies on 28 November in Irvington, New York.

■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is published.

1860

1851 ● Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dies on 1 February in Bournemouth, England. ● Joanna Baillie dies on 23 February in Hampstead, England. ■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance is published.

● Charlotte Perkins Gilman is born on 3 July in Hartford, Connecticut. ■ Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White is published. ■ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni is published.

1861

■ Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is published.

■ Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is published under the pseudonym Linda Brent.

1852

1862

■ Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly is published.

1853 ■ Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is published under the pseudonym Currer Bell.

● Edith Wharton is born on 24 January in New York City. ■ Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story is published.

1864

■ Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is published.

● Nathaniel Hawthorne dies on 19 May in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

C. 1854

■ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh is published.

● Oscar Wilde is born on 16 October in Dublin, Ireland.

1870

1855 ● Charlotte Brontë dies on 31 March in Haworth, Yorkshire, England.

● Charles Dickens dies on 9 June in Rochester, Kent, England.

1872 ■ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly is published.

1856 ● Sigismund Solomon Freud (later Sigmund Freud) is born on 6 May in Freiberg, Moravia, Czechoslovakia.

1873

■ Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is published.

● Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu dies on 10 February in Dublin, Ireland.

● Edward Bulwer-Lytton dies on 18 January in Torquay, Devonshire, England.

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1849

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1882

1894

● William Harrison Ainsworth dies on 3 January.

● Robert Louis Stevenson dies on 3 December in Apia, Samoa.

● Bela Lugosi is born Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blask¢ on 20 October in Lugos, Hungary.

● Christina Rossetti dies on 29 December in London, England.

1885

■ Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light is published.

● Karen Christentze Dinesen, who later wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, is born on 17 April near Copenhagen, Denmark.

1896 ■ H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility is published.

1886 ■ Guy de Maupassant’s “La Horla” (“The Horla”) is published Le Gil Blas.

1897

■ Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is published.

● William Faulkner is born on 25 September in New Albany, Mississippi. ■ Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.

1887 ● William Henry Pratt (later Boris Karloff) is born on 23 November in London, England.

1888

1898 ■ Henry James’s The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End is published.

● Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe (later F. W. Murnau) is born on 28 December in Bielefeld, Westphalia, Germany.

1899

1889

● Alfred Hitchcock is born on 13 August in London, England.

■ Wilkie Collins dies on 23 September in London, England.

● Elizabeth Bowen is born on 7 June in Dublin, Ireland.

1900 1890 ● Howard Phillips Lovecraft is born on 20 August in Providence, Rhode Island. ■ Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published.

● Oscar Wilde dies on 30 November in Paris, France.

1904 ■ Arthur Machen’s “The Garden of Avallaunius” is published.

1891 ● Herman Melville dies on 28 September in New York City. ■ Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories is published.

1906 ■ Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and Other Ghosts is published.

1892

1907

● Alexander Jackson Davis dies on 14 January in West Orange, New Jersey.

● Daphne du Maurier is born on 12 May in London, England.

■ Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is published.

■ George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the Vampire is published.

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1922

■ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Selig Polyscope Company, is released.

■ Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, directed by F. W. Murnau, is released.

1909

1924

■ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Nordisk Company, is released.

■ Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks), directed by Paul Leni and Leo Birinsky, is released.

1910

1925

■ Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de L’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera) is published.

● Edward Gorey is born on 22 February in Chicago, Illinois.

■ Frankenstein, directed by J. Searle Dawley, is released.

● (Mary) Flannery O’Connor is born on 25 March in Savannah, Georgia.

1911

1927

■ Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is published.

■ Algernon Blackwood’s The Dance of Death, and Other Tales is published.

1912 ● Bram Stoker dies on 20 April in London, England.

1914 ● Ambrose Bierce disappears c. 1 January in Mexico and is presumed dead.

1916 ● Henry James dies on 28 February in London, England.

1929 ● Ursula K. Le Guin is born on 21 October in Berkeley, California.

1930 ■ William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and “A Rose for Emily” are published.

1931 ● Chloe Ardelia Wofford (later Toni Morrison) is born on 18 February in Lorain, Ohio.

1919

● F. W. Murnau dies on 11 March in Santa Barbara, California.

● Shirley Jackson is born on 14 December in San Francisco, California.

■ Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi in the title role, is released.

■ Sigmund Freud’s “Das Unheimlich” (“The Uncanny”) is published.

■ Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the monster, is released. ■ M, directed by Fritz Lang, is released.

1920 ● Ray Bradbury is born on 22 August in Waukegan, Illinois. ■ Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World, directed by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, is released. ■ Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), directed by Robert Wiene, is released.

■ William Faulkner’s Sanctuary is published.

1932 ■ Murders in the Rue Morgue, directed by Robert Florey, is released. ■ White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin, is released. ■ William Faulkner’s Light in August is published.

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1908

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1933

1940

■ King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper, is released.

● Angela Carter is born on 7 May in London, England.

■ The Invisible Man, directed by James Whale, is released.

■ Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released.

■ Island of Lost Souls, directed by Erle C. Kenton, is released.

1941

1934

● Howard Allen O’Brien (later Anne Rice) is born on 4 October in New Orleans, Louisiana.

■ Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales is published.

1943 1935 ● Charlotte Perkins Gilman commits suicide on 17 August in Pasadena, California. ■ Bride of Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, is released.

■ I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and The Seventh Victim, all produced by Val Lewton, are released.

1945 ■ The Body Snatcher, directed by Robert Wise, is released.

1936 ■ Walter de la Mare’s Ghost Stories is published.

■ Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover, and Other Stories is published.

■ William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is published.

■ H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature is published.

■ H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” is published.

1947 ● Stephen King is born on 21 September in Portland, Maine.

1937 ● H. P. Lovecraft dies on 15 March in Providence, Rhode Island. ● Edith Wharton dies on 11 August in St. Bricesous-Foret, France.

1949 ■ Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris is published.

■ Edith Wharton’s Ghosts is published.

1952 1938 ● Joyce Carol Oates is born on 16 June in Lockport, New York.

● Clive Barker is born on 5 October in Liverpool, England.

■ Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is published.

1955

1939

■ Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find is published.

● Sigmund Freud dies on 23 September in London, England.

1956

● Margaret Atwood is born on 18 November in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

● Bela Lugosi dies on 16 August in Los Angeles, California.

■ Son of Frankenstein, directed by Rowland V. Lee, is released.

■ Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, is released.

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1968

■ The Curse of Frankenstein, directed by Terence Fisher, is released.

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Animals in That Country is published.

1959

■ Night of the Living Dead, directed by George A. Romero, is released.

■ Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is published.

■ Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski, is released.

■ The Mummy, directed by Terence Fisher, is released.

1969

■ The Twilight Zone is first televised.

● Boris Karloff dies on 2 February at Midhurst in Sussex, England.

1960

■ Led Zeppelin’s first two self-titled albums are released.

■ The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Roger Corman, is released. ■ Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released.

1962 ● William Faulkner dies on 6 July in Byhalia, Mississippi. ● Isak Dinesen dies on 7 September in Rungsted, Denmark.

1970 ■ Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut album is released. ■ Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is published. ■ Night Gallery is first televised.

1971 ■ Richard Matheson’s Hell House is published. ■ Alice Cooper’s Killer is released.

1963

■ Black Sabbath’s Paranoid is released.

■ Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is published. ■ The Birds, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is released. ■ The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, is released.

1972 ■ Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing is published. ■ Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is published. ■ Alice Cooper’s School’s Out is released.

1964 ● Flannery O’Connor dies on 3 August in Milledgeville, Georgia. ■ The Addams Family is first televised.

1973 ● Elizabeth Bowen dies on 22 February in London, England.

■ The Munsters is first televised.

■ The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, is released.

1965

1974

● Shirley Jackson dies on 8 August in North Bennington, Vermont.

■ Angela Carter’s Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces is published.

1966

■ The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Tobe Hooper, is released.

■ Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! is released.

■ Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks, is released.

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1957

CHRONOLOGY OF KEY EVENTS

1975

1983

■ Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot is published.

■ Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is published.

■ They Came from Within, directed by David Cronenberg, is released.

■ New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies is released.

1976 ■ Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle is published. ■ Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, is released. ■ The Omen, directed by Richard Donner, is released. ■ Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is published.

1984 ■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Mysteries of Winterthurn is published.

1986 ■ Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart is published. ■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Tinderbox is released.

1977 ■ Stephen King’s The Shining is published. ■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Night Side: Eighteen Tales is published.

■ Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera is produced.

1987 1978

■ Toni Morrison’s Beloved is published.

■ Dawn of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero, is released.

■ The Smiths’s Louder than Bombs is released.

1979

1988

■ Bauhaus’s 12-inch single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is released.

■ Toni Morrison is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved.

■ Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is published.

1989

■ Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures is released. ■ ’Salem’s Lot, directed by Tobe Hooper, is televised.

● Daphne du Maurier dies on 19 April in Cornwall, England. ■ Pet Sematary, directed by Mary Lambert, is released.

1980 ● Alfred Hitchcock dies on 29 April in Los Angeles, California. ■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur is published.

1990 ■ Twin Peaks is first televised.

■ The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is released.

1992

1981

● Angela Carter dies on 16 February in London, England.

■ Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is published.

■ Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is released.

■ Siouxsie and the Banshees’s Juju is released.

1982

1993

■ Joyce Carol Oates’s A Bloodsmoor Romance is published.

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is published.

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2000

■ Joyce Carol Oates’s Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque is published.

● Edward Gorey dies on 15 April in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

■ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh, is released.

■ Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is published.

1996 ■ Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is published.

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1994

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

T

he origins of Gothic literature can be traced to various historical, cultural, and artistic precedents. Figures found in ancient folklore, such as the Demon Lover, the Cannibal Bridegroom, the Devil, and assorted demons, later populated the pages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic novels and dramas. In addition, many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works are believed to have served as precursors to the development of the Gothic tradition in Romantic literature. These works include plays by William Shakespeare, such as Hamlet (c. 1600-01), and Macbeth (1606), which feature supernatural elements, demons, and apparitions, and Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), which was written to support religion and discourage superstition by providing evidence of the existence of good spirits, angels, and other divine manifestations, and by ridiculing delusions and naive credulity. However, while these elements were present in literature and folklore prior to the mid-eighteenth century, when the Gothic movement began, it was the political, social, and theological landscape of eighteenth-century Europe that served as an impetus for this movement. Edmund Burke’s treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) introduced the concept of increasing appreciation for the nature of experiences characterized by the “sublime” and “beautiful” by depicting and then engaging (vicariously)

in experiences comprised of elements that are contrary in nature, such as terror, death, and evil. Writers composed Gothic narratives during this period largely in response to anxiety over the change in social and political structure brought about by such events as the French Revolution, the rise in secular-based government, and the rapidly changing nature of the everyday world brought about by scientific advances and industrial development, in addition to an increasing aesthetic demand for realism rather than folklore and fantasy. The Gothic worlds depicted fears about what might happen, what could go wrong, and what could be lost by continuing along the path of political, social, and theological change, as well as reflecting the desire to return to the time of fantasy and belief in supernatural intervention that characterized the Middle Ages. In some cases Gothic narratives were also used to depict horrors that existed in the old social and political order— the evils of an unequal, intolerant society. In Gothic narratives writers were able to both express the anxiety generated by this upheaval and, as Burke suggested, increase society’s appreciation and desire for change and progress. It is Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) that is generally acclaimed as the original work of Gothic literature—despite the fact that some of the Gothic trappings found in Walpole’s work were present in works such as Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count

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Fathom (1753)—because in his narrative Walpole brings together elements of the supernatural and horrific, and models his ruined castle setting after his real-life residence, Strawberry Hill, a modern version of a medieval castle. The characters in the novel try to succeed in the modern world and to adhere to the optimism and forward-looking agenda they have been asked to advance, but a dark, ancient evil from the distant past dooms them to failure. While the literary merits of Walpole’s novel were challenged by many critics, the work inspired the reading public and authors alike, and works imitative of Otranto, written in what became known as the Gothic style, became extremely popular. Brother and sister John Aikin and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld, in their Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773), represent the intellectual and psychological mechanics of Gothic literature, and offer “Sir Bertrand, A Fragment,” a story written in Gothic style, to illustrate their assertions. Ann Radcliffe, like Walpole, is considered one of the founders of the Gothic genre. Radcliffe began her career as a Gothic writer with the publication of her well-received novel The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789, and quickly followed up with the novels A Sicilian Romance and The Romance of the Forest published in 1790 and 1791, respectively. Radcliffe’s 1794 novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho is regarded by many as the quintessential example of eighteenth-century fiction at its finest, and it is for this work that she is best known. Mrs. Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) is an example of the melodramatic popular “shilling shocker,” or “penny dreadful” type of Gothic fiction, a debased imitation of Radcliffe’s style, characterized by gross excess and lack of literary skill, that was parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818). Parsons was one of many novelists, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton—held as an author of a more “elevated,” or skilled example of the popular Gothic melodrama—who produced works of this kind. Other works considered classic examples of the Gothic novel are Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), both of which epitomize the stock Gothic character of the outsider, or social outcast, who must face the consequences of committing mortal sin. The great Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge also contributed to the Gothic tradition in literature, and, according to critic Fred Botting, produced “major innovations, or renovations of the genre” that “drew it closer to aspects of

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Romanticism.” The Romantic writers, asserts Botting as well as other commentators, while utilizing the settings and devices developed by Walpole, Radcliffe, and others, focused and expanded upon the psychological, internal qualities of the protagonists, and dealt with such themes as the search for identity, desire versus duty, social alienation, and the search for truth. William Godwin, and his daughter, Mary Shelley, are the Romantic writers most closely associated with the Gothic tradition. Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) utilizes the Gothic tradition to indict political repression and protest the tyrannical rule of the day, while Shelley’s Gothic in Frankenstein (1818) urges personal integrity and social responsibility in an age of scientific progress, and represents the anxiety produced by the disruption of the traditional, known natural world order. While English writers are credited with founding the Gothic novel, Scottish writers such as James Hogg contributed heavily to the genre, and many English-language works were influenced by German literary traditions, particularly the works of such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Sir Walter Scott’s works reflect a German sensibility, and works such as his Waverly (1814)—as well as the works of others, including Walpole, Radcliffe, Shelley, Maturin, and Lewis—in turn inspired Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Fenimore Cooper, some of the most notable authors who developed what became the American Gothic tradition in literature. In addition, the English Gothic tradition influenced French authors, including Gaston Leroux, and Russian authors, including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chekhov. Since its inception, the Gothic genre in literature has undergone numerous changes and adaptations, but its essential role as a means of depicting humanity’s deepest, darkest fears and otherwise unspeakable evils—both real and imagined—has endured.

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS John Aikin and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J. and A. L. Aikin (essays and fiction) 1773

Jane Austen Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 4 vols. (novels) 1818

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E. T. A. Hoffmann

Wieland; or, The Transformation (novel) 1798

Die Elixiere des Teufels. 2 vols. [The Devil’s Elixir] (novel) 1815-16

Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. 2 vols. (novel) 1799-1800 Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. 3 vols. (novel) 1799

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

James Hogg The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (novel) 1824; republished as The Suicide’s Grave, 1828

Eugene Aram: A Tale. 3 vols. (novel) 1832

John Keats

The Last Days of Pompeii. 3 vols. (novel) 1834

Poems (poetry) 1817

Zanoni. 3 vols. (novel) 1842

Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (poetry) 1820

Lucretia; or, The Children of Night. 3 vols. (novel) 1846

Edmund Burke A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (essay) 1757

George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron

Gaston Leroux Le Fantôme de l’Opéra [The Phantom of the Opera] (novel) 1910

Matthew Gregory Lewis The Monk: A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1796

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. A Romaunt (poetry) 1812

Charles Robert Maturin

Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (play) 1817

Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio. 3 vols. [as Dennis Jasper Murphy] (novel) 1807

Anton Chekhov

The Milesian Chief: A Romance. 4 vols. [as Dennis Jasper Murphy] (novel) 1812

“Chernyi monakh” [“The Black Monk”] (short story) 1894; published in the journal Artist

Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (play) 1816

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Melmoth the Wanderer. 4 vols. (novel) 1820

Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep (poetry) 1816

Mrs. Eliza Parsons

James Fenimore Cooper

Castle of Wolfenbach; A German Story. 2 vols. (novel) 1793

Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston. 2 vols. (novel) 1825

Edgar Allan Poe

Daniel Defoe

Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian (poetry) 1827

An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (essay) 1727

Fyodor Dostoevsky Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina [The Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg] (novel) 1846 Brat’ia Karamazovy [The Brothers Karamazov] (novel) 1880

William Godwin

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, North America: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny, Famine, and Shipwreck, During a Voyage to the South Seas; Resulting in Various Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries in the Eightyfourth Parallel of Southern Latitude [published anonymously] (novel) 1838 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. 2 vols. (short stories) 1840

Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. 3 vols. (novel) 1794

The Raven, and Other Poems (poetry) 1845

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ann Radcliffe

Faust: Ein Fragment (poetry) 1790

The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne: A Highland Story [published anonymously] (novel) 1789

Faust—Der Tragödie erster Teil [Faust. Part I; published in Faust: A Drama by Goethe and Schiller’s “Song of the Bell”] (play) 1808

Tales by Edgar A. Poe (short stories) 1845

A Sicilian Romance. 2 vols. [published anonymously] (novel) 1790

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Charles Brockden Brown

GOTHIC LITERATURE: AN OVERVIEW

The Romance of the Forest: Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry. 3 vols. [published anonymously] (novel) 1791 The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry. 4 vols. (novel) 1794 The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents. A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1797

Sir Walter Scott The Lay of the Last Minstrel (ballad) 1805 Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. 3 vols. (novel) 1814

William Shakespeare Hamlet (play) c. 1600-01 Macbeth (play) 1606

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. (novel) 1818; revised edition, 1831

Percy Bysshe Shelley Zastrozzi, A Romance (novel) 1810 St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance [as “A Gentleman of the University of Oxford”] (novel) 1811 Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, and Other Poems (poetry) 1816

Tobias Smollett The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (novel) 1753

Bram Stoker Dracula (novel) 1897

Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto, A Story (novel) 1764

PRIMARY SOURCES JOHN AIKIN AND ANNA LAETITIA (AIKIN) BARBAULD (ESSAY DATE 1773) SOURCE: Aikin, John and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld. “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment.” In Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J. and A. L. Aikin, pp. 119-37. London: J. Johnson, 1773. In the following essay, the Aikins delineate their theory to explain the psychological and intellectual processes involved in readers’ enjoyment of Gothic literature. The

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Aikins provide a fragment of a Gothic story that can be read both for enjoyment and as a means of studying the theory advanced in the preceding essay.

[“On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror”] That the exercise of our benevolent feelings, as called forth by the view of human afflictions, should be a source of pleasure, cannot appear wonderful to one who considers that relation between the moral and natural system of man, which has connected a degree of satisfaction with every action or emotion productive of the general welfare. The painful sensation immediately arising from a scene of misery, is so much softened and alleviated by the reflex sense of selfapprobation attending virtuous sympathy, that we find, on the whole, a very exquisite and refined pleasure remaining, which makes us desirous of again being witnesses to such scenes, instead of flying from them with disgust and horror. It is obvious how greatly such a provision must conduce to the ends of mutual support and assistance. But the apparent delight with which we dwell upon objects of pure terror, where our moral feelings are not in the least concerned, and no passion seems to be excited but the depressing one of fear, is a paradox of the heart, much more difficult of solution. The reality of this source of pleasure seems evident from daily observation. The greediness with which the tales of ghosts and goblins, of murders, earthquakes, fires, shipwrecks, and all the most terrible disasters attending human life, are devoured by every ear, must have been generally remarked. Tragedy, the most favourite work of fiction, has taken a full share of those scenes; “it has supt full with horrors”—and has, perhaps, been more indebted to them for public admiration than to its tender and pathetic parts. The ghost of Hamlet, Macbeth descending into the witches’ cave, and the tent scene in Richard, command as forcibly the attention of our souls as the parting of Jaffeir and Belvidera, the fall of Wolsey, or the death of Shore. The inspiration of terror was by the antient critics assigned as the peculiar province of tragedy; and the Greek and Roman tragedians have introduced some extraordinary personages for this purpose: not only the shades of the dead, but the furies, and other fabulous inhabitants of the infenal regions. Collins, in his most poetical ode to Fear, has finely enforced this idea. Tho’ gentle Pity claim her mingled part, Yet all the thunders of the scene are thine.

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Call up him that left half-told The story of Cambuscan bold; &c.

How are we then to account for the pleasure derived from such objects? I have often been led to imagine that there is a deception in these cases; and that the avidity with which we attend is not a proof of our receiving real pleasure. The pain of suspense, and the irresistible desire of satisfying curiosity, when once raised, will account for our eagerness to go quite through an adventure, though we suffer actual pain during the whole course of it. We rather choose to suffer the smart pang of a violent emotion than the uneasy craving of an unsatisfied desire. That this principle, in many instances, may involuntarily carry us through what we dislike, I am convinced from experience. This is the impulse which renders the poorest and most insipid narrative interesting when once we get fairly into it; and I have frequently felt it with regard to our modern novels, which, if lying on my table, and taken up in an idle hour, have led me through the most tedious and disgusting pages, while, like Pistol eating his leek, I have swallowed and execrated to the end. And it will not only force us through dullness, but through actual torture—through the relation of a Damien’s execution, or an inquisitor’s act of faith. When children, therefore, listen with pale and mute attention to the frightful stories of apparitions, we are not, perhaps, to imagine that they are in a state of enjoyment, any more than the poor bird which is dropping into the mouth of the rattlesnake—they are chained by the ears, and fascinated by curiosity. This solution, however, does not satisfy me with respect to the wellwrought scenes of artificial terror which are formed by a sublime and vigorous imagination. Here, though we know before-hand what to expect, we enter into them with eagerness, in quest of a pleasure already experienced. This is the pleasure constantly attached to the excitement of surprise from new and wonderful objects. A

strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of “forms unseen, and mightier far than we,” our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy cooperating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement. Hence, the more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the circumstances of a scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it; and where they are too near common nature, though violently borne by curiosity through the adventure, we cannot repeat it or reflect on it, without an over-balance of pain. In the Arabian nights are many most striking examples of the terrible joined with the marvellous: the story of Aladdin and the travels of Sinbad are particularly excellent. The Castle of Otranto is a very spirited modern attempt upon the same plan of mixed terror, adapted to the model of Gothic romance. The best conceived, and most strongly worked-up scene of mere natural horror that I recollect, is in [Tobias] Smollett’s Ferdinand count Fathom; where the hero, entertained in a lone house in a forest, finds a corpse just slaughtered in the room where he is sent to sleep, and the door of which is locked upon him. It may be amusing for the reader to compare his feelings upon these, and from thence form his opinion of the justness of my theory. The following fragment, in which both these manners are attempted to be in some degree united, is offered to entertain a solitary winter’s evening.

[“Sir Bertrand, A Fragment”] After this adventure, Sir Bertrand turned his steed towards the woods, hoping to cross these dreary moors before the curfew. But ere he had proceeded half his journey, he was bewildered by the different tracks, and not being able, as far as the eye could reach, to espy any object but the brown heath surrounding him, he was at length quite uncertain which way he should direct his course. Night overtook him in this situation. It was one of those nights when the moon gives a faint glimmering of light through the thick black clouds of a lowering sky. Now and then she suddenly emerged in full splendor from her veil; and then instantly retired behind it, having just served to give the forlorn Sir Bertrand a wide extended prospect over the desolate waste. Hope and native courage a while urged him to push forwards, but at length the increasing darkness and fatigue of

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The old Gothic romance and the Eastern tale, with their genii, giants, enchantments, and transformations, however a refined critic may censure them as absurd and extravagant, will ever retain a most powerful influence on the mind, and interest the reader independently of all peculiarity of taste. Thus the great Milton, who had a strong bias to these wildnesses of the imagination, has with striking effect made the stories “of forests and enchantments drear,” a favourite subject with his Penseroso; and had undoubtedly their awakening images strong upon his mind when he breaks out,

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body and mind overcame him; he dreaded moving from the ground he stood on, for fear of unknown pits and bogs, and alighting from his horse in despair, he threw himself on the ground. He had not long continued in that posture when the sullen toll of a distant bell struck his ears—he started up, and turning towards the sound discerned a dim twinkling light. Instantly he seized his horse’s bridle, and with cautious steps advanced towards it. After a painful march he was stopt by a moated ditch surrounding the place from whence the light proceeded; and by a momentary glimpse of moon-light he had a full view of a large antique mansion, with turrets at the corners, and an ample porch in the centre. The injuries of time were strongly marked on every thing about it. The roof in various places was fallen in, the battlements were half demolished, and the windows broken and dismantled. A drawbridge, with a ruinous gate-way at each end, led to the court before the building—He entered, and instantly the light, which proceeded from a window in one of the turrets, glided along and vanished; at the same moment the moon sunk beneath a black cloud, and the night was darker than ever. All was silent—Sir Bertrand fastened his steed under a shed, and approaching the house traversed its whole front with light and slow footsteps—All was still as death—He looked in at the lower windows, but could not distinguish a single object through the impenetrable gloom. After a short parley with himself, he entered the porch, and seizing a massy iron knocker at the gate, lifted it up, and hesitating, at length struck a loud stroke. The noise resounded through the whole mansion with hollow echoes. All was still again—He repeated the strokes more boldly and louder—another interval of silence ensued—A third time he knocked, and a third time all was still. He then fell back to some distance that he might discern whether any light could be seen in the whole front—It again appeared in the same place and quickly glided away as before—at the same instant a deep sullen toll sounded from the turret. Sir Bertrand’s heart made a fearful stop—He was a while motionless; then terror impelled him to make some hasty steps towards his steed—but shame stopt his flight; and urged by honour, and a resistless desire of finishing the adventure, he returned to the porch; and working up his soul to a full steadiness of resolution, he drew forth his sword with one hand, and with the other lifted up the latch of the gate. The heavy door, creaking upon its hinges, reluctantly yielded to his hand—he applied his shoulder to it and forced it

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open—he quitted it and stept forward—the door instantly shut with a thundering clap. Sir Bertrand’s blood was chilled—he turned back to find the door, and it was long ere his trembling hands could seize it—but his utmost strength could not open it again. After several ineffectual attempts, he looked behind him, and beheld, across a hall, upon a large staircase, a pale bluish flame which cast a dismal gleam of light around. He again summoned forth his courage and advanced towards it—It retired. He came to the foot of the stairs, and after a moment’s deliberation ascended. He went slowly up, the flame retiring before him, till he came to a wide gallery—The flame proceeded along it, and he followed in silent horror, treading lightly, for the echoes of his footsteps startled him. It led him to the foot of another staircase, and then vanished—At the same instant another toll sounded from the turret—Sir Bertrand felt it strike upon his heart. He was now in total darkness, and with his arms extended, began to ascend the second stair-case. A dead cold hand met his left hand and firmly grasped it, drawing him forcibly forwards—he endeavoured to disengage himself, but could not—he made a furious blow with his sword, and instantly a loud shriek pierced his ears, and the dead hand was left powerless in his—He dropt it, and rushed forwards with a desperate valour. The stairs were narrow and winding, and interrupted by frequent breaches, and loose fragments of stone. The stair-case grew narrower and narower, and at length terminated in a low iron grate. Sir Bertrand pushed it open—it led to an intricate winding passage, just large enough to admit a person upon his hands and knees. A faint glimmering of light served to show the nature of the place. Sir Bertrand entered—A deep hollow groan resounded from a distance through the vault—He went forwards, and proceeding beyond the first turning, he discerned the same blue flame which had before conducted him. He followed it. The vault, at length, suddenly opened into a lofty gallery, in the midst of which a figure appeared, compleatly armed, thrusting forwards the bloody stump of an arm, with a terrible frown and menacing gesture, and brandishing a sword in his hand. Sir Bertrand undauntedly sprung forwards; and aiming a fierce blow at the figure, it instantly vanished, letting fall a massy iron key. The flame now rested upon a pair of ample folding doors at the end of the gallery. Sir Bertrand went up to it, and applied the key to a brazen lock—with difficulty he turned the bolt—instantly the doors flew open, and discovered a large apartment, at the end of which was a coffin rested upon a bier,

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MRS. ELIZA PARSONS (NOVEL DATE 1793) SOURCE: Parsons, Mrs. Eliza. “Castle of Wolfenbach; a German story.” In Castle of Wolfenbach; a German story. In two volumes, pp. 1-9. London: Minerva Press, 1793. Parsons is one of the “Northanger Novelists,” a group of popular Gothic writers whose works Jane Austen is believed to have parodied in Northanger Abbey. The following excerpt is from Parson’s best known novel.

The clock from the old castle had just gone eight when the peaceful inhabitants of a neighbouring cottage, on the skirts of the wood, were about to seek that repose which labour had rendered necessary, and minds blest with innocence and tranquillity assured them the enjoyment of. The evening was cold and tempestuous,

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with a taper burning on each side of it. Along the room on both sides were gigantic statues of black marble, attired in the Moorish habits, and holding enormous sabres in their right hands. Each of them reared his arm, and advanced one leg forwards, as the knight entered; at the same moment the lid of the coffin flew open, and the bell tolled. The flame still glided forwards, and Sir Bertrand resolutely followed, till he arrived within six paces of the coffin. Suddenly, a lady in a shroud and black veil rose up in it, and stretched out her arms towards him—at the same time the statues clashed their sabres and advanced. Sir Bertrand flew to the lady and clasped her in his arms—she threw up her veil and kissed his lips; and instantly the whole building shook as with an earthquake, and fell asunder with a horrible crash. Sir Bertrand was thrown into a sudden trance, and on recovering, found himself seated on a velvet sofa, in the most magnificent room he had ever seen, lighted with innumerable tapers, in lustres of pure crystal. A sumptuous banquet was set in the middle. The doors opening to soft music, a lady of incomparable beauty, attired with amazing splendor entered, surrounded by a troop of gay nymphs more fair than the Graces—She advanced to the knight, and falling on her knees thanked him as her deliverer. The nymphs placed a garland of laurel upon his head, and the lady led him by the hand to the banquet, and sat beside him. The nymphs placed themselves at the table, and a numerous train of servants entering, served up the feast; delicious music playing all the time. Sir Bertrand could not speak for astonishment—he could only return their honours by courteous looks and gestures. After the banquet was finished, all retired but the lady, who leading back the knight to the sofa, addressed him in these words:———

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ JOHN AIKIN (1747-1822) AND ANNA LAETITIA (AIKIN) BARBAULD (1743-1825)

The brother and sister team of Dr. John Aikin and Anna Laetitita (Aikin) Barbauld produced the 1773 collection Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J. and A. L. Aikin. Critical opinion has been divided over which author wrote which piece in the collection; “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment,” an early and influential exploration of the nature and effects of terror in Gothic literature, has been attributed alternately to John and Anna. The essay offers an expansion of ideas introduced in prior literary treatises on the use of terror and the sublime in literature: Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and the anonymous ancient Greek text On the Sublime. The story fragment “Sir Bertrand” is a Gothic version of a chivalric tale, in which the title character encounters and “rescues” a female apparition trapped in a coffin inside of a ruined mansion. The fragment follows “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” and concisely illustrates the arguments offered in the essay, allowing the reader to experience the phenomenon of a pleasurable response to a terrifyingly horrific narrative.

the rain poured in torrents, and the distant thunders rolled with tremendous noise round the adjacent mountains, whilst the pale lightning added horrors to the scene. Pierre was already in bed, and Jaqueline preparing to follow, when the trampling of horses was heard, and immediately a loud knocking at the door; they were both alarmed; Pierre listened, Jaqueline trembled; the knocking was repeated with more violence; the peasant threw on his humble garment, and, advancing to the door, demanded who was there? “Two travellers, (answered a gentle voice) overtaken by the storm; pray, friend, afford us shelter.” “O! (cried Jaqueline) perhaps they may be robbers, and we shall be murdered.” “Pho! simpleton, (said Pierre) what can they expect to rob us of.” He opened

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the door, and discovered a man supporting a lady who appeared almost fainting. “Pray, friend, (said the man) permit this lady to enter your cottage, I fear she has suffered much from the storm.” “Poor soul, I am sorry for her; enter and welcome,” (cried Pierre.) Jaqueline placed her wooden arm-chair by the chimney, ran for some wood, and kindled a blaze in a moment, whilst Pierre put the horse into a little out-house which held their firing and his working implements, and returned with a portmantua to the lady. They had only some bread and milk to offer, but they made it warm, and prevailed on their guest to take some. The man, who appeared an attendant, did the same. The lady soon got her clothes dry, but she wanted rest, and they had no bed to offer. One single room answered all their purposes of life; their humble bed was on the floor, in a corner of it, but though mean it was whole and clean. Jaqueline entreated the lady to lie down; she refused for some time, but growing faint from exhausted spirits and fatigue, she was compelled to accept the offer; the others sat silently round the fire: but, alas! horror and affliction precluded sleep, and the fair traveller, after laying about two hours, returned again to the fire-side, weary and unrefreshed. “Is there any house near this?” (demanded she.) “No, madam, (replied Jaqueline) there is no house, but there is a fine old castle just by, where there is room enough, for only one old man and his wife live in it, and, Lord help us, I would not be in their place for all the fine things there.” “Why so?” (said the lady.) “O! dear madam, why it is haunted; there are bloody floors, prison rooms, and scriptions, they say, on the windows, to make a body’s hair stand on end.” “And how far from your cottage is this castle?” “A little step, madam, farther up the wood.” “And do you think we could obtain entrance there?” “O, Lord! yes, madam, and thank you too: why the poor old souls rejoice to see a body call there now and then; I go sometimes in the middle of the day, but I take good care to keep from the fine rooms and never to be out after dark.” “I wish, (said the lady) it was possible to get there.” Pierre instantly offered his service to conduct her as soon as it was light, and notwithstanding some very horrible stories recounted by Jaqueline, she determined to visit this proscribed place. When the morning came, the inhabitants of the cottage set out for the castle. The lady was so much enfeebled, from fatigue and want of rest, that she was obliged to be placed on the horse, and they found it very difficult to lead him through the thickets. They at length espied a fine

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old building, with two wings, and a turret on the top, where a large clock stood, a high wall surrounded the house, a pair of great gates gave entrance into a spacious court, surrounded with flowering shrubs, which lay broken and neglected on the ground, intermixed with the weeds which were above a foot high in every part. Whilst the lady’s attendant lifted her from the horse, Pierre repaired to the kitchen door where the old couple lived, which stood in one of the wings, and knocking pretty loudly, the old woman opened it, and, with a look of astonishment, fixed her eyes on the lady and her servant. “Good neighbour, (said Pierre) here is a great gentlewoman cruel ill; she wants food and sleep, we have brought her here, she is not afeared of your ghosts, and so therefore you can give her a good bed, I suppose.” “To be sure I can, (answered Bertha, which was the woman’s name) to be sure I can make a bed fit for the emperor, when the linen is aired: walk in, madam; you look very weak.” Indeed the want of rest the preceding night had so much added to her former feeble state, that it was with difficulty they conveyed her into the kitchen. Bertha warmed a little wine, toasted a bit of bread, and leaving Jaqueline to attend the lady, she made a fire in a handsome bed-room that was in that wing, took some fine linen out of a chest and brought it down to air. “Dear, my lady, (cried she) make yourself easy, I’ll take care of you, and if you ar’nt afeared, you will have rooms for a princess.” Pierre and Jaqueline being about to return to their daily labour, found their kindness amply rewarded by the generosity of the stranger, who gave them money enough, they said, to serve them for six months. With a thousand blessings they retired, promising however to call daily on the lady whilst she staid at the castle, though their hearts misgave them that they should never see her more, from their apprehensions of the ghosts that inhabited the rooms above stairs. When the apartment was arranged, the lady was assisted by Bertha and laid comfortably to rest; she gave her some money to procure food and necessaries, and desired her servant might have a bed also. This the good woman promised, and, wishing her a good sleep, returned to the kitchen. “God bless the poor lady, (said she) why she is as weak as a child; sure you must have come a great way from home.” “Yes (answered Albert, the servant’s name), we have indeed, and my poor lady is worn down by sorrow annd fatigue; I fear she must rest some time before she can pursue her journey.” “Well, (said Bertha) she may stay as long as she likes here, no body will disturb her in the

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (STORY DATE C. 1814) SOURCE: Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “The Assassins.” In Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Reprint, pp. 308-26. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, Inc., 1973. The following excerpt is from a story written around 1814 but not published until after Shelley’s death.

Where all is thus calm, the slightest circumstance is recorded and remembered. Before the sixth century had expired one incident occurred,

remarkable and strange. A young man, named Albedir, wandering in the woods, was startled by the screaming of a bird of prey, and, looking up, saw blood fall, drop by drop, from among the intertwined boughs of a cedar. Having climbed the tree, he beheld a terrible and dismaying spectacle. A naked human body was impaled on the broken branch. It was maimed and mangled horribly; every limb bent and bruised into frightful distortion, and exhibiting a breathing image of the most sickening mockery of life. A monstrous snake had scented its prey from among the mountains—and above hovered a hungry vulture. From amidst this mass of desolated humanity, two eyes, black and inexpressibly brilliant, shone with an unearthly lustre. Beneath the blood-stained eye-brows their steady rays manifested the serenity of an immortal power, the collected energy of a deathless mind, spell-secured from dissolution. A bitter smile of mingled abhorrence and scorn distorted his wounded lip—he appeared calmly to observe and measure all around—self-possession had not deserted the shattered mass of life. The youth approached the bough on which the breathing corpse was hung. As he approached, the serpent reluctantly unwreathed his glittering coils, and crept towards his dark and loathsome cave. The vulture, impatient of his meal, fled to the mountain, that re-echoed with his hoarse screams. The cedar branches creaked with their agitating weight, faintly, as the dismal wind arose. All else was deadly silent. At length a voice issued from the mangled man. It rattled in hoarse murmurs from his throat and lungs—his words were the conclusion of some strange mysterious soliloquy. They were broken, and without apparent connection, completing wide intervals of inexpressible conceptions. ‘The great tyrant is baffled, even in success. Joy! joy! to his tortured foe! Triumph to the worm whom he tramples under his feet! Ha! His suicidal hand might dare as well abolish the mighty frame of things! Delight and exultation sit before the closed fates of death!—I fear not to dwell beneath their black and ghastly shadow. Here thy power may not avail! Thou createst—’tis mine to ruin and destroy.—I was thy slave—I am thy equal, and thy foe.—Thousands tremble before thy throne, who, at my voice, shall dare to pluck the golden crown from thine unholy head!’ He ceased. The silence of noon swallowed up his words. Albedir clung tighter to the tree—he dared not for dismay remove his eyes. He remained mute in the perturbation of deep and creeping horror.

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day time, I am sure.” “And what will disturb her at night?” (asked Albert.) “O, my good friend, (answered she) no body will sleep in the rooms up stairs; the gentlefolks who were in it last could not rest, such strange noises, and groans, and screams, and such like terrible things are head; then at t’other end of the house the rooms are never opened; they say bloody work has been carried on there.” “How comes it, then, (said Albert) that you and your husband have courage to live here?” “Dear me, (replied she) why the ghosts never come down stairs, and I take care never to go up o’nights; so that if madam stays here I fear she must sleep by day, or else have a ground room, for they never comes down; they were some of your high gentry, I warrant, who never went into kitchens.” Albert smiled at the idea, but, resuming his discourse, asked the woman to whom the castle belonged? “To a great Baron, (said she) but I forget his name,” “And how long have you lived here?” “Many a long year, friend; we have a small matter allowed us to live upon, a good garden that gives us plenty of vegetables, for my husband, you must know, is a bit of a gardener, and works in it when he is able.” “And where is he now?” (said Albert) “Gone to the village six leagues off to get a little meat, bread and wine.” “What! does he walk?” “Lord help him, poor foul, he walk! no, bless your heart, he rides upon our faithful little ass, and takes care never to overload her, as we don’t want much meat, thank God. But where will you like to sleep? (added she;) will you go up stairs, or shall I bring some bedding in the next room?” Albert hesitated, but, ashamed to have less courage than his mistress, asked if there was any room near the lady’s? “Aye, sure, (answered Bertha) close to her there is one as good as hers.” “Then I will sleep there” (said he.) His good hostess now nimbly as she could, bestired herself to put his room in order, and was very careful not to disturb the lady. Albert was soon accommodated and retired to rest.

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‘Albedir!’ said the same voice, ‘Albedir! in the name of God, approach. He that suffered me to fall, watches thee;—the gentle and merciful spirits of sweet human love, delight not in agony and horror. For pity’s sake approach, in the name of thy good God, approach, Albedir!’ The tones were mild and clear as the responses of Aeolian music. They floated to Albedir’s ear like the warm breath of June that lingers in the lawny groves, subduing all to softness. Tears of tender affection started into his eyes. It was as the voice of a beloved friend. The partner of his childhood, the brother of his soul, seemed to call for aid, and pathetically to remonstrate with delay. He resisted not the magic impulse, but advanced towards the spot, and tenderly attempted to remove the wounded man. He cautiously descended the tree with his wretched burthen, and deposited it on the ground. A period of strange silence intervened. Awe and cold horror were slowly proceeding to the softer sensations of tumultuous pity, when again he heard the silver modulations of the same enchanting voice. ‘Weep not for me, Albedir! What wretch so utterly lost, but might inhale peace and renovation from this paradise! I am wounded, and in pain; but having found a refuge in this seclusion, and a friend in you, I am worthier of envy than compassion. Bear me to your cottage secretly: I would not disturb your gentle partner by my appearance. She must love me more dearly than a brother. I must be the playmate of your children; already I regard them with a father’s love. My arrival must not be regarded as a thing of mystery and wonder. What, indeed, but that men are prone to error and exaggeration, is less inexplicable, than that a stranger, wandering on Lebanon, fell from the rocks into the vale? Albedir,’ he continued, and his deepening voice assumed awful solemnity, ‘in return for the affection with which I cherish thee and thine, thou owest this submission.’ Albedir implicitly submitted; not even a thought had power to refuse its deference. He reassumed his burthen, and proceeded towards the cottage. He watched until Khaled should be absent, and conveyed the stranger into an apartment appropriated for the reception of those who occasionally visited their habitation. He desired that the door should be securely fastened, and that he might not be visited until the morning of the following day. Albedir waited with impatience for the return of Khaled. The unaccustomed weight of even so transitory a secret, hung on his ingenuous and unpractised nature, like a blighting, clinging curse.

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The stranger’s accents had lulled him to a trance of wild and delightful imagination. Hopes, so visionary and aerial, that they had assumed no denomination, had spread themselves over his intellectual frame, and, phantoms as they were, had modelled his being to their shape. Still his mind was not exempt from the visitings of disquietude and perturbation. It was a troubled stream of thought, over whose fluctuating waves unsearchable fate seemed to preside, guiding its unforeseen alternations with an inexorable hand. Albedir paced earnestly the garden of his cottage, revolving every circumstance attendant on the incident of the day. He re-imaged with intense thought the minutest recollections of the scene. In vain—he was the slave of suggestions not to be controlled. Astonishment, horror, and awe— tumultuous sympathy, and a mysterious elevation of soul, hurried away all activity of judgment, and overwhelmed, with stunning force, every attempt at deliberation or inquiry. His reveries were interrupted at length by the return of Khaled. She entered the cottage, that scene of undisturbed repose, in the confidence that change might as soon overwhelm the eternal world, as disturb this inviolable sanctuary. She started to behold Albedir. Without preface or remark, he recounted with eager haste the occurrences of the day. Khaled’s tranquil spirit could hardly keep pace with the breathless rapidity of his narration. She was bewildered with staggering wonder even to hear his confused tones, and behold his agitated countenance. * * * On the following morning Albedir arose at sunrise, and visited the stranger. He found him already risen, and employed in adorning the lattice of his chamber with flowers from the garden. There was something in his attitude and occupation singularly expressive of his entire familiarity with the scene. Albedir’s habitation seemed to have been his accustomed home. He addressed his host in a tone of gay and affectionate welcome, such as never fails to communicate by sympathy the feelings from which it flows. ‘My friend,’ said he, ‘the balm of the dew of our vale is sweet; or is this garden the favoured spot where the winds conspire to scatter the best odours they can find? Come, lend me your arm awhile, I feel very weak.’ He motioned to walk forth, but, as if unable to proceed, rested on the seat beside the door. For a few moments they were silent, if the interchange of cheerful and happy looks is to be called silence. At last he observed a

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As they were thus engaged, Khaled came towards them. The stranger beckoned to her to sit beside him, and taking her hands within his own, looked attentively on her mild countenance. Khaled inquired if he had been refreshed by sleep. He replied by a laugh of careless and inoffensive glee; and placing one of her hands within Albedir’s, said, ‘If this be sleep, here in this odorous vale, where these sweet smiles encompass us, and the voices of those who love are heard—if these be the visions of sleep, sister, those who lie down in misery shall arise lighter than the butterflies. I came from amid the tumult of a world, how different from this! I am unexpectedly among you, in the midst of a scene such as my imagination never dared to promise. I must remain here—I must not depart.’ Khaled, recovering from the admiration and astonishment caused by the stranger’s words and manner, assured him of the happiness which she should feel in such an addition to her society. Albedir, too, who had been more deeply impressed than Khaled by the event of his arrival, earnestly re-assured him of the ardour of the affection with which he had inspired them. The stranger smiled gently to hear the unaccustomed fervour of sincerity which animated their address, and was rising to retire, when Khaled said, ‘You have not yet seen our children, Maimuna and Abdallah. They are by the waterside, playing with their favourite snake. We have only to cross yonder little wood, and wind down a patch cut in the rock that overhangs the lake, and we shall find them beside a recess which the shore makes there, and which a chasm, as it were the rocks and woods, encloses. Do you think you could walk there?’—‘To see your children, Khaled? I think I could, with the assistance of Albedir’s arm, and yours.’—So they went through the wood of ancient cypress, intermingled with the bright-

ness of many-tinted blooms, which gleamed like stars through its romantic glens. They crossed the green meadow, and entered among the broken chasms, beautiful as they were in their investiture of odiferous shrubs. They came at last, after pursuing a path which wound though the intricacies of a little wilderness, to the borders of the lake. They stood on the rock which overhung it, from which there was a prospect of all the miracles of nature and of art which encircled and adorned its shores. The stranger gazed upon it with a countenance unchanged by any emotion, but, as it were, thoughtfully and contemplatingly. As he gazed, Khaled ardently pressed his hand, and said, in a low yet eager voice, ‘Look, look, lo there!’ He turned towards her, but her eyes were not on him. She looked below—her lips were parted by the feelings which possessed her soul—her breath came and went regularly but inaudibly. She leaned over the precipice, and her dark hair hanging beside her face, gave relief to its fine lineaments, animated by such love as exceeds utterance. The stranger followed her eyes, and saw that her children were in the glen below; then raising his eyes, exchanged with her affectionate looks of congratulation and delight. The boy was apparently eight years old, the girl about two years younger. The beauty of their form and countenance was something so divine and strange, as overwhelmed the senses of the beholder like a delightful dream, with insupportable ravishment. They were arrayed in a loose robe of linen, through which the exquisite proportions of their form appeared. Unconscious that they were observed, they did not relinquish the occupation in which they were engaged. They had constructed a little boat of the bark of trees, and had given it sails of interwoven feathers, and launched it on the water. They sat beside a white flat stone, on which a small snake lay coiled, and when their work was finished, they arose and called to the snake in melodious tones, so that it understood their language. For it unwreathed its shining circles and crept to the boat, into which no sooner had it entered, than the girl loosened the band which held it to the shore, and it sailed away. Then they ran round and round the little creek, clapping their hands, and melodiously pouring out wild sounds, which the snake seemed to answer by the restless glancing of his neck. At last a breath of wind came from the shore, and the boat changed its course, and was about to leave the creek, which the snake perceived and leaped into the water, and came to the little children’s feet. The girl sang to it, and it leaped into her bosom, and she

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spade that rested against the wall. ‘You have only one spade, brother,’ said he; ‘you have only one, I suppose, of any of the instruments of tillage. Your garden ground, too, occupies a certain space which it will be necessary to enlarge. This must be quickly remedied. I cannot earn my supper of tonight, nor of tomorrow; but thenceforward, I do not mean to eat the bread of idleness. I know that you would willingly perform the additional labour which my nourishment would require; I know, also, that you would feel a degree of pleasure in the fatigue arising from this employment, but I shall contest with you such pleasures as these, and such pleasures as these alone.’ His eyes were somewhat wan, and the tone of his voice languid as he spoke.

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crossed her fair hands over it, as if to cherish it there. Then the boy answered with a song, and it glided from beneath her hands and crept towards him. While they were thus employed, Maimuna looked up, and seeing her parents on the cliff, ran to meet them up the steep path that wound round it; and Abdallah, leaving his snake, followed joyfully.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON (NOVELLA DATE 1826) SOURCE: Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. “Glenallan.” In Gothic Tales of Terror, Volume One: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, edited by Peter Haining. 1972. Reprint, pp. 408-30. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, Inc., 1973. The following excerpt is from a novella written in 1826, and is an example of Bulwer-Lytton’s early work.

I I was born in the county of ———. After my mother’s death my father, who deeply lamented her loss, resolved to spend the remainder of his life in Ireland. He was the representative, and, with the exception of an only brother, the last of a long line of ancestry; and, unlike most ancient families still existing, the wealth of my father’s family was equal to its antiquity. At an early period of life he had established a high reputation in that public career which is the proper sphere of distinction to the rich and the highborn. Men of eager minds, however, should not enter too soon into the world. The more it charms them at first, the more it wearies them at last; hope is chilled by disappointment, magnanimity depressed by a social perspective which artificially lessens even great characters and objects, tedium succeeds to energy, and delight is followed by disgust. At least so thought, and so found, my father before he was thirty; when, at the very zenith of his popular esteem, he retired from public life, to one of his estates in the West of England. It was there, at a neighbouring gentleman’s, that he first saw and loved my mother, and it was there that all the patent softness of his nature was called forth. Men of powerful passions who have passed the spring-time of youth without the excitement of that passion which is the most powerful of all, feel love perhaps with greater tenderness and force when at last it comes upon them. My father and mother had been married for several years; their happiness was only equalled by their affection, and, if anything could weaken the warmth of the thanksgiving my father daily offered to Heaven for the blessings he enjoyed, it was the reflection

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that there had been born no pledge to their attachment, and no heir to the name and honours of his forefathers. Justly proud of his descent from some of the most illustrious warriors and statesmen of his country, such a reflection might well cast a shade on the otherwise unbroken brightness of his married life. At last, however, in the eighth year of that life, my mother found herself pregnant, and the measure of my father’s felicity was complete, as the time of her confinement approached. But on the day when I came into this world to continue the race of the Glenallans, my mother left it, for ever. This stroke fell the heavier on my father, because in the natural buoyancy of his character, he had never contemplated the possibility of such a calamity. He left England for six years, and travelled over the greater part of Europe. At the end of that time he returned, with the determination to withdraw himself completely from society, and devote all his time and intellect to the education of the son he had so dearly acquired. But as it was impossible for one so distinguished to maintain in his own country the rigid seclusion on which he was resolved, my father decided to fix his future abode in Ireland, upon the estate where his mother was born, and which in her right he inherited. Though so young at the time of our departure from England, I can well remember many of the incidents of the journey, and never can I forget the evening when our travelling carriage stopped before those moss-grown and gigantic ruins which were the only remnants of the ancient power of the Tyrones. It needed but a slight portion of my father’s wealth to repair the ravages made by time and neglect in this ruined but still massive structure, and my future home soon assumed a more lively appearance. Although my father civilly but coldly declined all intercourse with the neighbouring gentry, the lower orders were always sure of finding a warm hearth and a bounteous board in the princely halls he had restored. His beneficence secured to him the affection of his peasantry, even amidst the perpetual disorders of one of the wildest parts of that unhappy country, and notwithstanding the abhorrence with which the existing Government was regarded by the surrounding population. My father’s sole occupation was the management of my education. It was both the employment of his severer hours and the recreation of his lighter moments. He was not satisfied with making me a thorough classical scholar, but was particularly anxious to give me a perfect knowledge of the history and literature of my own

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Perhaps in his ardour to make me great, he forgot how necessary it was for my happiness to make me amiable. He suffered me to pay too little attention to the courtesies of society; and, thinking that it was impossible for a gentleman to be anything but a gentleman, he remembered not how many trifles, small in themselves but large in the aggregate, were required to lay a just claim to that distinction. From the lessons of my father I used to turn to my private and lonely amusements. I in some degree inherited his aristocratic pride, and preferred even solitude to the intrusive familiarity of the servants and dependents, who were accustomed to join in the rural sports for which I felt no inclination. It was in solitary wanderings over wide and dreary plains, by rapid streams, amongst the ruins of ancient power, beneath the lofty cliffs, and beside the green and solemn waters of the Atlantic, that my mind insensibly assumed its habitual bias, and that my character was first coloured by the sombre hues which ever afterwards imbued it. As there were none to associate with me, my loneliness became my natural companion; my father I seldom saw, except at meals and during the time I was engaged with him in the studies he had appointed for me. The effect of one great misfortune upon a mind so powerful as his was indeed extraordinary. Although during my mother’s life he had given up all political activity, and lived in comparative retirement, yet he was then proud of preserving the ancient and splendid hospitality of the family, and whilst his house was the magnificent resort of all who were distinguished by their rank, their talents or their virtues, I have been told by those who then frequented it, that his own convivial qualities, his wit, his urbanity, his graceful and winning charm of manner were no less admired by his friends than his intellectual powers were respected by his rivals. But during the whole time that I can remember him, his habits were so reserved and unsocial that, but for his unbounded benevolence, he might have passed for an inveterate misanthropist. Although his love for me was certainly the strongest feeling of his heart, yet he never evinced it by an affectionate word or look. His manner was uniformly cold, and somewhat stern, but never harsh. From my earliest infancy I never received from him an unkind word or a

reproach; nor did I ever receive from him a caress. In his gifts to me he was liberal to profusion, and as I grew up to manhood a separate suite of rooms and servants were allotted to me, far more numerous and splendid than those with which he himself was contented. The only servant I ever admitted to familiar intercourse with me was an old man whose character was of a kind to deepen the gloom of those impressions I had already derived from other sources. He was a sort of living chronicle of horrors. He knew about every species of apparition and every kind of supernatural being, whether of Irish, English, or Scottish origin. The wildest tales constructed by the luxuriant genius of German romancers would have been tame in comparison with those of old Phelim. But of all the fictions he used to narrate, and I to revere as sacred and incontrovertible truths, none delighted me so much as those relating to my own ancestor, Morshed Tyrone, a wizard of such awful power that the spirits of earth, air, and ocean ministered to him as his slaves, and the dead walked restless rounds to perform his bidding. I can remember well how the long winter evenings were spent, by the flickering light of the turf fire, in descriptions of the midnight orgies and revels, held perhaps in the very room where Phelim and I were then sitting. I can remember well the thrilling delight with which I used to watch for the hour when I laid aside what seemed to me the cold and airy beauties of Virgil, or the dry and magisterial philosophy of Seneca (the two books my father at this time most wished me to study), that I might listen to those terrific legends. Well, too, can I remember the not all undelightful fear which crept upon me when they were over, and I was left to the dreary magnificence of my solitary apartment. As I grew up, so far from discarding or wearing out these impressions, so inconsistent with the ideas of the eighteenth century, they grew with my growth, and strengthened with my strength. In the old library I discovered many treatises on the existence of witchcraft. Some of them went so far as to hint at the means of acquiring that dreadful art without the penalties which superstition has attached to it; others were filled with astrological speculations, and to these treasures, which I carefully removed to my own rooms, I was continually adding every work I could procure upon the subject of my favourite pursuits. Still as I read, the ardour of penetrating further into the mysteries hidden from human eyes so powerfully increased, that at last I used to

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country; to enlarge my views by habitual meditation; to make me familiar with the sciences of philosophy and political economy; and, in short, to bring me, as nearly as my abilities would permit, upon a par with himself.

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way to flow on with the rest of the world’s stream in the calm current of ordinary life. Alas, it was not to be! I have been thus diffuse in the narrative of my earliest years, because it is in that period of life that the character is stamped. It is then we sow the seeds we are to reap hereafter.

II I had attained my eighteenth year, and was beginning to think it time to mix somewhat more with my equals, when my father sent for me one morning at an hour which was not the usual time for our daily meeting. Since my recovery he had gradually relapsed into his former habits of reserve, although when we were alone his manner was warmer and his conversation more familiar. I was somewhat surprised at the message, but more surprised by the extraordinary agitation in which I found him when I entered his study.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1803-1873.

steal forth on certain nights to the lonesome abodes of the dead; and, amidst the corruption of mortality and the horrors of the charnel, I have sometimes watched till morning for the attainment of frightful secrets from which my mind in its ordinary healthful condition would have shrunk with repugnance. This unnatural state of mind, however, could not last when nothing sustained it but the chimeras of a disordered imagination; and what perhaps conduced more than anything else to restore me to my senses was a long and violent illness, caused by a severe cold caught in one of my midnight expeditions. During several weeks I was confined to my bed, and then the long dormant kindness of my father’s nature seemed to revive. A mother’s fondest care could not have surpassed the unceasing vigilance, the anxious tenderness, with which he watched and soothed me. He poured forth, for my amusement, the varied stores of a mind rich in the knowledge of men as well as books; and the astonishing fund of information thus lavished for my enjoyment made me conscious of my own mental defects, and anxious to recover the time I had squandered in eccentric reverie. As soon as I was convalescent I fell into a more regular and instructive course of reading: I discarded old Phelim from my confidence, cleared my shelves of their unhallowed lumber, and seemed in a fair

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‘Redmond,’ said he, ‘I believe you have never heard me mention my brother. Perhaps you did not know that I had so near a relation. I have learnt today that he is dead.’ Here my father paused, evidently much affected, and I gained time to recover from my surprise at hearing in the same breath of the existence and death of so close a connection. ‘In very early youth,’ continued my father, ‘an unfortunate quarrel arose between us, partly caused by my brother’s change of political party for reasons which I thought either frivolous or mercenary. The breach was widened, however, by a very imprudent marriage on his part, at which my family pride revolted; and he, disgusted at what he deemed (not perhaps unjustly, as I have since imagined) my heartless arrogance, resented so warmly some expressions I had used in the first moment of mortification that he forswore for ever my friendship and alliance. Thus we parted, never to meet again. He withdrew to France; and from that time to this my information respecting him has been slight and trivial. Today I received an official letter informing me of his death and enclosing one from himself, in which, after lamenting our long separation, he recommends (and in terms I dare not refuse to comply with) his only son to my care and affection. I shall therefore write at once to this young man, inviting him to Castle Tyrone, and assuring him of my future solicitude. I have sent for you, Redmond, to acquaint you with this decision and to prepare you for a companion about your own age, who will, I trust, relieve the tedium you must often have felt in the

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I will pass over my reflections and anticipations, my fears and hopes, in reference to the prospect of this addition to our home life. During the whole morning of the day when our guest was expected, my father was in a state of silent agitation, as unusual to him as it was surprising to me, although I largely shared it. At length the carriage was seen at a distance; it approached, and a young man leapt lightly down from it. My father received him with a warmth quite foreign to the usual coldness of his manner, and entered into a long conversation with him about his own father. During this conversation I employed myself in taking a minute survey of my new acquaintance. Ruthven Glenallan was in person small, but the proportions of his figure were perfectly symmetrical. He could scarcely be called handsome, but in his dark and dazzling eye, and in his brilliant smile, there was a power greater perhaps than that of beauty. He had been brought up from childhood in the most polished societies of Italy, and the winning grace of Continental manners was visible in all his gestures and expressions. Except my father, I have never known any person with such varied powers of conversation, or so able to charm and dazzle without apparent effort. Yet at times there was in his countenance a strange and sinister expression, which assumed a more suspicious appearance from the sudden and sparkling smiles immediately succeeding it if he thought himself observed. This peculiarity, however, I did not immediately perceive. For the next week we were inseparable. We walked and talked together, we accommodated our dissimilar habits to each other’s inclinations, and we seemed to be laying the foundation of a lasting intimacy. Little as my father was accustomed to observe how those around him passed their time, he was evidently pleased with our friendship; and one morning, when I went to ask his advice about a course of reading on the commerce and politics of America, he said to me: ‘I am much gratified by the affection which you and Ruthven feel for each other; the more so, as I am now convinced of what I have always hoped, that you would be but little affected by the loss of a part of that overflowing wealth which will be yours when I am gone. You are aware that a very small portion of my estate is entailed, and I can therefore, without injury to you, bequeath to Ruthven enough for his future independence. Though his father’s fortune was not large, his expenditure almost rivalled that of the foreign princes with whom he

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON (1803-1873)

Bulwer-Lytton was a popular Victorian author, renowned for his proficiency in several literary genres and his adaptability to diverse themes and styles. His most successful early work, the historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), depicts the quasi-Gothic villain Arbaces, a lustful priest of Isis who eventually kidnaps the heroine. In the occult romance Zanoni (1842), the eponymous antihero is a supernaturally gifted immortal who vies with the artist Glyndon for the love of the heroine while allowing his associate Mejnour to guide Glyndon towards occult enlightenment. Glyndon’s progress is interrupted when reckless disobedience leads him to an encounter with the fearsome Dweller of the Threshold. Zanoni’s powers ebb away as his commitment to the heroine grows, and he loses her after his own fateful confrontation with the same demon. Zanoni is ultimately redeemed when he takes the heroine’s place after she is condemned to death by guillotine by the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris. In his novel A Strange Story (1862), Bulwer-Lytton develops a dramatic conflict between the representatives of two diametrically opposed forces: Dr. Allen Fenwick is a man of science, and thus a man of reason, unable to believe in anything which is not tangible; his alter ego, Margrave, is a charming practitioner of the occult, determined to control powerful, unseen forces to obtain a potion which will ensure him eternal youth. He manages to persuade Dr. Fenwick to help him achieve his goal, and in the process is destroyed by the demonic forces he sought to manipulate without any regard to his soul. Fenwick’s fate is different, for he emerges unscathed due to his acknowledgement of the inexplicable. These characters are symbolic of Bulwer-Lytton’s objections to the theory of evolution; and, through Fenwick’s acceptance of the existence of the unknown, the author asserts his own faith in Christianity. Although Bulwer-Lytton’s literary subjects brought him great popularity, critics were largely unsympathetic, and his reputation declined rapidly after his death.

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unbroken solitude of our lonely life here.’ With these words my father dismissed me.

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associated, and at his death little or nothing could be saved from the wreck of his fortune. The least I can do, therefore, to compensate for any fault I have committed towards my brother will be to give to his son a small moiety from the superfluous riches of my own.’ I need not say what was my answer; it was, I hope, what it ought to have been.

OVERVIEWS EDITH BIRKHEAD (ESSAY DATE 1921) SOURCE: Birkhead, Edith. “Introductory.” In The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, pp. 1-15. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921. In the following essay, an introduction to her influential study of Gothic literature, Birkhead traces the use of terror in literature, beginning in ancient times.

The history of the tale of terror is as old as the history of man. Myths were created in the early days of the race to account for sunrise and sunset, storm-winds and thunder, the origin of the earth and of mankind. The tales men told in the face of these mysteries were naturally inspired by awe and fear. The universal myth of a great flood is perhaps the earliest tale of terror. During the excavation of Nineveh in 1872, a Babylonian version of the story, which forms part of the Gilgamesh epic, was discovered in the library of King Ashurbanipal (668-626 B.C.); and there are records of a much earlier version, belonging to the year 1966 B.C. The story of the Flood, as related on the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, abounds in supernatural terror. To seek the gift of immortality from his ancestor, Ut-napishtim, the hero undertakes a weary and perilous journey. He passes the mountain guarded by a scorpion man and woman, where the sun goes down; he traverses a dark and dreadful road, where never man trod, and at last crosses the waters of death. During the deluge, which is predicted by his ancestor, the gods themselves are stricken with fear: “No man beheld his fellow, no more could men know each other. In heaven the gods were afraid . . . They drew back, they climbed up into the heaven of Anu. The gods crouched like dogs, they cowered by the walls.”1 Another episode in the same epic, when Nergal, the god of the dead, brings before Gilgamesh an apparition of his friend, Eabani, recalls the impressive scene, when the witch of Endor summons the spirit of Samuel before Saul. When legends began to grow up round the names of traditional heroes, fierce encounters with

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giants and monsters were invented to glorify their strength and prowess. David, with a stone from his sling, slew Goliath. The crafty Ulysses put out the eye of Polyphemus. Grettir, according to the Icelandic saga, overcame Glam, the malevolent, death-dealing vampire who “went riding the roofs.” Beowulf fearlessly descended into the turbid mere to grapple with Grendel’s mother. Folk-tales and ballads, in which incidents similar to those in myths and heroic legends occur, are often overshadowed by terror. Figures like the Demon Lover, who bears off his mistress in the fatal craft and sinks her in the sea, and the cannibal bridegroom, outwitted at last by the artfulness of one of his brides, appear in the folk-lore of many lands. Through every century there glide uneasy spirits, groaning for vengeance. Andrew Lang2 mentions the existence of a papyrus fragment, found attached to a wooden statuette, in which an ancient Egyptian scribe addresses a letter to the Khou, or spirit, of his dead wife, beseeching her not to haunt him. One of the ancestors of the savage were-wolf, who figures in Marryat’s Phantom Ship, may perhaps be discovered in Petronius’ Supper of Trimalchio. The descent of Bram Stoker’s infamous vampire Dracula may be traced back through centuries of legend. Hobgoblins, demons, and witches mingle grotesquely with the throng of beautiful princesses, queens in glittering raiment, fairies and elves. Without these ugly figures, folk-tales would soon lose their power to charm. All tale tellers know that fear is a potent spell. The curiosity which drove Bluebeard’s wife to explore the hidden chamber lures us on to know the worst, and as we listen to horrid stories, we snatch a fearful joy. Human nature desires not only to be amused and entertained, but moved to pity and fear. All can sympathise with the youth, who could not shudder and who would fain acquire the gift. From English literature we gain no more than brief, tantalising glimpses of the vast treasury of folk-tales and ballads that existed before literature became an art and that lived on side by side with it, vitalising and enriching it continually. Yet here and there we catch sudden gleams like the fragment in King Lear: Childe Roland to the dark tower came. His word was still Fie, Foh and Fum, I smell the blood of a British man.

or Benedick’s quotation from the Robber Bridegroom: It is not so, it was not so, but, indeed, God forbid that it should be so,

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For forty days and forty nights, He wade through red blood to the knee, And he saw neither sun nor moon, But heard the roaring of the sea.

The mediaeval romances of chivalry, which embody stories handed down by oral tradition, are set in an atmosphere of supernatural wonder and enchantment. In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Sir Lancelot goes by night into the Chapel Perilous, wherein there is only a dim light burning, and steals from the corpse a sword and a piece of silk to heal the wounds of a dying knight. Sir Galahad sees a fiend leap out of a tomb amid a cloud of smoke; Gawaine’s ghost, with those of the knights and ladies for whom he has done battle in life, appears to warn the king not to begin the fight against Modred on a certain day. In the romance of Sir Amadas, the ghost of a merchant, whose corpse the knight had duteously redeemed from the hands of creditors, succours him at need. The shadow of terror lurks even amid the beauty of Spenser’s fairyland. In the windings of its forests we come upon dark caves, mysterious castles and huts, from which there start fearsome creatures like Despair or the giant Orgoglio, hideous hags like Occasion, wicked witches and enchanters or frightful beings like the ghostly Maleger, who wore as his helmet a dead man’s skull and rode upon a tiger swift as the wind. The Elizabethan dramatists were fascinated by the terrors of the invisible world. Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, round whose name are clustered legends centuries old concerning bargains between man and the devil, the apparitions and witches in Macbeth, the dead hand, the corpse-like images, the masque of madmen, the tomb-maker and the passing-bell in Webster’s sombre tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, prove triumphantly the dramatic possibilities of terror. As a foil to his Masque of Queens (1609) Ben Jonson introduced twelve loathly witches with Até as their leader, and embellished his description of their profane rites, with details culled from James I.’s treatise on Demonology and from learned ancient authorities. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Despair, who “had as many lives as a cat,” his wife Diffidence at Doubting Castle, and Maul and Slaygood are the ogres of popular story, whose ac-

quaintance Bunyan had made in chapbooks during his ungodly youth. Hobgoblins, devils and fiends, “sturdy rogues” like the three brothers Faintheart, Mistrust and Guilt, who set upon Littlefaith in Dead Man’s Lane, lend the excitement of terror to Christian’s journey to the Celestial City. The widespread belief in witches and spirits to which Browne and Burton and many others bear witness in the seventeenth century, lived on in the eighteenth century, although the attitude of the “polite” in the age of reason was ostensibly incredulous and superior. A scene in one of the Spectator essays illustrates pleasantly the state of popular opinion. Addison, lodging with a good-natured widow in London, returns home one day to find a group of girls sitting by candlelight, telling one another ghoststories. At his entry they are abashed, but, on the widow’s assuring them that it is only the “gentleman,” they resume, while Addison, pretending to be absorbed in his book at the far end of the table, covertly listens to their tales of “ghosts that, pale as ashes, had stood at the feet of the bed or walked over a churchyard by moonlight; and others, who had been conjured into the Red Sea for disturbing people’s rest.”3 In another essay Addison shows that he is strongly inclined to believe in the existence of spirits, though he repudiates the ridiculous superstitions which prevailed in his day;4 and Sir Roger de Coverley frankly confesses his belief in witches. Defoe, in the preface to his Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727) states uncompromisingly: “I must tell you, good people, he that is not able to see the devil, in whatever shape he is pleased to appear in, he is not really qualified to live in this world, no, not in the quality of a common inhabitant.” Epworth Rectory, the home of John Wesley’s father, was haunted in 1716-17 by a persevering ghost called Old Jeffrey, whose exploits are recorded with a gravity and circumstantial exactitude that remind us of Defoe’s narrative concerning the ghostly Mrs. Veal in her “scoured” silk. John Wesley declares stoutly that he is convinced of the literal truth of the story of one Elizabeth Hobson, who professed to have been visited on several occasions by supernatural beings. He upholds too the authenticity of the notorious Drummer of Tedworth, whose escapades are described in chapbooks and in Glanvill’s Sadducismus Triumphatus (1666), a book in which he was keenly interested. In his journal (May 25th, 1768) he remarks: It is true that the English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old wives’ fables. I am sorry for it; and I willingly

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which hint at the existence of a hoard as precious and inexhaustible as that of the Nibelungs. The chord of terror is touched in the eerie visit of the three dead sailor sons “in earthly flesh and blood” to the wife of Usher’s well, Sweet William’s Ghost, the rescue of Tam Lin on Halloween, when Fairyland pays a tiend to Hell, the return of clerk Saunders to his mistress, True Thomas’s ride to Fairyland, when:

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lins, in his Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands, adjures Home, the author of Douglas, to sing:

take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to those who do not believe it.

The Cock Lane ghost gained very general credit, and was considered by Mrs. Nickleby a personage of some importance, when she boasted to Miss La Creevy that her great-grandfather went to school with him—or her grandmother with the Thirsty Woman of Tutbury. The appearance of Lord Lyttleton’s ghost in 1779 was described by Dr. Johnson, who was also disposed to believe in the Cock Lane ghost, as the most extraordinary thing that had happened in his day.5 There is abundant evidence that the people of the eighteenth century were extremely credulous, yet, in literature, there is a tendency to look askance at the supernatural as at something wild and barbaric. Such ghosts as presume to steal into poetry are amazingly tame, and even elegant, in their speech and deportment. In Mallet’s William and Margaret (1759), which was founded on a scrap of an old ballad out of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Margaret’s wraith rebukes her false lover in a long and dignified oration. But spirits were shy of appearing in an age when they were more likely to be received with banter than with dread. Dr. Johnson expresses the attitude of his age when, in referring to Gray’s poem, The Bard, he remarks: “To select a singular event and swell it to a giant’s bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions has little difficulty, for he that forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous. And it has little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are improved only as we find something to be imitated or declined.” (1780.) The dictum that we are affected only as we believe is open to grave doubt. We are often thrown into a state of trepidation simply through the power of the imagination. We are wise after the event, like Partridge at the play: No, no, sir; ghosts don’t appear in such dresses as that neither . . . And if it was really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a distance, and in so much company; and yet, if I was frightened, I am not the only person.6

The supernatural which persisted always in legends handed down from one generation to another on the lips of living people, had not lost its power to thrill and alarm, and gradually worked its way back into literature. Although Gray and Collins do not venture far beyond the bounds of the natural, they were in sympathy with the popular feelings of superstitious terror, and realised how effective they would be in poetry. Col-

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how, framing hideous spells, In Sky’s lone isle, the gifted wizard-seer Lodged in the wintry cave with Fate’s fell spear Or in the depths of Uist’s dark forests dwells, How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross With their own vision oft astonished droop When o’er the wintry strath or quaggy moss They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop.

Burns, in the foreword to Halloween (1785), writes in the “enlightened” spirit of the eighteenth century, but in the poem itself throws himself whole-heartedly into the hopes and fears that agitate the lovers. He owed much to an old woman who lived in his home in infancy: She had . . . the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors.7

Tam o’ Shanter, written for Captain Grose, was perhaps based on a Scottish legend, learnt at the inglenook in childhood, from this old wife, or perhaps By some auld houlet-haunted biggin Or kirk deserted by its riggin,

from Captain Grose himself, who made to quake: Ilk ghaist that haunts auld ha’ or chamer, Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor, And you, deep-read in hell’s black grammar, Warlocks and witches.

In it Burns reveals with lively reality the terrors that assail the reveller on his homeward way through the storm: Past the birks and meikle stane Where drunken Charlie brak’s neck-bane; And through the whins, and by the cairn Where hunters fand the murdered bairn And near the thorn, aboon the well Where Mungo’s mither hanged hersell.

For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witchdance, seen through a Gothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of humour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed. The Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765),

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God himself Scarce seemèd there to be,

welcome the firm earth beneath our feet, and the homely sound of the vesper bell. In Christabel we float dreamily through scenes as unearthly and ephemeral as the misty moonlight, and the words in which Coleridge conjures up his vision fall into music of magic beauty. The opening of the poem creates a sense of foreboding, and the horror of the serpent-maiden is subtly suggested through her effect on Christabel. Coleridge hints at the terrible with artistic reticence. In Kubla Khan the chasm is: A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover.

The poetry of Keats is often mysterious and suggestive of terror. The description of the Gothic hall in The Eve of St. Agnes: In all the house was heard no human sound; A chain-drooped lamp was flickering by each door; The arras, rich with horseman, hawk and hound, Fluttered in the besieging wind’s uproar; And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor;

the serpent-maiden, Lamia, who Seemed at once some penanced lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self;

the grim story in Isabella of Lorenzo’s ghost, who Moaned a ghostly undersong Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers along.

all lead us over the borderland. In a rejected stanza of the Ode on Melancholy, he abandons the horrible: Though you should build a bark of dead men’s bones And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;

Although your rudder be a dragon’s tail Long severed, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage, large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail To find the Melancholy—

Keats’s melancholy is not to be found amid images of horror: She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die, And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu.

In La Belle Dame sans Merci he conveys with delicate touch the memory of the vision which haunts the knight, alone and palely loitering. We see it through his eyes: I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all: They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!’ I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side.

From effects so exquisitely wrought as these it seems almost profane to turn to the crude attempts of such poets as “Monk” Lewis or Southey to sound the note of terror. Yet they too, in their fashion, played a part in the “Renascence of Wonder.” Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of “gramarye” in Bürger’s Lenore, etherealised and refined it. Scott and Lewis gloried in the gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in their supernatural poems wish to startle and terrify, not to awe, their readers. Those who revel in phosphorescent lights and in the rattle of the skeleton are apt to o’erleap themselves; and Scott’s Glenfinlas, Lewis’s Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene and Southey’s Old Woman of Berkeley fall into the category of the grotesque. Hogg intentionally mingles the comic and the terrible in his poem, The Witch of Fife, but his prose-stories reveal his power of creating an atmosphere of diablerie, undisturbed by intrusive mockery. In the poem Kilmeny, he handles an uncanny theme with dreamy beauty. From the earliest times to the present day, writers of fiction have realised the force of supernatural terror. In the Babylonica of Iamblichus, the lovers evade their pursuers by passing as spectres; the scene of the romance is laid in tombs, caverns, and robbers’ dens, a setting remarkably like that of Gothic story. Into the English novel of the first half of the eighteenth century, however, the ghost dares not venture. The innate desire for the marvellous was met at this period not by the novel, but by oral tradition and by such works as Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights, the

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brought poets back to the original sources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear. In Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew—the spectre-woman and her deathmate—the sensations of the mariner, alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with irresistible power. The very substance of the poem is woven of the supernatural. The dream imagery is thrown into relief by occasional touches of reality—the lighthouse, the church on the cliff, the glimpses of the wedding, the quiet song of the hidden brook in the leafy month of June. We, like the mariner, after loneliness so awful that

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Countess D’Aulnoy’s collection of fairy-tales, Perrault’s Contes de ma Mère Oie. Chapbooks setting forth mediaeval legends of “The Wandering Jew,” the “Demon Frigate,” or “Dr. Faustus,” and interspersed with anecdotes of freaks, monsters and murderers, satisfied the craving for excitement among humbler readers.8 Smollett, who, in his Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), seems to have been experimenting with new devices for keeping alive the interest of a picaresque novel, anticipates the methods of Mrs. Radcliffe. Although he sedulously avoids introducing the supernatural, he hovers perilously on the threshold. The publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 was not so wild an adventure as Walpole would have his readers believe. The age was ripe for the reception of the marvellous. The supernatural had, as we have seen, begun to find its way back into poetry, in the work of Gray and Collins. In Macpherson’s Ossian, which was received with acclamation in 1760-3, the mountains, heaths and lakes are haunted by shadowy, superstitious fears. Dim-seen ghosts wail over the wastes. There is abundant evidence that “authentic” stories of ghostly appearances were heard with respect. Those who eagerly explored Walpole’s Gothic castle and who took pleasure in Miss Reeve’s well-trained ghost, had previously enjoyed the thrill of chimney-corner legends. The idea of the gigantic apparition was derived, no doubt, from the old legend of the figure seen by Wallace on the field of battle. The limbs, strewn carelessly about the staircase and the gallery of the castle, belong to a giant, very like those who are worsted by the heroes of popular story. Godwin, in an unusual flight of fancy, amused himself by tracing a certain similitude between Caleb Williams and Bluebeard, between Cloudesley and The Babes in the Wood,9 and planned a story, on the analogy of the Sleeping Beauty, in which the hero was to have the faculty of unexpectedly falling asleep for twenty, thirty, or a hundred years.1 0 Mrs. Radcliffe, who, so far as we may judge, did not draw her characters from the creatures of flesh and blood around her, seems to have adopted some of the familiar figures of old story. Emily’s guardian, Montoni, in The Mysteries of Udolpho, like the unscrupulous uncle in Godwin’s Cloudesley, may well have been descended from the wicked uncle of the folk tale. The cruel stepmother is disguised as a haughty, scheming marchioness in The Sicilian Romance. The ogre drops his club, assumes a veneer of polite refinement and relies on the more gentlemanlike method of the dagger and stiletto for gaining his ends. The banditti and

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robbers who infest the countryside in Gothic fiction are time-honoured figures. Travellers in Thessaly in Apuleius’ Golden Ass, like the fugitives in Shelley’s Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, find themselves in robbers’ caves. The Gothic castle, suddenly encountered in a dark forest, is boldly transported from fairyland and set down in Italy, Sicily or Spain. The chamber of horrors, with its alarming array of scalps or skeletons, is civilised beyond recognition and becomes the deserted wing of an abbey, concealing nothing worse than one discarded wife, emaciated and dispirited, but still alive. The ghost-story, which Ludovico reads in the haunted chamber of Udolpho, is described by Mrs. Radcliffe as a Provençal tale, but is in reality common to the folklore of all countries. The restless ghost, who yearns for the burial of his corpse, is as ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew. In the Iliad he appears as the shade of Patroclus, pleading with Achilles for his funeral rites. According to a letter of the younger Pliny,1 1 he haunts a house in Athens, clanking his chains. He is found in every land, in every age. His feminine counterpart presented herself to Dickens’ nurse requiring her bones, which were under a glass-case, to be “interred with every undertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound ten, in another particular place.”1 2 Melmoth the Wanderer, when he becomes the wooer of Immalee, seems almost like a reincarnation of the Demon Lover. The wandering ball of fire that illuminates the dusky recesses of so many Gothic abbeys is but another manifestation of the Fate-Moon, which shines, foreboding death, after Thorgunna’s funeral, in the Icelandic saga. The witchcraft and demonology that attracted Scott and “Monk” Lewis, may be traced far beyond Sinclair’s Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (1685), Bovet’s Pandemonium or the Devil’s Cloyster Opened (1683), or Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) to Ulysses’ invocation of the spirits of the dead,1 3 to the idylls of Theocritus and to the Hebrew narrative of Saul’s visit to the Cave of Endor. There are incidents in The Golden Ass as “horrid” as any of those devised by the writers of Gothic romance. It would, indeed, be no easy task to fashion scenes more terrifying than the mutilation of Socrates in The Golden Ass, by the witch, who tears out his heart and stops the wound with a sponge which falls out when he stoops to drink at a river, or than the strange apparition of a ragged, old woman who vanishes after leading the way to the room, where the baker’s corpse hangs behind the door. Though the title assumes a special literary significance at the close of the eighteenth century, the tale of ter-

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ror appeals to deeply rooted instincts, and belongs, therefore, to every age and clime.

Notes 1. Frazer, Folklore of the Old Testament, I. iv. § 2. 2. Cock Lane and Common Sense, 1894. 3. Spectator, No. 12. 4. Spectator, No. 110. 5. Boswell, Life of Johnson, June 12th, 1784. 6. Tom Jones, Bk. xvi. ch. v. 7. Letter to Dr. Moore, Aug. 2, 1787. 8. Ashton, Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century, 1882. 9. Advertisement to Cloudesley, 1830. 10. Preface to Mandeville, Oct. 25, 1817. 11. Letters, vii. 27. 12. The Uncommercial Traveller. 13. Odyssey, xi.

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JOHN PAUL RIQUELME (ESSAY DATE FALL 2000)

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ EDMUND BURKE (1729?-1797)

Widely recognized as the founder of modern Anglo-American conservatism, Burke is considered by many the most important and influential English statesman and political writer of the eighteenth century. In his speeches and essays he addressed major issues of his time, including the precepts of the American and French revolutions, the two-party political system, principles of economic reform, and the rights of government versus the rights of the individual. Born in Dublin to middle-class parents of different faiths—his father an Anglican attorney and his mother a staunch Roman Catholic—Burke was a sickly child who spent much of his boyhood reading and studying. Although raised in his father’s faith, he developed an early appreciation for the plight of oppressed Irish Catholics. In his teens he attended a Quaker boarding school in County Kildare before entering Trinity College in Dublin in 1744. After receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1748, Burke remained at Trinity for some time to continue work on an independent study of human responses to aesthetics, a field that had interested him since his first reading of the anonymous firstcentury Greek treatise On the Sublime. Revised and expanded several years later and published as A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke’s study anticipated the nineteenth-century Romantic interest in the Gothic.

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SOURCE: Riquelme, John Paul. “Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism: Dark Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (fall 2000): 585-605. In the following essay, Riquelme examines the relationship between the Gothic and Modernism in literature.

The Gothic Imaginary and Literary Modernism The Gothic imaginary in its diverse literary embodiments has come to be understood as a discourse that brings to the fore the dark side of modernity (Botting 2). As narrative, it is the black sheep of the Anglo-American novel, which has generally been taken to concern marriage and the contexts that make marriage possible.1 Although Gothic narratives regularly focus on marriage or on social and sexual relations between the sexes, often those relations are threatened or abrogated, as in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1765) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; revised 1831). Gothic sexuality may also take a bizarre form, as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a form that raises anthropological issues in arresting ways. Some of those issues were already present less insistently in the earliest Gothic narratives, because the threat to marriage, family, and home amounts to a threat to the stability and the future of culture. That dark threat comes from inside. The historical origins of Gothic writing in the eighteenth century are simultaneously political and aesthetic. Rising along with the English novel during the same decades that are the prelude to Romanticism, the Gothic in its narrative form engages issues of beauty, the character of the sublime and the grotesque, the political dynamics of British culture (especially with regard to the kind of social change that comes to be represented by the French Revolution), the quality of being English (including the holding of anti-Catholic religious attitudes), the structure of the economy (especially concerning property in a market economy and gift-exchange), and the place of women in hierarchies of power. Stylistically, the Gothic has always been excessive in its responses to conventions that foster the order and clarity of realistic representations, conventions that embody a cultural insistence on containment. The essentially anti-realistic character of Gothic writing from the beginning creates in advance a compatibility with modernist writing. That compatibility begins to take a visible, merged form in the 1890s in Britain. In the development of the Gothic after G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

with literary modernism, an influential body of writing and writers generally associated with the first half of the twentieth century whose limits and defining character remain to be convincingly described by critics of literature and culture. Tracing the modern development of Gothic provides new perspectives on literary modernism and on our own modernity. In the long twentieth century, the Gothic and Modernism influence each other and share certain developments.

The influence of Edgar Allan Poe, for example, on British and Irish writers, including Oscar Wilde, is often mediated by his reception among the French, who read him in Charles Baudelaire’s translation. The anthropological perspectives that Poe’s American stories sometimes evoke, which emerge from a social situation involving slavery, resonate for Irish writers and for others facing racial, ethnic, class, and gender prejudice in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Poe also affects Samuel Beckett through Baudelaire in Beckett’s concern in his late prose, especially Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), with mal, or evil, which derives in part from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857). Because Beckett’s postmodern sense of ill includes an excessively minimal, apparently inept way of writing, his response to historical evil in postEnlightenment, European culture after World War II and the Holocaust combines with an aesthetics that challenges expectations concerning beauty, narrative structure, and realism. For Beckett, seeing, that is, recognizing, the ill around and within us requires and enables a mode of saying, or writing, that reflects the illness rather than pretending to be sane, undisturbed, and undisturbing. As does Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Beckett invites us to recognize our own faces in his portrayal of ill. This is the kind of recognition that Gothic writing has frequently offered. Early in its history, the Gothic is structurally and implicitly a negative version of pastoral because of its turn to foreign locales that are threatening and bizarre. It later relocates the antipastoral setting and its implications much closer to home: on native soil, on board ship, in the sanitarium, in the library, in the house, in the bedroom, in the schoolroom, in the mind, and in language.

The origins of literary modernism lie in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, a time when important Gothic writing was being published. The development of Gothic writing as a discourse of modernity that influences the formation of literary modernism in 1890s Britain reaches a crucial moment with the publication of three seminal texts within a few years of each other: Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). Each draws in distinctive, transforming ways on the tradition of Gothic writing that stretches back, on the Irish side, through Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872) to C. S. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and on the English side, through Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the work of the Brontë sisters (1840s), and Shelley’s Frankenstein to Gothic tales by Anne Radcliffe, Walpole, and others in the eighteenth century. In addition, as I have mentioned, the American Gothic of Poe in French translation has its effect on writers and artists of the 1890s and later in England and elsewhere.

Critics have yet to explore extensively the ways in which elements of the Gothic tradition have become disseminated in the writings of the long twentieth century, from 1880 to the present.2 The lineaments of a yet-to-be-written history of the modern Gothic begin to emerge in the essays published in this issue. In choosing the rubric Gothic and Modernism, I have linked the Gothic

The Gothic influence on modernism and on twentieth-century writing in English in general is various and evident outside high cultural production in detective fiction, horror stories, and science fiction, as well as in other media, especially film. The close relation of Gothic writing to some popular cultural forms has contributed to the comparatively dismissive attitude toward the Gothic in academic studies of canonical literature. Such skepticism has obscured the significance of Gothic traditions for literary modernism. Among modernist authors of high cultural standing, W. B. Yeats and Joseph Conrad provide early examples of writers who draw significantly on Gothic traditions and motifs, often in ways that set into play exotic elements carrying orientalist implications concerning identity, nation, empire, and anthropological issues. But the exotic representations need not be regarded as primarily orientalist in character; that is, they participate in an exotic cultural imaginary that, like the Gothic imaginary,

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the French Revolution, the characteristics and issues apparent in Gothic writing of the eighteenth century carry forward into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they are significantly transformed, intensified, and disseminated by interactions with national literatures and political events outside England. Eventually they are affected by the historical development of modernity in wider than national arenas, including colonial and postcolonial situations.

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is frequently a vehicle for staging and challenging ideological thinking rather than a means of furthering it. Yeats’s theory of masks, of self and anti-self, which he takes initially from Wilde, places the double at the center of his writing and thinking. Yeats’s image of the dancer, particularly as a version of Salomé, is a development of Wilde’s exotic Gothic drama that leads eventually to Yeats’s plays for dancers, which fuse aspects of the Japanese Noh theatre with Irish characters and include spirits and ghosts.3 Yeats’s prophetic writings and investigations into the occult also include Gothic elements. Conrad’s writings, which concern centrally the dark side of modernity, regularly present aspects of the Gothic translated to locations in which agents of empire experience disturbing encounters with nature and with indigenous peoples that challenge their sanity and their ideas about civilization. Most obviously among Conrad’s works, Heart of Darkness (1902) concerns the dark double that is one truth about civilization and modernity. In The Secret Sharer (1910), the ship becomes a haunted space when it is invaded by a ghost-like character who is eventually exorcised. The plot of Lord Jim (1900) turns on an unidentified object or being that literally goes bump in the night. A similar collision causes a car accident in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). That novel’s narrative hinges on a mysterious experience involving eerie echoes, the doubling of images in mirror-like walls, and the threat of sexual violation across the races in the darkness of the Marabar Caves. There are mad characters and haunted spaces in Virginia Woolf’s narratives (Mrs. Dalloway [1925]; “A Haunted House” [1921]), and the dead can sometimes continue to speak, including a dead insect in “The Death of the Moth.” Toni Morrison’s ghosts, as in Beloved (1987), invite comparisons with earlier emanations in Gothic writings. In a modernist transformation of the works of Poe and other Gothic precursors, one of William Faulkner’s most memorable novels, Absalom! Absalom! (1936), concerns the fall of a house. In The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot alludes memorably to Dracula in the figure of the bats crawling upside-down down a wall (5.380-82).4 In addition, by championing revenge tragedies as a critic and drawing on them in his poetry, Eliot established this unromantic dramatic form more prominently in the canon of English literature.5 Filled as they are with anger, madness, and vengeance, revenge tragedies are central precursors for Gothic narrative and poetry, to which they

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bear evident kinship. Wilde understood the connection when he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, which includes a scene in which Lord Henry Wotton compares Sybil Vane’s suicide by poison to “a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, [. . .] a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur” (255). In Thomas Hardy’s poetry, the voice of the dead is heard, including that of a dead woman who speaks as “Not Only I” in the poem of that title, which anticipates Seamus Heaney’s “The Bog Queen.” The crossing of boundaries into darkness by these authors and many others throughout the twentieth century is frequent and emphatic. The refusal of conventional limits and the critical questioning of cultural attitudes often proceed within a Gothic structuring of elements or with a Gothic inflection. The transformations, adaptations, and other prominent traces of the Gothic in modern writing indicate the persistence of a cluster of cultural anxieties to which Gothic writing and literary modernism, along with postcolonial writing and some popular forms of expression, continue to respond. The dark side of the discourse and experience of modernity is evident in all these cultural forms.

The 1890s: Mona Lisa, Other Vampires, and Dark Doubles The history of Gothic writing since 1880 begins with Stevenson, Stoker, Wilde, James, and Hardy, and it finds one of its concluding moments after 1980 in the late prose of Beckett. Among the major texts drawing on Gothic traditions published in the 1890s, Stoker’s Dracula has captured our collective attention most intensely and persistently. Like the face of Mona Lisa, the vampire has become a pervasive cultural icon in the past hundred years. The representation of Mona Lisa as an embodiment of the vampire occurs in Walter Pater’s famous description of her in his essay on Leonardo (1869) in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873): She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. (80)

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Dracula is a vividly memorable instance of the modern Gothic, with its doublings and pairings among the characters, its concern with property, its use of sacramental elements from Catholicism, its ambiguous representations of gender, its antifeminist details, its shifts of locale to and from England, and its jagged, stylistically mixed narration. For Pater, the vampire is Mona Lisa’s dark double, one truth about her. Stoker carries the connection forward when he names his primary women characters Mina and Lucy, for Mina-Lucy also find their counterpart in the vampire. Central to Dracula’s modernity is the way it implicates female characters, male vampire hunters, and readers in the darkness that we might wish to assign primarily to the nonhuman creature. Dracula provides a model, replicated in later works, for the emergence of hybridity as the character of the future and of modern experience. In this regard, the mixed blood of Mina Harker’s child at the book’s end is comparable to the mixed character of the foetus carried by Lilith Iyapo, the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel, Dawn (1987), after her sexual encounters with an alien. It is an open question whether the cultural anxieties that underlie both Dracula and Dawn have altered or abated significantly in the past hundred years. The doubling characteristic of Gothic writing evokes the mixed, ambiguous, character of human experience, which holds the potential for both destructive and creative transformation.6 In Dracula and in Dawn, the doubling involves the enigmatic duplication with a difference of human reproduction that yields a creature who differs from us but not entirely. We do and do not recognize ourselves as we respond ambivalently to the new hybrid emerging in the narratives of these texts, a hybrid whose origin lies within us. As Lord Henry says of the unspoken ambivalence roused by Dorian Gray, he is “the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found” (384). Doubling of characters in various ways plays an emphatic role in The Turn of the Screw, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and works by Stoker prior to

Dracula. As Joseph Valente argues in his essay, “‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic,” doubling occurs in a repetitive, insistent way in Stoker’s early story, “The Dualitists; or the Death Doom of the Double Born” (1887), which appeared a decade before Dracula. Valente’s argument carries implications for Gothic’s relation to modern literature, for he brings together the Gothic and colonial writing as distinguishable but related and sometimes conceptually overlapping discourses of modernity. Drawing implicitly on postcolonial theoretical commentaries about colonial situations and their aftermath, Valente argues for a reading of Stoker’s work in which the position of Ireland as a metropolitan colony plays a key role in channeling the Gothic toward modernism. Valente identifies an extreme and revealing colonial situation, that of the Anglo-Irish, in which Stoker is involved. The already in-between character of the Anglo-Irish, together with Stoker’s even more thoroughly mixed heritage, contributes to Stoker’s finding himself aligned with both conqueror and vanquished, ruler and subjects in a way that enables him to “devise a Gothic estate called the ’double born’.” In that modality of the Gothic, which depends on an ambivalence of a structural kind, Stoker is able to take advantage of Gothic’s potential for a critique of ideology. He does so by harnessing its characteristic doubling to a critical engagement with binary opposites that support hierarchical thinking. That engagement is not Stoker’s reflection and acceptance of ruling attitudes but a modernist probing of them in which the potential for delusion, destruction, and self-destruction vividly emerge. Valente’s reading bears directly on our understanding of Dracula as a book in which Stoker reveals the destructive logic of identity (including, by implication, identitarian politics7 ) and social hierarchy.8 Valente has focused on a moment in which modernism begins to come into being through the melding of Gothic with the kind of anticolonial thinking that has become familiar to us a century later in postcolonial literature, theory, and history. The anthropological issues concerning the character of the human are as evident in this modernist form of the Gothic, written in this case by an Irish colonial author, as they are in postcolonial literature. Those issues come forward most obviously in Stoker’s short story when the events turn toward infanticide and parricide. In this strange, blatantly violent story, the dynamics of the double involve the hybridity of colonial identity in representa-

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The passage is of note in the present context because Yeats reprints a portion of it set up as free verse as the first item in his The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, though the passage was not originally published as verse and does not fall within the chronological limits of the anthology. Yeats’s modernist reinscription of Pater places the vampire and the artist-scientist’s representation of woman at the origins of a modern literary sensibility.

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tions that expose the destructive character of antagonistic oppositions. As is the case with all the other modern Irish writers who present doubling emphatically in their works, including Wilde, Yeats, and James Joyce, Stoker’s sensibility arises from a cultural situation characterized by oppositions of a violent, destructive kind. Like these other Irish writers, he presents at times the destructive and self-destructive character of conflictual doubling, and at times the possibility of a hybridity that might transform conflict into a disquieting, risky merger, whose results are unpredictable. The former comes through most strongly in “The Dualitists,” while the latter emerges in Mina Harker’s androgynous tendencies and in the mixed character of her child. In the first of the major texts of modern Gothic to be published in the 1890s, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde, like Stoker, brings a critical eye to bear on his society by means of the doubling that often characterizes Gothic writing. Poe influences both the doublings and the echoic strategies of the novel. As I argue in the opening essay of this issue, “Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the novel’s complex doublings and role shiftings blur distinctions between good and bad. The blurring contributes to engaging and implicating the reader in ways that anticipate Dracula. Wilde’s novel is an important precursor for later narratives of consumption and violence, including American Psycho (1991), whose central characters embody an ugliness hiding deceptively beneath an attractive social veneer. More explicitly than he does in Salomé, and in a domestic rather than an exotic setting, Wilde provides a Gothic rendering of Walter Pater’s aestheticism in a work that fuses aesthetic issues with political and moral concerns.9 In the case of Dorian Gray, by embedding the myth of Echo and Narcissus in the narrative, he produces an early instance of “the mythical method,” a strategy that Eliot identifies in later writings by Yeats and Joyce.1 0 Wilde brings out the dark implications of the pursuit of beauty as a narcissistic activity that represents in his narrative the hypocritical tendencies of British society at their worst. He takes an important step into modernism when he gothicizes the aesthetic and aestheticizes the Gothic. The merger enables Wilde to distance himself from Pater by writing a text that transforms realistic writing in complexly echoic and mythic ways in order to explore anthropological issues and reveal delusive, self-destructive aspects of the society the book addresses.

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Hardy will likely seem out of place in a discussion of late Victorian and early modernist Gothic that invokes centrally works by Wilde, Stoker, and James, but he is not. In his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats tellingly associates Wilde with Hardy in comments on Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898), implying that both Hardy and Wilde react against Pater. Wilde’s poem is itself a response to a Gothic precursor, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Like many later modernist challenges to Romantic tendencies, Wilde’s poem proceeds by stressing material circumstances and by introducing literal counters for Romantic figures. But the Gothic association of Hardy and Wilde is based on more than their responses to Pater and to Romanticism. In Hardy’s late fiction, Tess Durbeyfield is in some salient regards comparable to Salomé, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is nearly contemporaneous with Wilde’s play. The novel presents a temporally distant pastoral world undergoing a modernization that had already transformed it by the 1890s. Its story of a young woman who suffers because of two modern men, the narcissistic, deluded offspring of a mercantile family and a religious family, contains Gothic elements that become increasingly insistent as the narrative progresses. But the Gothic association of Hardy and Wilde is based on more than their responses to Pater and to Romanticism. In Hardy’s late fiction, Tess Durbeyfield is in some salient regards comparable to Salomé, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is nearly contemporaneous with Wilde’s play. The novel presents a temporally distant pastoral world undergoing a modernization that had already transformed it by the 1890s. Its story of a young woman who suffers because of two modern men, the narcissistic, deluded offspring of a mercantile family and a religious family, contains Gothic elements that become increasingly insistent as the narrative progresses. The threat to women and to marriage from members of the aristocracy and religious orders so frequent in earlier Gothic narratives (which Herod’s and John the Baptist’s misogyny in Salomé; repeats) takes modern form in Tess’s story, while other Gothic elements remain more immediately recognizable. The superstition of the d’Urberville coach, the menacing portraits of Tess’s female ancestors, the narrator’s suggestion that her mailed and male ancestors committed acts of violence against young women, and the association she has with the tomb of her forebears

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In “Oxford’s Ghosts: Jude the Obscure and the End of the Gothic,” Patrick O’Malley makes clear some of the transforming ways that Hardy responds to the Gothic tradition after Tess with the publication of his other great novel of the 1890s, Jude the Obscure. O’Malley brings out a salient modernist use of tropes in Hardy’s writing when he describes the literalizing of Gothic elements in Jude. As in the fusing of the Gothic and the realistic in Tess, in Jude two apparently different universes are brought together in an ostensibly realistic narrative. As in Dracula, the Gothic is here and now in England in Hardy’s narrative. That is so quite literally in the architecture that defines its urban spaces, but as O’Malley points out it is also present in the medievalism that Hardy calls up, a medievalism that asks to be understood in direct

relation to Catholicism. Hardy both responds to the issues and traditions of Gothic writing and brings the anti-Catholic aspects of the Gothic to life by evoking in the narrative antagonistic debates around Catholicism in nineteenth-century England. The Catholic threat is alive in Hardy’s England, and like Van Helsing in Dracula, Sue Bridehead becomes associated with Catholic ritual. This aligning of individuals and groups with Catholicism in order to raise doubts about the soundness of their beliefs and the moral justification of their actions is typical of the Gothic. By not displacing his narrative to a distant site, Hardy participates in the domesticating of the Gothic that is evident as well in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula. All these writers bring the Gothic home. As O’Malley says explicitly, instead of being foreign, the Gothic has become all too familiar: “The Gothic as a genre has collapsed into the contemporary novel, because the Gothic, indeed, has come home to England.” By contrast with Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, who, in O’Malley’s formulation, “rejects Gothic traditions concerning sexual and religious deviance as foreign to English national identity,” Hardy assimilates those characteristics into British cultural inheritance. In particular, O’Malley characterizes Jude as a “Radcliffean Gothic novel gone wrong,” in which Sue Bridehead, like Mina Harker in Dracula and Lilith Iyapo in Dawn, does not ultimately resist sexual contact that is a kind of horror. In his revision of Radcliffe, Hardy both reverses the meaning of sexual deviance and makes escape impossible. At the same time, the difference between Catholic and Protestant is effaced, as it also is in Dracula. The monster turns out to be incarnated in a conventional figure of authority. In other modern writing that emerges from the Gothic, including the works of Stoker and Conrad, it is often difficult to distinguish the threat from those who oppose it or the criminals from the police. In Jude, the threat is no literal monster (as if a monster ever could be literal) but an apparently ordinary schoolteacher. Phillotson’s twisted manipulations and desires differ from the overt violence of later novels, such as American Psycho, but their toll on human life is palpable. As O’Malley rightly asserts, “The Gothic has not only entered England but it has also subsumed the naturalized life of English citizens.” A central text of the modern English novel has fused with a dark Gothic double. The horror is now clearly part of marriage itself.

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all anticipate the intensified Gothic aspect of her story’s final chapters. In “Phase the Seventh,” her husband returns virtually from the dead, her estrangement from her body makes her, like the vampirized Lucy Westenra, a kind of walking dead person (“like a corpse” [367]), she murders her lover in a rage, and she and her husband find their way first to a deserted mansion and then to the eerie, enigmatic, echoic space of Stonehenge, where she sleeps on what may once have been a sacrificial altar. Like Salomé, her exotic counterpart, Tess is executed after taking revenge on a man. Hardy, however, refuses the exotic as a vehicle for his tale of violence against and by women, choosing instead to merge Gothic elements with realistic ones in a tale of madness and revenge. The merger brings the Gothic into a modern embodiment by insisting that the truth about social realities is carried in those Gothic elements and that the Gothic is inseparable from the realistic. In Tess, the Gothic is not rendered as a fantasy located in a safely distant country; rather, it is incarnate in the English countryside, where it resides and abides. Despite Tess’s execution, her presence lingers in the shape of her younger sister. Like the partly imaginary Wessex in relation to the literal south of England, and like Tess Durbeyfield in relation to Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the realistic story has a twin in its Gothic double. The veneer of fantasy and a distance from historical realities has become as thin and transparent in Hardy’s representations of Wessex as it is in Faulkner’s later tales of Yoknapatawpha County. In its double character as a mingling of realistic and antirealistic, Hardy’s narrative anticipates the dual character of later modernist works influenced by the Gothic, including those of Conrad and Faulkner.

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Gothic Popular Forms and Barely Regulated Madness: Westerns, Detective Fiction, Pornohorror Escape is no more possible for Letty Mason, the protagonist of Dorothy Scarborough’s antiWestern, The Wind (1925), than it was for Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure or will be for Lilith Iyapo in Dawn. As in the major works of modern Gothic published in the 1890s, in the anti-Western that Susan Kollin describes in “Race, Labor, and the Gothic Western: Dispelling Frontier Myths in Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind,” the potential for a critique of ideology emerges from Gothic elements. As it does in Stoker’s metrocolonial Gothic writing, a colonial situation contributes to the character of the anti-Western. Kollin sketches a merger of Gothic and transformed colonial elements in which the British colonial adventure story develops through the Western into an antiWestern that includes prominent Gothic details. The Gothic aspects bring out the negative side of the ambivalence concerning the frontier already present in the Western. In The Wind, the result is a narrative in which Gothic elements in the presentation of both nature and character have the effect of challenging frontier myths, including myths of nation building that depend on the innocence of white females. Through doublings characteristic of Gothic narrative, in this distinctively American meshing of the Gothic, the colonial, and the frontier, blurred distinctions of race and class bring out the Western’s dark side. As Kollin explains, in Scarborough’s narrative concerning indigenous characters, females, and property relations, the territorial conquest of Empire is displaced to an American situation in which the taking on of Gothic roles by indigenous figures contributes not to the furthering of ideology but to its dismantling. In “‘I’m in the Business Too’: Gothic Chivalry, Private Eyes, and Proxy Sex and Violence in Chandler’s The Big Sleep,” Charles Rzepka also explores a transformation of the Western, specifically in a work of American detective fiction in which a cowboylike, knightly hero appears in a Gothic urban adventure story. Citing both Joyce Carol Oates’s and Leslie Fiedler’s complaints about Raymond Chandler’s detective stories, Rzepka establishes firmly the connection to the Gothic. Fiedler sees in Chandler’s writing a descendant of a male Gothic tradition that tends toward the pornographic, while Oates calls his work an example of a misogynistic “demonic anti-pastoral” (34). That latter phrase could be applied to many works of Gothic writing, since we enter not the

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Forest of Arden but the Castle of Otranto, or, in The Big Sleep, the Sternwood mansion, where we encounter madness, violence, or both. As is regularly the case with the Gothic, Chandler’s work raises issues about the defining limits of civilization and of the human. The limits of the human come up implicitly in various kinds of figurative boundary crossings in Chandler’s novel, especially ones involving insects and plants in relation to human beings. The orchids in General Sternwood’s hothouse have flesh that seems nearly human, and he thinks of himself as a spider. Rzepka defends Chandler against some of the criticisms leveled against his work by arguing that he actualizes the potential for the critique of ideology within the Gothic, specifically by providing a vantage point for criticizing his own cultural context that invites readers to recognize their complicity. The disagreement among Chandler’s readers points to an issue of general relevance: the extent to which a work that includes violence and prejudicial representations stages cultural tendencies for us to recognize and judge rather than simply affirms those tendencies and makes them vicariously available. This issue regularly arises in the response to Gothic texts. In Rzepka’s reading of The Big Sleep, a doubling structure typical of Gothic enables us to recognize how difficult it can be to distinguish ostensibly good from ostensibly bad. As a consequence, we recognize our own complicity in the cultural attitudes that give rise to the narrative’s events. Good and evil are set in parallel in ways that make differentiating them absolutely an impossibility. Eddie Mars, the crime boss, is General Sternwood’s criminal counterpart, and Mars’s occasional hitman, Canino, is Marlowe’s double, whom Marlowe kills, as Canino has killed others. We may well prefer Marlowe, but he has killed. As with Tess’s murder of Alec d’Urberville, which some readers applaud, and the staking of Lucy Westenra in Dracula, Chandler’s narrative invites us to condone an act of extreme violence. Readers will not, by contrast, accept the violence against men and women that Patrick Bateman perpetrates in the novel by Bret Easton Ellis that Ruth Helyer writes about in “Parodied to Death: The Postmodern Gothic of American Psycho.” We resist the invitation to identify with Bateman, despite the first-person narration. Even though we do not cheer Bateman, we do recognize him as one of us. Rzepka points out that in the wake of the economic transformations in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century,

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Like Dracula, American Psycho is centrally about sanity, including the extent to which the feeling of being sane can be a self-congratulatory, self-serving delusion. Many of the characters in Stoker’s narrative keep journals in an endeavor to record their experiences in a written form that confirms that they remain in control of their faculties and their actions. In the book’s final chapter, Van Helsing congratulates himself on his sanity, just before he violates the graves of three female vampires and mutilates their bodies. In both Dracula and American Psycho, the gruesome killing of females appears to generate a feeling of sanity and being under control for the male perpetrator of the violence. The gory details of American Psycho are an extreme development in Gothic writing that suggests that madness is always close at hand in Gothic narratives. D. W. Harding argued persuasively that underlying the apparently controlled, unruffled surface of language and narrative in Jane Austen’s novels we sense something that challenges and requires control: hatred.1 1 By contrast with this “regulated hatred,” the barely regulated turbulence underlying Gothic narrative understood as a dark version of the novel is not hatred but something more extreme and more difficult to control: madness. In American Psycho, the barely regulated madness of Gothic writing frequently loses its regulated veneer. Bateman’s efforts to retain his sense of his own sanity are themselves symptoms of madness, though he does not recognize them for what they are. Rather than keeping a journal, he videotapes his own acts and watches them repeat-

edly. Repetitions suggest both loss of control, the inability to stop imitating, stop repeating, stop watching, but also an attempt to retain or gain control, as with his repetitions while working out. As Helyer suggests, Ellis uses imitation and repetition in a self-conscious appropriation of Gothic elements that is also a postmodern process of seemingly endless repetition. When Bateman observes himself, he becomes his own double, the observer of his representations of himself, as do the vampire hunters who write in Dracula. He shares with Dorian Gray the darkly narcissistic desire to watch himself becoming something bestial. The excesses of American Psycho might appear to put it in a class virtually by itself or to make it a parody of horror narrative, like the movie Scream (1996), in which the genre of the horror movie is frequently called up through horror movies that characters watch on television or talk about. But the tendency toward excess is typical of the Gothic, which regularly comes close to parody or self-parody. The excessive, overtly artificial quality of the Gothic, as in its counterpart, the pastoral, enables us to recognize a staging of cultural tendencies rather than a capitulation to them. In the violence against women in American Psycho, as in the antifeminist conversations in The Picture of Dorian Gray, we recognize that prejudicial thinking and behavior are being put on display in ways that we are more likely to judge than to accept. The exaggerations are also part of American Psycho’s postmodern character, which, as Helyer comments, borders at times on the comical. But the mutilation of women is not comical. It is tempting to claim that American Psycho goes further in the graphic character of its violence against women than any text normally considered as part of the Gothic tradition. But it would be hard to maintain persuasively that anything in Ellis’s novel exceeds Dr. Seward’s gratuitously bloody depiction in Dracula of the vampire hunters’ violation of Lucy Westenra’s corpse, whose heart they stake before cutting off the head and stuffing its mouth with garlic. Earlier still in the tradition of the Gothic, Victor Frankenstein chops up the female being that he is well on the way to creating. Though his act is not presented in vivid detail, it need not be in order to have a strong effect. By its emphasis on blood, Ellis’s novel does seem to go even further than Dracula, in which, according to the zoophagous Renfield, “the blood is the life.” We encounter blood in American Psycho in many scenes, along with other bodily fluids.

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American detective fiction had home-grown replacements for the foreign aristocratic villains of early Gothic narratives. Instead of Radcliffe’s Montoni, we have industrialists and other members of an economic ruling class. In Ellis’s novel of pornographic horror, the villain also comes from within the culture. As the title indicates, he is an American, specifically, part of the American elite, someone with money who, like Lord Henry Wotton or Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray, thinks he can do what he wants with impunity. The details concerning conspicuous consumption in both Wilde’s novel and Ellis’s create a clear connection between them. Bateman is at one with some of the defining aspects of his culture, including the market economy. He works on Wall Street and, like Dorian Gray, embodies the deluded, selfserving ideal whose ugly truth is the hidden image of the culture’s barely suppressed selfknowledge. As Helyer points out, the monster turns out to be the person next door.

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Rather than only drinking blood and ingesting insects and small animals, Bateman eats human flesh, both raw and cooked. But the difference merely raises more explicitly the issue of cannibalism that is already evident in Stoker’s narrative. Concerning this particular violation of cultural imperatives, both books resemble Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988), whose central character’s name, Hannibal Lector, suggests both “cannibal” and “reader.” The fascination some readers experience in response to books as extreme as American Psycho may well depend on a felt connection between those words.

The Gothic and Language: M. R. James and Samuel Beckett In the works of M. R. James, the beast also turns out to be within and in close proximity to readers, since James’s spooks often inhabit the reading room. When the house of books turns out to be haunted, how can the act of reading not also be? In James’s stories, books can sometimes kill. James may well have remembered that Dorian Gray complains to Lord Henry Wotton that a book Wotton had given him was poisonous and implores him not to give the book to others. I have grouped James with Beckett because of his connection to the Irish Gothic and because his stories, like Beckett’s style, locate the darkness within language. Although English, James was strongly influenced by Irish Gothic writing, which he knew well.1 2 His edition of Sheridan Le Fanu’s stories, Madam Crowl’s Ghost and other Tales of Mystery (1923), revived interest in the Irish writer at the same time that Eliot was writing about revenge tragedy. As Penny Fielding’s “Reading Rooms: M. R. James and the Library of Modernism” makes clear, the library is an institution devoted to collecting and classification, as well as one that rests on the importance of language, a defining aspect of the human. Like the museum, the zoo, and the encyclopedia, the library represents a categorizing tendency within the Western conception of knowledge that works to maintain sanity and order, or an impression of sanity and order. Accomplishing its mission depends on registering and cataloging by means of distinctions that, like Cartesian coordinates, enable the creating of a map-like coherence and intelligibility to help us feel we know where we are and what we are. The library functions in part to contain and control what otherwise would be a chaotic, even mad, jumble. Despite that mission, as Fielding indicates, in James’s work there are dark forces and dark

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corners even in this enlightening institution. It seems that the mad double that the process of containment is attempting to tame and suppress is actually brought into being or inflamed by the attempt. In that regard, it is worth recalling that Dracula is a creature of the library. His books enable him to learn what he needs to know in order to invade England successfully. Dracula’s library functions as a colonial British library, established by the English during imperial expansion for educational purposes to teach indigenous peoples how to think and behave in the English way. But the resulting acts of mimicry to which such libraries contribute can be a mask for subversion and resistance.1 3 The library can be the location for revolutionary activity. Karl Marx had a regular spot in the Reading Room of the British Library, where he worked on Capital. In short, the library’s rationalized system of classification does not guarantee the results produced by users of books, results that the rational impulse may well not recognize as orderly or sane. The emphasis in twentieth-century thought on language as the primary factor differentiating humans from animals, culture from nature, arises in part as a politically and intellectually resistant response to Social Darwinism’s claim that culture can be understood using evolutionary concepts on analogy with nature. According to that emphasis, language makes us human and presumably makes thought, including rationality, and civilization possible. But language and the cultural imperative to collect and to classify to which it is tied in the library are unable to account for some aspects of experience, including the threat that in James’s stories lives in the midst of the institution. That threat, which is neither intelligible nor eradicable, seems to live within language and within the institutions of culture. The suspicion that language contains or fosters an uncontrollable, destructive excess emerges from Beckett’s late writings as Graham Fraser reads them in “‘No More Than Ghosts Make’: The Hauntology and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work.” As in M. R. James, in Beckett we encounter a textualizing of the ghost and the threat, a linking of ghost and threat to language. In Beckett, however, the counterpart and response to the threat of and in language is a spectralizing of the text, whose substance is reduced to language that is virtually disembodied. By eschewing realism and attenuating representation, Beckett’s late work engages us more on the level of the signifier than as narrative. The Beckettian Gothic invites

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Fraser describes details that enable a reading of Beckett’s late prose work, Ill Seen Ill Said, as “a distilled, high modernist pastiche of the Gothic novel,” whose features include a spectral woman dressed in black and a ramshackle cabin that appears to be both animate and evil, observed by an inquisitorial eye. But more important than the details of narrative in this poststructural reading of Beckett’s Gothic is the spectral doubling of observing eye and character, whose blurred boundaries point to the hauntology, or logic of the specter, in Beckett’s writing. With this haunting double, the conceptual resemblance to Dracula emerges, for the woman is neither conclusively alive nor dead. Beckett’s style for incarnating his postmodern version of the undead, in which the boundary between the real and its opposite, between the living and the dead, between the actual and the imagined, becomes obscured, poses a challenge for conceptions of language that insist on referential, determinate meanings. When such meanings are displaced by the echoing voices of allusion and by the ghostly voices of their own opposites, the classifying bases that underlie the Cartesian illusions of the library and the unified, sane, self-possessed self become unstable. The language of Beckett’s late prose is a hybrid that, by effacing distinctions between opposites, undermines the possibility of classification and hierarchy of the sort that the library’s system supports. It is even difficult to classify Beckett’s own writing with confidence using conventional categories of literary genres and national language. Where in the library or the bookstore do we put him: with Irish authors? with French or Francophone authors? with poets? with novelists? with dramatists? Yeats turned Pater’s prose into verse by an editorial act. Beckett’s style blurs the distinctions between prose and poetry in advance of any editing or reading. Beckett responds to the excessive desire to know more, the desire that drives Victor Frankenstein to generate his monstrous double and that takes many readers to the library, with a ghostly echo that refuses excess by providing the minimum and “no more.” He avoids the trap of projecting or attempting to become any ideal that society thinks it wants by taking the Gothic as far beyond the domain of the feasible as it has ever

gone and is likely ever to go. By refusing to struggle against the ghost and the dark double, since the struggle only generates or spreads the darkness, Beckett comes as close as anyone could in language to putting the specter within us to rest in its unquiet grave.

Notes 1. Although the essays in this issue and my introduction focus primarily on narrative, Gothic writing, a mode that crosses the boundaries of literary genres, includes both drama and poetry. For discussions of contemporary examples of the Gothic in the visual arts as well as literature, see Grunenberg. 2. The most ambitious attempt to provide an overview of modern Gothic writing and discussions of individual texts is David Punter’s The Modern Gothic. Punter’s discussion of the relation of Gothic writing to realism is particularly salutary; see 185-86. For discussions of twentieth-century Gothic writing that deal primarily with relations between Gothic and postmodernism, see Sage and Smith. 3. Yeats discusses the Noh theatre in his introduction to Pound and Fenollosa’s Certain Noble Plays of Japan. 4. The allusion is confirmed in a letter from the poet’s wife, Valerie Eliot, published in the TLS (18 May 1973), cited in Wolf 47. 5. Eliot included a number of his essays concerning revenge tragedy in Selected Essays, New Edition (1950). Many of the relevant essays are available in Eliot’s Essays on Elizabethan Drama. Even “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), probably the most widely reprinted literary essay in English of the twentieth century, cites a lengthy passage from The Revenger’s Tragedy by Middleton (then attributed to Tourneur). 6. For a general commentary on the double in literature, see Karl Miller’s Doubles. 7. In “Location and Home in Beckett, Bhabha, Fanon, and Heidegger,” I discuss briefly the disagreement within postcolonial theory concerning alternatives to realism and identity politics as a repetition of disagreements earlier in the twentieth-century about modernism’s antirealistic character and its tendency to dissolve the self; see 543-44. 8. In fact, Valente intends his discussion of Stoker’s story to provide an entrée for a commentary on Dracula, which will be available in his forthcoming Unlocking Dracula’s Crypt. 9. I discuss Wilde’s response to Pater in Salomé; in “Shalom/Solomon/Salomé.” 10. Eliot uses the term in his review of Joyce’s Ulysses, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” originally published in The Dial (November, 1923). 11. See D. W. Harding, “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen.” 12. W. J. McCormack develops the notion of the “Irish Gothic” in his introduction to the section of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, “Irish Gothic and After (1820-1945).”

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us to know ourselves in its spectral qualities, but not by holding a mirror up to a social situation whose details we recognize as our own. This form of the Gothic has been stripped bare, become the ghost of itself in a minimalist art.

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13. Concerning the dynamics of an imitation that resists and transforms its model, see Homi K. Bhabha’s “Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse” in his The Location of Culture 85-92.

Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Eliot, T. S. Essays on Elizabethan Drama. 1956. New York: Harcourt, 1960. ———. Selected Essays, New Edition. 1950. New York: Harcourt, 1965. ———. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism. Ed. Seon Givens. New York: Vanguard, 1963. 198-202. Grunenberg, Christoph, ed. GOTHIC: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. Harding, D. W. “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen.” Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs: Prenctice-Hall, 1963. 166-79. Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. 1891. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. McCormack, W.J. “Irish Gothic and After (1820-1945).” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. II. Ed. Seamus Deane. Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991. 831-54. Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Simple Art of Murder.” New York Review of Books 21 Dec. 1995: 32-40. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 1893. 4th ed. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Rpt. of Studies in the History of the Renaissance. 1873. Punter, David. The Modern Gothic. London: Longman, 1996. Vol. 2 of The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1996. Riquelme, John Paul. “Location and Home in Beckett, Bhabha, Fanon, and Heidegger.” The Centennial Review 42 (1998): 541-68. ———. “Shalom/Solomon/Salomé;: Modernism and Wilde’s Aesthetic Politics.” The Centennial Review 39 (1995): 575-610. Sage, Victor and Allan Lloyd Smith, eds. Modern Gothic: A Reader. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. The Portable Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Aldington. New York: Viking, 1965. Wolf, Leonard, ed. The Essential Dracula. New York: Plume, 1993. Yeats, William Butler. Introduction. The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan. New York: New Directions, 1959. 151-63. Rpt. of Certain Noble Plays of Japan. Ed. Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa. 1916.

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ORIGINS OF THE GOTHIC MONTAGUE SUMMERS (ESSAY DATE 1938) SOURCE: Summers, Montague. “The Romantic Feeling.” In The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. 1938. Reprint, pp. 17-59. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. In the following excerpt from his widely studied analysis of Gothic literature, originally published in 1938, Summers surveys the evolution of Gothic art, architecture, and literature through the eighteenth century.

The word “Gothic,” which was to play so important a part in later days, and which now has so very definite and particular a meaning (especially in relation to literature) originally conveyed the idea of barbarous, tramontane and antique, and was merely a term of reproach and contempt. From its application to architecture— and Gothic building, as we shall see, was long enough held in very low esteem—it came to connote almost anything mediæval, and could be referred to almost any period until the middle, or even the end, of the seventeenth century. In such extension, of course, it comes loosely to signify little more than old-fashioned, grannam and outof-date.1 In reference to architecture, the sovran disdain with which Gothic was regarded is repeatedly emphasized. John Evelyn, a virtuoso of the most cultured talent, writing An Account of Architects & Architecture, in A Parallel of Architecture Both Ancient & Modern by Roland Freart Sr De Chambray, folio, 1664, in his Epistle Dedicatory instructs Sir John Denham: “You will know, that all the mischiefs and absurdities in our modern Structures proceed chiefly from our busie and Gotic triflings in the Composition of the Five Orders.” Gothic is unworthy to be called an Order, those who envisaged it were “low and reptile Souls” severely to be reprobated on account of the “idle and impertinent Grotesks, with which they have ever infected all our Modern Architecture” (p. 3), and no words are bad enough for those who dare “to Engotish (as one may say) after their own capricious Humour” (p. 5). Evelyn speaks of “Arched Doors or Windows” (p. 131), and observes, “This Barbarity therefore we may look upon as purely Gotique.” The great Sir Christopher Wren in his ample description of and notes upon S. Paul’s Cathedral, printed in Parentalia, folio, 1750, 2 speaks of abandoning “the Gothick Rudeness of the old Design” for “a good Roman Manner.” His aim was “a Cathedral-form . . . so rectified, as to reconcile, as near as possible, the Gothick to a better Manner

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Sir Christopher Wren quotes with warm approval Evelyn,3 and speaks of buildings demolished by “the Goths, Vandals, and other barbarous Nations . . . introducing in their stead, a certain fantastical and licentious Manner of Building, which we have since called Modern or Gothick. Congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy and monkish Piles, without any just Proportion, Use, or Beauty, compared with the truly ancient . . . a judicious Spectator is rather distracted or quite confounded, than touched with that Admiration, which results from the true and just Symmetry, regular Proportion, Union, and Disposition.” In final condemnation Wren sums up Gothic Cathedrals as “vast and gigantick Buildings indeed, but not worthy the Name of Architecture.” We are the less surprised then to find that the Augustan Addison, who incidentally in his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, etc. In the Years, 1701, 1702, 1703, never misses an opportunity of lewdly aspersing the manners and impiously reviling the religion of the country in which he was a stranger, shook his head sadly enough when he saw the Certosa4 of Pavia. He perforce allowed “the convent of Carthusians” to be “very spacious and beautiful,” yet added, “Their church is extremely fine, and curiously adorned, but of a Gothic structure.”5 When he approaches Siena he is rabid with resentment: “There is nothing in this city so extraordinary as the Cathedral, which . . . can only be looked upon as one of the master-pieces of Gothic Architecture. When a man sees the prodigious pains and expence, that our forefathers have been at in these barbarous buildings, one cannot but fancy to himself what miracles of Architecture they would have left us, had they been only instructed in the right way; for when the devotion of those ages was much warmer than that of the present, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal of the Priests, there

was so much mony consumed on these Gothic Cathedrals, as would have finished a greater variety of noble buildings, than have been raised either before or since that time. One would wonder to see the vast labour that has been laid out on this single Cathedral . . . nothing in the world can make a prettier show to those who prefer false beauties, and affected ornaments, to a noble and majestick simplicity.” And this of the Duomo with its black and white chequered marbles, memorials of the Sorrowful and Joyful Mysteries of Our Lady, whereby, as she told S. Bridget, “her life was ever divided between grief and happiness,” the Duomo with the Capella del Voto, the bronze work of Beccafumi, Donatello’s statue of S. John Baptist, Neroccio’s S. Catharine, and the wonderful mosaics of that pavement! The fact is that the antipathy of Wren and Addison to Gothic does not consist in any mere matter of taste or liking, but sets much deeper than that; it is psychological. Wren, unconsciously perhaps, betrays the secret when he speaks of “monkish Piles” without any use. The Gothic Cathedral was an aspiration towards God, a place where the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Altar might be ever offered to the Father. The Gothic Cathedral was built for the Mass and on account of the Mass. Minds of the type of Wren and Addison had no conception of the Christian Sacrifice; what they supposed the Catholic Faith to be they loathed. Their churches were empty lecture-rooms, “luminous and disencumbered” to echo Addison’s approving phrase. Here was no priest, but a preacher who should discourse lukewarm logic and moral common-sense to his auditors. It was all very didactic and very respectable, and it would be difficult to imagine anything more utterly lacking in any sense of religion. The classicists were wont to hold up Horace as the supreme master and model, not Horace of the Odes and Satires, not even a genuine Horace of the De Arte Poetica, but a Horace who had been tailored in the velvet court-coat and made to wear the mighty periwig of the “regent of Parnassus,” Nicolas Boileau Despréaux. As we might expect, Boileau uses the word gothique in sternest reprobation, as for example when in his famous ninth Satire he lashes the clerk who in the parterre for “quinze sous” can Traiter de visigoths tous les vers de Corneille.

In England, too, the use of the word was soon conveniently extended from its direct application to architecture, and Dryden in his critical preface

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of Architecture; with a Cupola, and above that, instead of a Lantern, a lofty Spire, and large Porticoes.” He remarks: “This we now call the Gothick Manner of Architecture (so the Italians called what was not after the Roman Style) tho’ the Goths were rather Destroyers than Builders; I think it should with more reason be called the Saracen style. . . . The Crusado gave us an Idea of this Form.” In England, Salisbury is “one of the best patterns of Gothick-building.” He again insists “what we now vulgarly call the Gothick, ought properly and truly to be named the Saracenick Architecture refined by the Christians,” and developed from “Mosques, Caravansaras, and Sepulchres” built by Mohammedans.

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containing A Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry, to The Art of Painting, 4to, 1695, his English prose translation of Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy’s Latin poem De Arte Graphica,6 precisely says: “The Gothique manner, and the barbarous ornaments, which are to be avoided in a picture, are just the same with those in an ill-ordered play. For example, our English Tragi-comedy must be confessed to be wholly Gothique, notwithstanding the success which it has found upon our theatre.” (How unjust Dryden is to his own genius here is an inquiry we must waive as impertinent to our matter.)7 Again, he defines: “All that has nothing of the Ancient gust is call’d a barbarous or Gothique manner.” Echoing these very words the vaguely philosophical third Earl of Shaftesbury in his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times (1711) writes: “We are not so Barbarous or Gothick as they pretend.” Bishop Burnet in his History of his Own Time (published posthumously 1723-34) described the temper of Charles XII as growing “daily more fierce and Gothick.” “Ah Rustick, ruder than Gothick,” cries Mrs. Millamant to the loutish Sir Wilfull in The Way of the World, 1700; and well nigh half a century later Mrs. Western rebuked her irate brother with “O! more than Gothick ignorance!” Tom Jones, vii, chapter 3. In 1773 Mrs. Hardcastle complains of her good spouse’s “Gothic vivacity,” whilst a modish young lady in The Example; or, the History of Lucy Cleveland (1778) deemed “husband” a “gothic word.” In Miss Cuthbertson’s Rosabella; or, A Mother’s Marriage, 5 volumes, 1817, Mrs. O’Dowd with horror speaks of Rotherhithe whither she has accompanied her husband, Captain O’Dowd, on business as “Gothland” (Vol. III, p. 254), and in the same novel we hear that the Marchioness of Quizland cried shame on Lady Townhurst’s rusticity, declaring “it was Gothic barbarity to patronize children.” Even as late as 1841, in his novel The Parish Clerk, J. T. Hewlett spoke of eating dinner “at the gothic hour of one o’clock.” Very rarely was there any adverse comment upon the extended use of the word ‘Gothic,’ although it is true that a reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine, July, 1778, takes exception to the description of The Champion of Virtue (The Old English Baron) as a Gothic story, since Englishmen of the days of King Henry V and King Henry VI were certainly not Goths.8 Wisely enough Clara Reeve ignored such futile pedantry, and in good set terms made it plain that her literary offspring was intended “to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient Romance and modern Novel,” and that it was “distinguished by the ap-

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pellation of a Gothic story, being a picture of Gothic times and manners.” In The Novice of Saint Dominick, 4 volumes, 1806, by Miss Sydney Owenson (afterwards Lady Morgan), chapter V, the pious and learned lady Magdelaine de Montmorell exclaims: “female sanctity is, I am afraid, a treasure still rarer than female genius, to be found in this Gothic age.” The term ‘Gothic.’ so long slandered and traduced, found at length a learned and powerful defender in Bishop Richard Hurd of Worcester (1720-1808),9 whose Letters on Chivalry and Romance, published anonymously in 1762, must be accounted not only a work of paramount importance in the history of English romanticism, but also regarded as among the finest critical essays of our literature. Bishop Hurd was greatly influenced by Joseph and Thomas Warton, yet he is something far more than the mere disciple of the two brothers, for his pages in every period show a forceful originality, conviction, and matured reflection, whilst he goes much further than they had ventured openly to advance. The very first of the twelve Letters boldly throws down the gauntlet with its opening words: “The ages, we call barbarous, present us with many a subject of curious speculation. What, for instance, is more remarkable than the Gothic CHIVALRY? or than the spirit of ROMANCE, which took its rise from that singular institution?” A little later in the same letter he observes: “The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign countries, such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were even charmed by the Gothic Romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in them? Or, may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius, and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far, in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?” To answer which questions he proposes as the Subject and Plan to explain the rise, progress and genius of Gothic Chivalry. “Reasons, for the decline and rejection of the Gothic taste in later times must be given.” In the third Letter Hurd notes the several Characteristics of Chivalry; the passion for arms; the spirit of enterprise; the honour of knighthood; the rewards of valour; the splendour of equipages; their romantic ideas of justice; their passion for adventures; their eagerness to run to the succour of the distressed; the pride they took in redressing wrongs, and removing grievances; their courtesy, affability, and that refined gallantry, which carried the notions of chastity, the fairest and strongest

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In a word, you will find that the manners they paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical for being Gothic.” The seventh Letter considers in some detail the effect of the Gothic upon Spenser1 1 and Milton. No doubt each of these bards kindled his poetic fire from classic lore, but when most inflamed they are the more particularly rapt with the Gothic fables of chivalry. With regard to Shakespeare too, whose “genius kept no certain rout, but rambled at hazard into all the regions of human life and manners . . . one thing is clear, that even he is greater when he uses Gothic manners and machinery, than when he employs classical.” The eighth Letter entirely cuts the ground from under the feet of Wren and Evelyn. “When an architect examines a Gothic structure by Grecian rules he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic architecture had its own rules, by which when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the Grecian. The question is not, which of the two is conducted in the simplest or truest taste: but, whether there be not sense and design in both, when scrutinized by the laws on which each is projected. The same observation holds of the two sorts of poetry. Judge of the Faery Queen by the classic models, and you are shocked with its disorder: consider it with an eye to its Gothic original, and you find it regular. The unity and simplicity of the former are more complete: but the latter has that sort of unity and simplicity, which results from its nature. The Faery Queen then, as a Gothic poem, derives its METHOD, as well as the other characters of its composition, from the established modes and ideas of chivalry. . . . So that if you will say anything against the poet’s method, you must say that he should not have chosen this subject. But this objection arises from your classic ideas of Unity, which have no place here; and are in every view foreign to the purpose.” There is, in fact, not the classic Unity, “which consists in the representation of one entire action,” but “an Unity of another sort, an unity resulting from the respect which a number of related actions have to one common purpose. In other words, It is an unity of design, and not of action.” The Gothic Novel,—The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, for example— has this unity of design. In the ninth Letter the author considers the beauties of Tasso, which afford a fresh confirma-

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claim of the female sex, to so platonic an elevation; and above all, the “character of Religion.” Every one of these characteristics, under a varied form, but yet plain to distinguish, is to be found in the Gothic Novel, the “character of Religion” becoming an intense pre-occupation with the cloister, abbots, monks, nuns, friars, convents, priories and the anchoret’s retreat. The fourth Letter draws some very striking parallels between the old Romances and the poems of Homer, “circumstances of agreement between the heroic and gothic manners,”1 0 and the author commences the fifth Letter by emphasizing “that the resemblance between the heroic and Gothic ages is very great.” In the sixth Letter he justly remarks that “so far as the heroic and Gothic manners are the same, the pictures of each, if well taken, must be equally entertaining. But I go further, and maintain that the circumstances, in which they differ, are clearly to the advantage of the Gothic designers.” Not a few of his contemporaries must have been horrified when they read these sentences, nor would their amaze decrease, when, speaking of the manners of the feudal age, he adds that as Homer was a citizen of the world, could the poet have seen the manners of the feudal age he would certainly have preferred them to Grecian manners, “And the grounds of this preference would, I suppose, have been ‘The improved gallantry of the feudal times; and the superior solemnity of their superstitions.’” This last phrase is very significant, and strikes the key-note of much that was to follow in novel and romance. As to religious machinery, “for the more solemn fancies of witchcraft and incantation, the horrors of the Gothic were above measure striking and terrible. The mummeries of the pagan priests were childish, but the Gothic Enchanters shook and alarmed all nature. We feel this difference very sensibly in reading the antient and modern poets. You would not compare the Canidia of Horace with the Witches in Macbeth. And what are Virgil’s myrtles dropping blood to Tasso’s enchanted forest?” With a tribute of enthusiastic praise to the “terrible sublime” of Shakespeare, he continues: “I can’t but think that, when Milton wanted to paint the horrors of that night (one of the noblest parts in his Paradise Regained) which the Devil himself is feigned to conjure up in the wilderness, the Gothic language and ideas helped him to work up his tempest with such terror. . . . And without more words you will readily apprehend that the fancies of our modern bards are not only more gallant, but, on a change of the scene, more sublime, more terrible, more alarming, than those of the classic fablers.

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tion of the point upon which he principally insists, The pre-eminence of the Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry [and certainly romance] above the classic. Bishop Hurd with urbanest satire just laughs out of court my Lord Shaftesbury and his critical cant upon the tritest theme—“it is not to be told with what alacrity and self-complacency he flourishes upon it” in his Soliloquy or Advice to an Author, 1710. “The Gothic manner, as he calls it,” is the favourite object of my Lord’s raillery. This ingenious nobleman is so perfectly enamoured “of his noble antients,” whose spirit and precepts he misunderstands, that he will fight any man who contends there may be other elegances and beauties in literature besides those in the behalf of which he jousts so slashingly. The cold Boileau “happened to say something of the clinquant of Tasso; and the magic of this word, like the report of Astolfo’s horn in Ariosto, overturned at once the solid and well-built reputation of the Italian poetry.” This potent word occurs in the ninth of Boileau’s satires, A Son Ésprit, where he attacks a whole catalogue of poets, almost as long as Homer’s list of ships, and unmercifully belabours the courtier-wits: Tous les jours, à la cour, un sot de qualité Peut juger de travers avec impunité; À Malherbe, à Racan, préférer Théophile, Et le clinquant du Tasse, à tout l’or de Virgile.

You are, no doubt, a vastly superior critic, Monsieur Nicolas Boileau Despréaux, but did it never occur to you that a man may yield to none in his devotion to Vergil, and yet may love and admire Tasso also? Yet “the clinquant of Tasso” became a sort of watchword among the critickins. On a sudden nothing was heard but this abracadabra, and the respectable Mr. Addison, “who gave the law in taste here, took it up and sent it about the kingdom in his polite and popular essays.” These considerations lead to some very pointed remarks in regard to those who profess so exactly to follow what they are pleased to call nature: “But the source of bad criticism, as universally of bad philosophy, is the abuse of terms. A poet, they say, must follow Nature; and by Nature we are to suppose can only be meant the known and experienced course of affairs in this world. Whereas the poet has a world of his own, where experience has less to do, than consistent imagination.

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He has, besides, a supernatural world to range in. He has Gods, and Faeries, and Witches at his command: And, ———O! who can tell The hidden pow’r of herbes, and might of magic spell? Spencer, B. i, C. 2

Thus in the poet’s world, all is marvellous and extraordinary; yet not unnatural in one sense, as it agrees to the conceptions that are readily entertained of these magical and wonder-working Natures. This trite maxim of following Nature is further mistaken in applying it indiscriminately to all sorts of poetry.” Sublime and creative poetry and romance may be regarded as a species addressing itself solely or principally to the Imagination. Therefore the poet or romantic writer may say: “I leave to the realist, to the classicist (so-called) the merit of being always broad awake, always in their dull sober senses; The divine dream (Homer’s “theios oneiros”),1 2 and mystic fancy are among the noblest of my prerogatives.” The cry of the Augustans was: Magic and enchantment are senseless things. This crass materialism is met by the simple truth that witchcraft is a very real and terrible thing, for we are wiser in this than they; that the supernatural is all about and around us ever; that the veil trembles and is very thin. The concluding Letters sum up and emphasize with a few general reflexions and particular applications Hurd’s views upon Gothic Romance. One of the writer’s strongest arguments— although never explicitly advanced as such—lies in the fact that he on no occasion expresses himself narrowly, as one who wishes entirely to banish and disallow any school of poetry save the chivalrous and romantic; he freely acknowledges the legitimate claim and position of classical poetry, he merely refuses to grant it a monopoly and an exclusive tyranny of place and power. He urges and insists that Gothic poetry shall be judged by its own standards, by its own particular claims, method, and end. In the direct opposite to this catholic spirit consists one of the many, perhaps the greatest of the many, weaknesses of Addison and his followers. We may take Addison, as being the most influential, to typify a school. Addison has the hall-mark of the completest prig. He steadfastly refuses to allow worth or beauty in poem or prose

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Gibbon has justly declared that he could mention “few writers more deserving of the great though prostituted name of the critic” than Richard Hurd, and to over-estimate the importance of the Letters on Chivalry and Romance in the history of English letters is almost impossible. The anonymous publication of the book did not burst with a sudden resonance in literary circles and compel clamant attention in every quarter, but its influence very swiftly coursed and permeated the channels of taste and thought. The change thereafter was immediate. There had, of course, already been symptoms of a certain vacillation of fashion, but this transition was incalculably accelerated by the authoritative pronouncements and acknowledged learning of so eminent a man as Hurd, for the authorship of the Letters was no great secret. Not merely did a few scholars, a few poets, a handful of critics echo his dicta and range themselves beneath his banner, but a Gothic flavour rapidly became fashionable with all classes of society. Following closely in the footsteps of their father, who died in 1745, and who is by no means an unimportant name in the history of the revival of romanticism, the Rev. Thomas Warton of Philander, an Imitation of Spencer, and the two Runic Odes, the Warton brothers, Joseph and Thomas, were already known as ardent romanticists, and as early as 1746 Joseph in the Advertisement prefixed to his Odes fairly challenged didactic poetry, and declared his conviction that “the fashion of moralizing in verse has been carried too far,” asserting that “he looks upon Invention and Imagination to be the chief faculties of a Poet.” It might be an exaggeration to say that Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry which appeared in three volumes, February, 1765, was a performance inspired by the Letters on Chivalry and Romance, since early in 1761 he was in treaty with Dodsley concerning the publication of a collection of old ballads, but Hurd’s championship of the Gothic immensely helped and encheered

him, although the original Preface is apologetic to the last degree, and as is well known he polished, printed and pruned the ballads in a perfectly preposterous fashion. The Reliques were not much approved of by Hurd himself, and Percy found little encouragement from many of the most eminent literary men, but for all that the success of his collections was overwhelming, and the reading public vehemently applauded, whilst Walpole, on February 5th, 1765, acknowledged “the flattering and agreeable present of the Reliques of Ancient Poetry” in a letter1 3 of most cordial compliment, requesting the honour of the editor’s acquaintance, and protesting, “If it should ever lie within my slender power to assist your studies or inquiries, I hope, Sir, you will command me. I love the cause, I have a passion for antiquity . . .” A second edition of the Reliques was called for in 1767; a third in 1775; but the fourth did not appear until 1794. The influence of the Reliques upon the younger generation was openly acknowledged by such men as Scott and Wordsworth. It should, however, be remarked that Matthew Gregory Lewis for his ballads, The Tales of Wonder, The Tales of Terror, and others drew his inspiration from contemporary Germany, from Bürger, Schiller, Goethe, and from J. G. von Herder’s Stimmen der Völker in Liedern. Whatever we may think of Ossian to-day, and myself I sometimes imagine that even the few of us who yet linger to read with real enjoyment and admiration Macpherson’s perfervid rhetoric and lyrical flights are hardly able to judge his very remarkable work with completest candour, there can be no question that the Ossianic poems created an ineffaceable impression upon the age. Nor can a book be without deep significance which was hailed with enthusiasm by Gray, David Hume, John Home, and many another eminent name; which gave Herder such extraordinary pleasure; which strongly influenced Goethe and Schiller; which was imitated by Coleridge and Byron; which was praised and carefully studied by Chateaubriand, “épicurien à l’imagination catholique,” as Sainte-Beuve1 4 once named him. Dr. Hugh Blair, in his essay A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1763), defined Ossian’s two principal characteristics as tenderness and sublimity. “The events recorded are all serious and grave; the scenery throughout, wild and romantic. The extended heath by the seashore; the mountains shaded with mist; the torrent rushing through a solitary valley; the scattered oaks, and the tombs of warriors overgrown with moss, all produce a solemn attention in the

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which he conceives as not conforming to the stereotyped rules and prejudices that had become in the world of letters a kind of canon law. Any author who does not speak the polite and popular cant is disbarred. This is the very essence of egotistical Philistinism, and if it so ill befits a writer such as Addison, who had parts, what are we to think when we meet it in men of a much lesser grade and narrower intellects such as Thomas Babington Macaulay? It were superfluous to dwell upon the point since this latter writer, both as critic and historian, is now so badly blown upon and generally discredited.

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mind, and prepare it for great and extraordinary events.” The same might be said of numberless Gothic novels. Ossian’s address to the Sun, his lament over the Desolation of Balclutha, the Songs of Selma, and many passages more, are repeated and but little varied again and again in romantic fiction. The spectres of Ossian which, Dr. Drake said, seem to “rush upon the eye with all the stupendous vigour of wild and momentary creation,” have their ghostly progeny in the thousand phantoms of a thousand Castles. In that poignant scene in Mrs. Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline; or, The Orphan of the Castle, when Lady Adelina walking in the woods encounters Fitz-Edward, quite naturally comes the phrase: “The wind blew chill and hollow among the halfstripped trees, as they passed through the wood; and the dead leaves rustled in the blast. ’Twas such a night as Ossian might describe.” There are even, one might truly say, many Caledonian Gothic novels which show the influence of Ossian, another and entirely separate thing from the imitation of Sir Walter Scott, although some daring spirits essayed a commixture of the two. Mrs. Radcliffe’s first book, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, “A Highland Story,” 1789; Horsley Curties’ The Scottish Legend, or The Isle of St. Clothair, 1802; Mrs. Helme’s St. Clair of the Isles: or, The Outlaws of Barra, “A Scottish Tradition,” 1803; and William Child Green’s The Prophecy of Duncannon, or, The Dwarf and the Seer, “A Caledonian Legend,” 1824; all show a certain indirect Ossianic influence, whilst Otho and Rutha, 1781, is servilely imitative. The impetus given to the Romantic Movement by the two Wartons by Percy, and by Ossian, was very great, and had far-reaching consequences, but it was Hurd’s Letters1 5 which not only vindicated Gothicism but made the Gothic fashionable. In 1749, as we have already seen, Squire Western’s sister used the epithet “Gothick”1 6 as a term of unqualified opprobrium and contempt; seventeen years later, in 1766, the wealthy Mrs. Heidelberg, “the very flower of delicacy and cream of politeness,” invites Lord Ogleby to take a dish of tea or “a sullabub warm from the cow” in her “little Gothic dairy, fitted up entirely in my own taste,” whilst the old city merchant, Sterling, who apes luxury and courts the mode, builds a spire in a field against a tree to terminate the prospect— “One must always have a church, or an obelisk, or something to terminate the prospect, you know”—and spends one hundred and fifty pounds

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to put his ruins in proper repair, so that “you would think them ready to tumble on your head.” The famous, but unfinished Sir Bertrand, which so powerfully impressed Leigh Hunt, is too obviously inspired by The Castle of Otranto, and the introductory essay On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror was certainly suggested by the work of Bishop Hurd, as indeed were other discourses in this kind such as On Romances, an Imitation, and An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations, appearing in the same collection Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, by J. and A. L. Aikin, 1773. Sir Bertrand has often been ascribed to Anna Laetitia Aikin (who married in 1774 the Rev. Rochemont Barbauld), but Miss Lucy Aikin in her Memoir prefixed to Mrs. Barbauld’s Works, 1825, specifically gives the fragment to Dr. Aikin, and the essay on pleasurable terror to Miss Aikin. Walpole, it is true, in a letter to Robert Jephson, January 27th, 1780, wrote of The Castle of Otranto:1 7 “Miss Aikin flattered me even by stooping to tread in my eccentric steps. Her Fragment, though but a specimen, showed her talent for imprinting terror”; but Miss Lucy’s testimony is conclusive, and it is borne out by Leigh Hunt who comments that John Aikin was “a writer from whom this effusion was hardly to have been looked for,” Book in a Corner, 1849; and who was assuredly at no pains to advance his authorship of Sir Bertrand. Miss Aikin in her essay shrewdly observed the positive pleasure which arises from curiosity. Imagination thus stimulated “rejoices in the expansion of its powers.” A supernatural terror is on a higher psychological plane than terror aroused by natural objects of repulsion. When there is excess of pain scenes of terror drive “too near our common nature”; it is far more agreeable when the circumstances are “wild, fanciful and extraordinary.” This is a true difference, and nicely discerned. We do not, however, stay now to consider this very vital point, since there will be much more to say on the subject and more pertinently when considering the work of Mrs. Radcliffe. John Aikin set out to combine both kinds of terror in Sir Bertrand, which Walpole thought “excellent,” but although it must remain a question of opinion, I cannot persuade myself that the Fragment achieves success. The commencement is striking. A knight, as he wanders in darkness over a desolate and dreary moor, hears the sullen tolling of a bell, whose funeste curfew guides him by the aid of a flickering light to “an antique mansion” with turrets at the coins. All is wrapped in

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Notes 1. In the reign of Charles II the current phrase was “the old Elizabeth way.” Thus Lady Dupe, in Dryden’s Sr Martin Mar-all (acted 1667) describes old Moody as one who “stands up for the old Elizabeth way in all things.” In The Gentleman Dancing-Master (acted in 1672) Mrs. Flirt, arranging her ménage, is quick to tell Monsieur: “Don’t you think we’ll take up with your old Queen Elizabeth furniture as your Wives do.” 2. Parentalia, folio, 1750, pp. 282, 297, 304, 306, 308. 3. An Account of Architects and Architecture, folio, 1664, p. 9. 4. Founded by Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The façade (1491) is one of the world’s loveliest things. The interior paintings are mostly by Borgognone, although there are examples of the work of Perugino, Mantegna, Pordenone, and other artists. 5. My quotations are from the edition in The Works of the Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq., four volumes, London, Tonson, 1721, Vol. II, p. 10; and Sienna, pp. 135-6. 6. Du Fresnoy, 1611-65. De Arte Graphica was published posthumously at Paris three years after his death with a French prose translation by De Piles. 7. Dryden even speaks of his own The Spanish Fryar as “unnatural mingle,” although he acknowledges his partiality to the play. Yet there can be a regular as well as an irregular and unfitting alternation of gravity and mirth, as Dryden shows us in his masterpiece of drama, Don Sebastian. Here our pleasure during the lighter episodes in no way encroaches upon our concernment for the tragic scenes. 8. The Castle of Otranto might, of course, be criticized along the same lines. 9. His editions of Horace, Ars Poetica, 1749, and Epistola ad Augustum, 1751, were warmly praised by Warburton. In 1776 Hurd, then Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry (translated to Worcester, 1781), was appointed preceptor to the Prince of Wales, and in 1783 he was offered the Primacy, which he declined. 10. Letters on Chivalry, 1762, p. 32. “Nay, could the very castle of a Gothic giant be better described than in the words of Homer:

High walls and battlements the courts inclose, And the strong gates defy a host of foes.” Od. B. xvii, ver. 318 Udolpho in the Odyssey! It does not appear to me that Hurd owes anything to Sainte-Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne Chevalerie, 2 vols., 1759, (Vol. III, 1781), although he may, of course, have known the book. 11. The Spenserian revival in the eighteenth century, important as it is in its influence upon Romanticism, must barely be indicated in a brief word. It is interesting to note that Oldham (1653-83) wrote a Satyr, “The Person of Spencer is brought in, Dissuading the Author from the Study of Poetry.” The Augustans hardly understood “Old Spenser,” who, as Addison was pleased to write, failed to “charm an understanding age,” Account of the Greatest English Poets, 1694. Prior thought that he had imitated the Spenserian stanza, but he could not even make the colouring look like Spenser’s. In 1713 Samuel Croxall published a political satire as An Original Canto of Spencer, and in 1715 appeared an edition of Spenser edited by John Hughes, who ventured to say that to compare The Fairie Queene “with the novels of antiquity, would be like drawing a parallel between the Roman and the Gothick architecture.” Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, however, many imitations of Spenser appeared, such, for example, as the three poems of William Thompson, who was a complete romanticist in spirit and form. Richard Owen Cambridge (1717-1702) imitated Spenser in his Archimage, as did Gilbert West in his On the Abuse of Travelling, 1839, with which Gray was “enraptured and enmarvailed.” William Shenstone (1714-63) is deservedly famous for his “ludicrous imitation” The School-Mistress (the final revision is 1742); and there were many other mock-Spenserian poems, such as Christopher Pitt’s The Jordan, the subject of which finds a parallel in Francesco Berni’s capitolo In Lode dell’Orinale. In 1748 appeared James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence, in one passage of which, Canto II, stanza 52, the poet speaks of “my master Spenser.” Moses Mendez, a professed admirer of Thomson, published The Seasons in 1751, and a few years later The Squire of Dames, which latter in particular shows a close study and no tepid appreciation of Spenser. In 1754 appeared that very important critical study, Thomas Warton’s Observations on the Faery Queene. 12. Iliad, II, 22. Leaf and some scholars read ‘oulos,’ ‘baneful,’ Autenrieth-Keep. Pope translates, “the flatt’ring Dream.” 13. Letters of Horace Walpole, Toynbee, 1904, Vol. VI, pp. 181-3 14. Chateaubriand et son groupe, t. I, p. 89. 15. Samuel Jackson Pratt (who wrote chiefly under the name Courtney Melmoth) in his Family Secrets, Literary and Domestic, 5 vols., 1797, has a disquisition, The use and abuse of the ancient romance, Chapter XLVI, Vol. I, pp. 359-70 (see also the two following chapters), which is of considerable interest, and in which the very proper praise is significant. 16. It is worth noting that in Mrs. Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (acted in 1687), 4to, 1687, II, 3, some splendid Masking Habits are described as “à la Gothic and Uncommune.” A little later we have: “Enter Charmante and Cinthio, dress’d in their Gothic Habits.”

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darkness. He enters to grasp a death-cold hand, which he severs with one stroke of his sabre. Mysterious armed figures menace him, and he sees a hideous chevalier “thrusting forwards the bloody stump of an arm.” Eventually he gains a far chamber where a lady in a shroud and black veil arises from a coffin. As he kisses her the horrid enchantment dissolves, and he finds himself set at a banquet in a splendid room, when the lady thanks him as her deliverer. Here the fragment ends. The opening is, as I have said, a powerful piece of work and grue, but the story rapidly loses, and the wakening kiss with its reminiscences of La Belle au Bois Dormant is utterly incongruous, bringing the whole structure to the ground. We are not with Amadis and Esplandian now.

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17. Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Toynbee, 1904, Vol. XI, p. 113. Miss Aikin had visited Strawberry Hill on June 14th, 1774. “She desired to see the Castle of Otranto,” and, says Walpole, “I let her see all the antiquities of it.” On April 8th, 1778, Walpole, in a letter to Mason, remarked, “Mrs. Barbut’s Fragment was excellent,” but, as he was not even at the pains to learn the lady’s correct name, he is hardly to be relied upon as regards the authorship. Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Toynbee, 1904, Vol. IX, p. 217, where the footnote is slightly inaccurate, Sir Bertrand not Don Bertrand.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

Widely considered one of the most significant poets and critics in the English Romantic movement, Coleridge is best known for the poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” and “Christabel,” and one volume of criticism, Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (1817). In 1796 Coleridge met the poet William Wordsworth, with whom he had corresponded casually for several years, and in 1798 they collaborated on Lyrical Ballads, a volume of poetry that was recognized in the twentieth century as the first literary document of English Romanticism. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the tale of a seaman who kills an albatross, intertwines reality and fantasy as well as a variety of religious and supernatural images to depict a moving spiritual journey of doubt, renewal, and eventual redemption. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” was published with a note explaining the strange circumstances of its composition: Coleridge wrote that he fell asleep while reading an account of how the Chinese emperor Kubla Khan had ordered the building of a palace within a walled garden. Three hours later, Coleridge awoke and began to write down the several hundred lines which he claimed to have composed during his sleep. However, he found that the rest of the poem had disappeared from his mind. In a later note appended to the text, he added that his dream was induced by opium and that it was “a sort of reverie.” Though Coleridge himself dismissed “Kubla Khan” as a “psychological experiment,” the poem is now considered a forerunner of the work of the Symbolists and Surrealists in its presentation of the unconscious. In Coleridge’s other poetic fragment, “Christabel,” he combined exotic images with Gothic romance to create an atmosphere of terror and to treat themes of evil and guilt in a setting pervaded by supernatural elements. Most critics now contend that Coleridge’s inability to sustain the poem’s eerie mood prevented him from completing it.

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AMERICAN GOTHIC LOUIS S. GROSS (ESSAY DATE 1989) SOURCE: Gross, Louis S. “The Pathology of History.” In Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to Day of the Dead, pp. 25-36. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989. In the following essay, Gross illustrates the unique character of American Gothic literature and differentiates it from European Gothic literature.

Gothic narrative has always looked backward; the past is its beginning and end. When Horace Walpole erected his literary monument The Castle of Otranto in 1764, he established the Gothic as a genre dependent on notions of the European past—very much part of the ideological temper of his time. In that conflict between the self-creation of what is called the Age of Reason and the old “dark” days of superstition and corruption, the Gothic chose the romance of the past. In Walpole’s time, the word “Gothic” denoted the crude, barbarous, and medieval, just those attributes proper English folk attributed to old Catholic Europe. Walpole embraced these disdainful labels and, free from the prevailing aesthetic notions, G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

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imagined a past fully to his liking. His estate, Strawberry Hill, was a later attempt to objectify that imaginative creation, but Otranto’s legacy has been more far-reaching. For bourgeois English readers of the Gothic, the genre allowed a glimpse of the mystery and corruption of the past fully congruent with their political and religious biases. Because these tales of oppression and terror are set in other places and other times, English readers need not have directly applied these fears to their own time, a safety valve perhaps necessary in an England uneasily viewing the revolutions in France and America. In any case, the early Gothic novel became associated with a distant historical setting and an antiquarian sensibility.

English Gothic novel is not so much historical as scenic. And American Gothic narrative? Lukacs discusses only one bona fide American historical novelist—James Fenimore Cooper. He sees Cooper’s Leatherstocking Saga as a type of the Scott novel: “Cooper portrays the enormous historical tragedy of those early colonizers who emigrated from England to preserve their freedom, but who themselves destroy this freedom by their own deeds in America.”2

Not surprisingly, America has not been an emotionally resonant setting for English Gothicism; the barbarity of America is not tempered by a past redolent of sweet corruption. For the American Gothicist, however, our past is the focus of intense emotional reflection. While Gothic narrative in America may be as formulaic as in Europe, our approach to time and setting is strikingly different. American gothicists do not remove their characters to Italy, Spain, France, or the other centers of English Gothic mystery; they shriek and faint in familiar surroundings and near the readers’ own time. Certain periods have a special attraction—the colonial and revolutionary—but the escape to the past has not as far to go; history constrains the American Gothic as much as it feeds it. What this means for American Gothic narrative is that we have a unique ability to review our past within the Gothic mode. Our native literature was formed at the time when the Gothic romance tradition held readers in thrall, and unlike English readers who turned the Gothic vision outward to another people and another age, our Gothic turns inward to illuminate its own people and their age. American Gothic narrative, then, is less romantic and more disturbing than its English models.

Cooper’s designation as historical novelist is supported by Robert Clark in History, Ideology and Myth in American Fiction, 1832-52. Clark also writes, “One of the principal reasons for offering a novel as historical is to remove from fiction the taint of the lie. The tendency to collapse history into romance deprived the author of the ability to claim that his fiction was above reproach because true to the known record, . . . the American novelist was not eager to call himself a romancer, the more so since ‘the romance’ carried all the pejorative significations of falseness and deceit which the word has conveyed from Johnson’s day to this.”3 For Clark, Cooper considered himself a historian not a romancer. Yet we know from Cooper’s own words that he considered America “thin” in both historical and romantic substance. Alan Holder writes, “Though he complained in Notions of the Americans that there were ‘no annals for the historian’ in our country, and ‘no obscure functions for the writer of romance,’ he attempted to create significant images of the American past.”4 He created the images by claiming the prerogatives of both the historian and romancer; the elements of the “known record” and the “deceit” of the imaginative recreation merge in the act of inscription so that the individual character’s personal history becomes a metaphor for national history.5 When the “deceitful” elements of the plot are distinctly Gothic, one discovers a radically different way of reading a “historical” narrative. Take the example of Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln (1825).

Is the Gothic novel but a type of the historical novel? George Lukacs dismisses the idea: “In the most famous ‘historical novel’ of the eighteenth century, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, history is likewise treated as mere costumery: it is only the curiosities and oddities of the milieu that matter, not the artistically faithful image of a concrete historical epoch. What is lacking in the so-called historical novel before Sir Walter Scott is precisely the specifically historical, that is, derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age.”1 By such a definition, the

Lionel Lincoln is one of the darkest portraits of national identity ever painted, particularly striking as a work to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. It was to be the first in a series of stories on the Revolution.6 Cooper seems to have been in financial and emotional distress at the time of its inception: hounded by creditors, suffering from digestive disorders, recovering from an attack of sunstroke, and mourning the recent death of his son Fenimore. While these personal sorrows are reflected in the work’s agonized father-

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As in the similarly uneasy preface to Brockden Brown’s Wieland, the author of Lionel Lincoln speaks in his preface of his calm and steady character, his disdain for spookery: “He is indebted to no garrulous tale-teller for beguiling the long winter evenings; in ghosts he has no faith; he never had a vision in his life, and he sleeps too soundly to dream.”8 Yet tales, ghosts, visions, and dreams are at the heart of his novel, and the complacent author who wishes “to live in peace and hopes to die in the fear of God” (LL, 211) is also present in scenes of savagery and despair. The double voice of the Gothicist who attempts to distance himself from his vision is as much a structural principle here as the disjunction between documented historical fact and the imaginative metaphors of familial and national identity that give the work its uniquely Gothic view of history. The novel tells the story of Lionel Lincoln, a young American who has lived for many years in England and who, in 1775, returns to his natal town of Boston as a major in the British army. The Boston to which he returns is in the first stages of revolutionary insurrection. The young man’s attempts to understand the land he has left and his search for family ties are woven together in a tapestry of forbidding gloom and violence. The plot is structured around a series of oppositions, the first of which involves Great Britain and the American colony. The British are presented as wary soldiers, unable to fathom the depth of the colonialist anger. Their first sight of Boston shows “sullen ships” and the “broad, silky folds of the flag of England” covering a mob of Americans plotting violent revolution. From the opening passages on, Cooper paints a picture of political and moral instability, where the fear is located in the very real possibility of violence and destruction. This is the perception of the British soldiers. The colonials also see a dark picture of oppression and violence. Neither side is presented as morally superior, nor is Cooper intent on giving the reader a civics lesson. These people are determined adversaries in a deadly struggle. They have a clear allegiance to a cause and therefore are

not material for Gothic transformation. Instead, they form the backdrop of reality upon which the historical novel depends; the Gothic hero, Lionel Lincoln, and the mystery surrounding him serve the transforming needs of Gothic narrative. While the political/historical dimension of this novel is concerned with the conflict between the mother country and her rebellious child, the personal/historical dimension involves a young man born in the uneasy state of national duality. He describes himself as an American “by birth, but an Englishman by habit and education” (LL, 213). His role in returning to Boston is as representative of the oppressor and defender of those “habits” he has adopted. The people he meets may be categorized by their response to the call for revolution. Cooper presents a wide-ranging group of Americans, some bent on freedom at any cost, others desiring a more decorous appeal for justice, still others content to remain British subjects. All are involved in a momentous historical decision, but it is only for Lionel Lincoln that personal and national identity are at stake; he is the one for whom this return signals a desire for understanding how the past affects the present. In him, political and familial identification are made to take the same course, and it is through him that the Gothic vision brings the narrative’s oppositions together. The Gothic components of this narrative are dependent on the mysterious figure of a deranged old man named Ralph, who haunts Lionel as intensely as any ghost one might meet in this genre. He first confronts Lionel on board the ship bringing British soldiers to Boston, and is immediately associated with the rebels’ hatred of British occupation: “Will the day ever arrive, . . . when those flags shall be lowered, never to rise again in this hemisphere?” (LL, 213). Ralph also introduces the theme of familial identity when he castigates Lionel’s description of his English “habits and education”: “Accursed be the habits, and neglected the education, which would teach a child to forget its parentage!” (LL, 213). These two themes, the historical birth of a nation and the birth of personal identity, surge through the work, and it is Ralph’s haunting presence that places Lionel Lincoln at the center of this movement. Lionel’s next meeting with Ralph is as eerie a Gothic encounter as Cooper was to write. Lionel is searching out the meeting places of the revolutionaries and is led by the half-witted boy Job to Beacon Hill:

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son relationship, Cooper also devised an intensely researched historical background for the story, asserting that the battle scenes were “as faithfully described as is possible to have been done by one who was not an eyewitness of those important events.”7 This documented history and its struggle with Cooper’s overlay of Gothic plot and vision give the novel a nightmarish, and wholly American, sense of dread.

the fires near the revolutionary camps and seems to live for revenge against England that seems as personal as it is political. In short, he is neither heroic nor kind nor respectable, and this is the character Cooper chooses as the leader of the American struggle for independence. Much of the criticism directed at the book by early critics reveals the uneasiness with which Ralph was viewed as a leader of the American Revolution.9 He is far from the idealized hero a country would embrace.

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Job shook his head threateningly as he looked up and said, “Don’t let Ralph hear you say anything ag’in liberty!” “Ralph, who is he lad? your genius! Where do you keep the invisible, that there is danger of his overhearing what I say?” “He’s up there in the foot,” said Job, pointing significantly toward the foot of the beacon, which a dense volume of vapor was enwrapping, probably attracted by the tall post that supported the grade. Lionel gazed at the smoky column for a moment, when the mists began to dissolve, and amid their evolutions he beheld the dim figure of his aged fellow-passenger. The old man was still clad in gray, which harmonized so singularly with the mists as to impart a look almost ethereal to his wasted form. (LL, 230-31)

Ralph’s speech in this scene also places him directly in the tradition of Gothic seers: “Come hither, Lionel Lincoln, to the foot of this beacon, where you may gather warnings, which, if properly heeded, will guide you through many and great dangers unharmed” (LL, 231). Lionel indeed recognizes Ralph as almost “a being of another world.” The warning Ralph gives is to avoid the places where the revolutionaries meet; as a soldier of His Majesty, Lionel is an enemy to the cause. He also introduces the metaphor of the parentchild relationship as a metaphor for the ruler and the ruled in the following exchange with Ralph: “We are the subjects of one king; children who own a common parent.” “I will not reply that he has proved himself an unnatural father,” said the old man calmly” (LL, 231). Thus the twin themes of national and familial identity are woven together for Lionel and the reader by the Gothic vision of the narrative. Ralph’s haunting stature in this work is reinforced by his function as the voice of memory and recollection: “Look at me, . . . I have seen most of this flourishing country a wilderness; my recollection goes back into those periods when the savage, and the beast of the forest, contended with our fathers for much of that soil which now supports its hundreds of thousands in plenty; and my time is to be numbered, not in years but in ages. For such a being, think you there can be yet many months, or weeks, or even days in store?” (LL, 244). In remembering America’s past, he embodies Lionel’s future national identity. Yet this voice of American rebellion is unequivocally sinister and frightening. For most of the plot Lionel and his friends think Ralph a madman, a dangerous lunatic. He is often glimpsed by the red glare of

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Such criticism fails to consider the Gothic vision of the work. Ralph exists as a haunting figure for Lionel; he is important to the text only as he reflects the turmoil of America on the brink of revolution. Lionel himself is the quintessential Gothic hero: young, unruffled, rather complacent. He is not unsympathetic to the plight of the colonists, he is merely unable to comprehend the desire for separation, perhaps because he has so much attached himself to England and what it represents. He has family in Boston, staunch loyalists all, but does not concern himself with what Ralph calls the “nightly convulsion” to come: “‘I cannot admit the signs of the times to be quite so portentous as your fears would make them,’ said Lionel, smiling a little proudly” (LL, 244). It is through this young man’s education into the chaos of his world that the novel accomplishes the integration of the Gothic and historical modes. The Boston to which Lionel returns is obviously an externalized city of night, illuminated by revolutionaries carrying lamps to secret meetings with the air of a witches’ sabbath about them. Like his literary cousin Robin in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Lionel is a deeply divided character, given to following the lead of his companions. The reason for Ralph’s hold on Lionel is just that sense of extreme suggestiveness or instability that mark a Gothic protagonist. It is through the blurring of distinctions between the imaginary frightful and the actual frightful that Lionel turns a personal identity crisis into a national one. The novel’s most famous scene is a perfect illustration of Cooper’s blending of the Gothic and historical modes. Late one evening Lionel, out on patrol, finds himself at Cobb’s Hill, where the English have stationed their cannons by a graveyard. Lionel moves through the mist-shrouded area only to come upon Job: “Job loves to come up among the graves, before the cocks crow; they say the dead walk when living men sleep.”

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“Tis sinful to ask them many questions, and such as you do not should be made in the Holy Name, . . .” “Hush!” said Lionel—what noise is that?” . . . . . “There’s no noise but the moaning of the wind in the bay, or the sea tumbling on the beaches of the islands.” “Tis neither,” said Lionel; “I heard the low hum of a hundred voices, or my ears have played me falsely.” “May the spirits speak to each other,” said the lad—“they say their voices are like the rushing winds.” Lionel passed his hand over his brow, and endeavored to recover the tone of his mind, which had been strangely disordered by the solemn manner of his companion, and walked slowly from the spot, closely attended by the silent changeling. (LL, 298)

In this remarkable passage, the distant hum of warfare and the voices of the dead mingle in the “disordered” imagination of a young soldier revisiting the places of his youth. The concreteness of the historical setting and the imaginative evocation of fearful mystery are here drawn together so that our perception of the past is inextricably linked with our expectations of the Gothic: in effect, the act of meditating on the past becomes a Gothic exercise. Another passage that illustrates Cooper’s recasting of the historical novel occurs in chapter 15 of Lionel Lincoln. Here, Lionel, unable to shake off the fear of his visit to Cobb’s Hill, has a nightmare: When the heavy sleep of morning fell upon his senses, visions of the past and future mingled with wild confusion in the dreams of the youthful soldier. The form of his father stood before him. . . . While his heart was warming at the sight, the figure melted away, and was succeeded by fantastic phantoms, which appeared to dance among the graves on Cobb’s Hill, led along in these gambols, which partook of the ghastly horrors of the dead, by Job Pray, who glided among the tombs like a being of another world. Sudden and loud thunder then burst upon them, and the shadows fled into their secret places, from whence he could see . . . some glassy eyes and spectral faces, peering out upon him, as if conscious of the power they possessed to chill the blood of the living. . . . Lionel arose from his bed, . . . in a vain effort to shake off the images that had haunted his slumbers.

“Ha!” he muttered to himself, “I have been dreaming by halves—these are but the sounds of no fancied tempest, but cannon, speaking most plainly to the soldier!” (LL, 299)

In this dream passage we see the way in which the “real” place and circumstance of revolutionary Boston become a part of the “imaginative” fears of Lionel Lincoln: the personal remembrance of the father mingles with the dead on Cobb’s Hill who scatter at the report of British cannon. The weight of the past is an oppressive force in Gothic narrative. Characters either are made to suffer the results of old sins or curses (The Castle of Otranto, Wieland, The House of the Seven Gables, The Marble Faun, Poltergeist) or to replicate the lives lived in some shadowy past (Dracula, The Turn of the Screw, Vertigo, Psycho, Marnie, Salem’s Lot). In either case, the people and events of the past cling to the minds of these characters, enveloping them in guilt and madness. Critics have long supposed the Gothic to be a genre marked by Oedipal fears stemming from the political and religious upheavals of the eighteenth century.1 0 The revolt against God and King established by the American and French revolutions triggered tremendous repressive fears about the Father’s power, and the exhilaration at overthrowing patriarchal figures met with an equally intense sense of fear, shame, and guilt at such revolt. This dual emotion of attraction and revulsion is a familiar one in the Gothic novel where revolt, whether manifested as a turning to evil or a straining of the limits of acceptable social structure, is punished swiftly, even if such revolt is justifiable in moral terms. This equivocal view regarding revolution and revolutionary figures denies the possibility of reading Gothic fiction as purely politically subversive. Aside from the fact that the Gothic does not affirm anything and, therefore, does not posit social change as the answer to social ills, its sense of suffering and dissolution as punishment for demonic transformation undercuts its prescience regarding the causes of revolt. Much of European Gothic narrative is set in the medieval period precisely because it is perceived as a time of political and religious oppression. The falsity of such a perception in historical terms has little to do with its resonance in imaginative terms. Likewise, the Victorian period has become synonymous with a Gothic view because it is perceived as a period of repression, guilt, and injustice. This view has become so emotionally potent that modern Gothic narratives use the Victorian setting as shorthand representation for the Gothic vision:

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“And would you hold communion with the dead, then?”

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Sweeney Todd, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Mysteries of Winterthurn, and The Elephant Man are only a few. Cooper’s Ralph is, then, fulfilling a proper Gothic function in this novel: the demonically transformed man who haunts the narrative and is marked by suffering and despair. That he seems to be the figurehead of the Boston revolt is perfectly in keeping with the Gothic’s exhilaration in and fear of revolt. Ralph not only externalizes the spirit of revolution, he holds the key to the mystery of Lionel Lincoln’s past. Lionel has returned to Boston filled with longing for the father who disappeared many years before. No one will give him information except to say that his father returned to England and was not heard of again. Only Ralph takes much interest in the young man, sinister though much of it is. This interest is explained late in the novel when Ralph is revealed as the father Lionel has awaited. Ralph’s unmasking reveals his lost years as spent incarcerated in an English madhouse, put there by the scheming family whose fortunes he did not add to his. His escape from the asylum enabled him to travel back to America. What is so interesting about this typical Gothic plot device is the equation Ralph makes between his imprisonment by English keepers and America’s “imprisonment” by Great Britain. Just as he has thrown off the chains of bondage, so he exhorts the colonists to do so. In other words, his patriotic stance is an extension of his dementia, for the years of imprisonment have robbed him of his reason. He also manages to sway Lionel’s English convictions by threatening to tell him all: “‘Thou shalt have all thou askest, Lionel Lincoln, and more,’ returned Ralph . . . ‘provided thou will swear eternal hatred to that country and those laws, by which an innocent and unoffending man can be leveled with the beasts of the field, and be made to rave even at his Maker, in the bitterness of his sufferings.’ ‘More than that—ten thousand times more than that, will I swear—I will league with this rebellion—. . .’” (LL, 397). This vow of hatred and revenge is Ralph’s legacy to Lionel, and his gradual movement to a double allegiance is halted only by the arrival of his father’s keeper from England who promptly engages the raving Lincoln in a fight during which the old man again analogizes his imprisonment with American rebellion: “‘Vengeance is holy!’ cried the maniac, bursting into a shout of horrid laughter at his triumph, and shaking his gray locks till they flowed in wild confusion around his glowing eyeballs; ‘Urin and thrummin are the words of

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glory! Liberty is the shout! Die, damned dog! die like the fiends in darkness, and leave freedom to the air!’” (LL, 405). Ralph is stabbed by the jailor and dies near the body of his bastard son Job, who has been murdered by English soldiers. Ralph Lincoln’s final moments are counterpoint to the continuing battle raging in the streets of Boston, where the Americans are about to force a British retreat. The mystery of Lionel’s identity resolved, he immediately retreats from his sympathetic position to the colonials and plans a return home to the England that shaped him and imprisoned his father. The final passages relate the thriving fortunes of Lionel and his wife in England where, we are told, they lived in “sweetest concord” till the “eruption of the French Revolution.” As at the conclusion of Wieland, characters flee America, scene of mysterious revelations and upheavals, to take refuge in the bosom of the mother country and to make reparation for having doubted her. While America is singularly lacking in the rich supernatural beings of the European tradition— werewolf, vampire, zombie—we do have the complex figure of the Indian, once thought a race of demons, and the haunting legacy of the Salem witch trials. From Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Arthur Miller, the blood of witches has nurtured many an American tale of terror. Of those narratives set in the Salem of that time, Esther Forbes’s A Mirror for Witches (1928) is perhaps the most extraordinary. The work is presented as an account of the progress of a young witch, told by a narrator living near the time of the actual events. Less well known than Hawthorne’s explorations of this phenomenon, Forbes’s novel is equally harrowing in its depiction of colonial America, and subtle in exposing the societal mechanism necessary to sustain an ideology. The work is given its unique style by the narrative voice. The narrator is convinced that witches did exist, and to support this begins his chronicle with a list of examples “To Show Doll Bilby not alone among Women in her preference for Evil. The Cases of Ry, Goose, Leda, Danae, etc., cited.”1 1 The narrative voice is at once established as an alien one, deliberately toying with the reader’s associations with other witch chroniclers like Cotton Mather by maintaining a believing tone in the narrative that is often undercut by an irony of the author’s making. While Esther Forbes is certainly not supporting the belief in witches, she is quite successful in creating a narrator who does, and the subtle tension between the chroni-

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The sly hints of Forbes’s irony are seldom though significantly felt through the narrative. An “estimable church woman” falls from a ladder and believes it is a trick of the devil. Why was she on the ladder? She was spying on her serving girl and a male servant in the hayloft. A villager wishes to marry his son to a wealthy woman thought by some to be a witch. The old man ignores the dangers: “He cared more that his son should have a great property in this world than that his son should be saved for the next. He was not an evil man, for he was a deacon in the Church” (M, 16-17). These and other touches of skepticism give the narrative a complexity that disturbs as much as any of the terrors of the plot. The conjunction of historical recreation and modern nightmare prevents the reader from emotionally dissociating himself from the text. The participants in this historical pageant are disaffected English men and women, many of them religious outcasts seeking personal liberty in the New Land. Throughout the text, Forbes indicates the essentially alienated feelings of these early Americans towards their new home, a land full of unknown terror. They are still tied to the folk traditions of their past, and ruled by a strong sense of sin within the community. While a number of these characters are stereotypically dour, hypocritical Puritan types, others offer a more “reasoned” and compassionate voice. Basically, the characters may be grouped by their reactions to three symbols of mystery and power: the forest, the Indian, and Doll Bilby. The forest is a place of dark evil for the village, and as the dwelling of the Indian, a habitation for Satan and his followers: To the west, beyond the rough pastures, and too close for a wholesome peace of mind, was a forest of a size and terror such as no Englishman could conceive of unless he had actually seen it. It stretched without break farther than man could imagine, and the trees of it were greater than the

masts of an admiral or the piers of a cathedral. Yet it was always a green and gloomy night in this forest, and over all was silence, unbreakable. Many thought the tawny savages who lived within were veritable devils, and that somewhere within this vastness, Satan himself might be found. (M, 19)

The few villagers who venture into this transforming haunted spot are the object of social ostracism: Goody Greene’s talents as an herbalist gain her widespread enmity because she “associates herself with the heathen tawny savages and thus learns arts—doubtless often evil arts—from them” (M, 19). That Greene’s respect and affection for the Indians permits her these unusual liberties, no one considers. Instead, she is reported to the Church elders who tell her, “it is better for a woman to keep her own house than to go abroad through the woods alone and no one knows on what errand” (M, 17). The voice of reason in the novel belongs to Zacharias Zelley, a middle-aged Englishman come to Cowan Corners to preach the Gospel in a nonconformist fashion. Zelley’s response to the fear of the forest and its Indians is to offer his view of God in the New World: “‘For,’ he said, ‘we left the Devil behind in England. Seek God in the heart of this majestic and awful forest—not the Devil. . . . Let us leave him there in the Old England, but in the New keep our eyes pure and open against the coming of the Lord” (M, 8). As it turns out, Zelley’s theology is no more able to protect him from the terrors of the plot than the superstitious folk he opposes. Greene and Zelley are representative of the individual in conflict with the group perception, and as such could either be visionaries or outlaws. They are branded the latter, not only because they do not see the Devil’s hoofprints under every leaf, but because of their affection for Doll Bilby, the locus of demonic transforming power in this text. Doll is everything the Puritan fears: wild, natural, uninhibited, sensual, and foreign. Alone of the people in Cowan Corners, she is a European: her parents were charged with witchcraft in their native Brittany. Our introduction to her associates her with social ostracism and religious intolerance. As her parents burn at the stake, a compassionate English tradesman carriers her in his arms to comfort her. His decision to raise the child as his own is met by a curse flung by the officiating priest: “Take the child be gone. She was born of a witch-woman and will grow to witchcraft and do much harm—but in England among the heretics. Be gone.”1 2 The priest’s prediction does, in fact, come true but more as an illustration of the ways

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cler and the imaginative artist is established early in the text: “A few years later, Christie Goose, a single woman of upwards forty years, suddenly flew lunatic—and that upon the Lord’s Day. Then she did confess that each night and every night, the Devil, wickedly assuming the shape Mr. Oates, God’s minister at Crumplehorn, Oxon., came to her through the window. This fact amazed Crumplehorn, for Goose was of all women most pious, and had sat for years in humble prayerfulness at the feet of Mr. Oates. Some were astonished that even a devil should find need for this same Goose, who was of hideous aspect” (M, 28).

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in which ideology depends on the internalizing of oppression than as prophecy. The strangeness of Doll Bilby’s looks and conduct make her an object of loathing for the people of Cowan Corners. Forbes makes clear the extent to which jealousy and sexual desire color their reaction to Doll. Her wild black hair, shining black eyes, and lithe shape draw both the wandering eyes of the young men and the reproachful ones of the young women. Doll’s stepmother’s jealousy over Mr. Bilby’s love for Doll sets her against the child from the start. Much of the evidence against Doll comes from Hannah Bilby, whose hysterical pregnancies and neurasthenia are attributed to Doll’s malefic powers. Her sexual attractiveness also contributes to her legend. She is seen in the company of a large black bull who roams the fields. This symbol of desire especially haunts the dreams of Titus Thumb, Doll’s suitor and enforced fiancé. His desire for Doll is a horror to him, at once drawing her to him and confirming his belief in her demonic nature. Just as Hannah projects onto Doll her jealousy and bitterness, so Titus makes Doll a monster of sinful lust. In fact, for much of the text Doll is only a receptacle for the fears and desires of the villagers. The title, A Mirror for Witches, while ostensibly referring to the glass into which Doll is seen staring, actually refers to Doll as a mirror-image of those good citizens of Cowan Corners whose sacrificial offering she becomes. Doll is also associated with the forest and the Indian, first by her friendship with Goody Greene and, secondly, by her habit of taking solitary walks through the forest. Her relationship with Greene is the first major sign that she is submitting to the group perception of herself. She hopes that Greene will tell her tales of witchcraft and evil, so she might know how a witch acts. She frequents the forest hoping to meet the Devil and hear his will for her. Doll’s pathetic attempts to play what she comes to believe is her role only serve to convince the village that she is indeed a witch. One of the tropes of Gothic narrative that Forbes exploits here is the suffocating inability to be seen as the victim when it is against the wishes of the characters representing authority (for example, the police chief in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street [1985] who will not believe his daughter’s terror at being chased by “the boogeyman”). Her delight in the mystery and dark beauty of the forest—just those qualities that make it stand out against the drab village—lead her to the narrative’s central incident, Doll’s vision in the forest (M, 63).

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Much of Doll’s confusion about her witch nature revolves around why she receives no sign from Satan marking her his own, another mirror inversion of the believer’s anguish at the silence of God. Late in the narrative, Doll, bereft of the one kind face she knows, that of her dead father, spends the night deep in the forest. Here she has a vision which the narrator acknowledges alternates between wakefulness and sleep and is, therefore, of ambiguous nature. The vision includes manifestations of supernatural folklore, friends, goblins, vampires and the like but also images of Doll’s past. She awakens from this vision fully accepting her demonism: “She called upon her Father in Hell, thanking him that he had made manifest to her visible proof of his greatness. . . . She called upon all that vast host of evil things, blessed them, and promised to serve them” (M, 9). At this point, Doll has no alternative but to live out the fearful prophecy of the priest at Mont Höel and her role in the drama of life in Cowan Corners. While the bleakness of Doll’s tale is unsparingly presented, the text does posit one faint glimpse of light in the picture: the possibility of love to alter circumstances. The one road of escape from the horrors of Mont Höel is that of simple affection, and in this particular text, love for the Other. Jared Bilby’s love for Doll gives her, and the reader, practically the only glimpse of sustaining affection in Cowan Corners. Bilby finds Doll a wild, frightened little creature, scorned by all, but his kindness transforms her: “The captain coaxed and petted her, urged her to eat, and quieted her with his hands. So by love he restored her to humanity” (M, 12). In the Bilby home, where she is treated to blows and neglect, Mr. Bilby alone dares to kiss “a wide hobgoblin mouth which many a Christian would fear to kiss” (M, 72). This last hope of escape from the horror of cruelty and ignorance is given a particular voice by Zacharias Zelley: “In his praying Mr. Zelley (so it was observed) twice asked with particular passion that the old hatreds, the old jealousies, and the old, cruel superstitions might be left behind, and that in the new land, the spirit of man might break forth as a chick breaks the egg” (M, 19). With the death of Mr. Bilby, however, such hope disappears. Ironically, it is Bilby’s sudden death that provides the charge upon which Doll is tried for witchcraft. The pathetically weak hope of redeeming love is also evident in Doll’s relations with two other kindly characters, Goody Greene and Mr. Zelley. Greene is another outsider, a strange old woman whose cordial relations with the Indian marks her

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In the passage describing Doll’s trial, the narrator shows us the Meeting House, the community’s center of justice and righteousness, the holy place set against the evil forest: By the windows and doores of the Meeting House were nailed the grim and grinning heads of wolves, freshly slain. In the stocks before the Meeting House were two Quaker women, the one in an extremity of despair and cold (for there was some ice on the ground) and the other brazen, screaming out profanities and laughing in her disgrace. Upon the roof-walk paced back and forth Captain Buzzey of the train-band troop, beating his drum in great long rolls, summoning all to come and worship. (M, 52-53)

One of Forbes’s slyest touches, this passage indicates the intolerance and ferocity of the Cowan Corners society. Zelley’s humanity is set against this cruelty. Instead of listening to the discussions in the noonhouse, he went out of doors and stood before the evil women in the stocks, exhorting them in the name of Christ Jesus to repent and be forgiven. Theodate Gookin, a stout child, mocked them and pelted them with small apples. This action of the child enraged Mr. Zelley more than had the foul blasphemies of the Quakers. He roughly ordered Theodate to lay off his warm overcoat. This he spread kindly over the back of the most insufferable of the blasphemers. By which act of charity, he stilled her lying tongue. . . . (M, 145-46)

For Doll herself, love is a fierce determination to force Satan to reveal himself. When she comes upon an escaped convict in the forest, she takes him for her Master, and surrenders herself to him. By this time convinced of her demonic nature, she awaits the birth of her demon-child and the replication of her own childhood. She had embraced her role with passionate engagement and “wanted no other God than Lucifer and no Heaven, . . . Hell was her true home—her Paradise.”1 3 Guarded by the only villager to risk it, a fiercely ugly old vagabond of indeterminate gender, Doll dies in a visionary ecstasy of welcoming demons. The child is born dead. The triumph of Forbes’s novel is its relentless revelation of the construction and defense of ideology by terror. This glimpse into the American past is as historically “correct” as one might expect from a member of the Antiquarian society, a woman deemed “a novelist who wrote like a historian and a historian who wrote like a novelist.”1 4 What she has given us is a text set in the period which, for Americans, fulfills the emotional function of the Middle Ages for British Gothicists, a time perceived as defined by darkness and moral corruption. A Mirror for Witches is certainly a historical novel of the kind Lukacs discusses—its characters are what they are in response to their time—but what the novel most impresses upon us is the implication of our Puritan ideology for the Other—in this work for women, people of color, aliens, sexual marginals, and nonconformists of all kinds. In revealing a fierce terrorism at the heart of America’s founding ideology, Forbes makes history itself the bearer of sickness that she obviously means us to relate to our own time. In this, she continues the vision of Lionel Lincoln and other American Gothic narratives that see history as a long nightmare from which we wake only fitfully and tremble.

Notes 1. George Lukacs, The Historical Novel (Lincoln and London: The University of Nebraska Press, repr. 1983), p. 19. 2. The Historical Novel, p. 65.

Zelley’s charity does not save him. The kind man is destroyed by his association with Doll, first by her hysterical assertions of her witch power and second, by the knowledge that the town now suspects him of evildoing; later in the text we are told that Zelley was tried in the Salem witchhunts. The paralyzing realization of his helplessness leaves him doubting everything he has lived for and the God he has worshipped.

3. Robert Clark, History, Ideology and Myth in American Fiction, 1823-52 (London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1984), p. 48. 4. Alan Holder, The Imagined Past: Portrayals of Our History in Modern American Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), p. 13. 5. The Leatherstocking Saga is an example of the technique in which the journey of Natty Bumpo is a metaphorical reflection of America’s development.

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as evil: “The Indians venerated her, calling her ‘White Mother’ and ‘Moon-Woman.’ She went even into the great forest with more safety than any man. She was loving towards these peoples and had much traffic with them, . . .” (M, 51). Doll is responsible for even greater hostility to Greene from the villagers; the old woman’s kindness does not exempt her from the Salem hangings. Zacharias Zelley is a more complex character; he is the narrative’s Gothic protagonist, the man utterly transformed by his brush with the Other. Apart from his significance as the voice of belief in a new order, Zelley is revealed as a “good” man by a number of small details, the most telling of which is his response to the Quakers.

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6. Background on the composition of Lionel Lincoln from “Historical Introduction” to the edition of the novel published in 1984 by the State University of New York, Albany Press, pp. xv-xl. 7. “Historical Introduction,” p. 211. 8. James Fenimore Cooper, Lionel Lincoln (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, Publisher, 1893), p. 210. All subsequent text references, designated by LL, are to this edition. 9. See pp. xxiv-xxv of “Historical Introduction” for critical commentary by Cooper’s contemporaries. We must also remember that Cooper was, in political terms, an ardent supporter of Jeffersonian democracy—at least in his waking hours. What we find in Lionel Lincoln is the nightmare equivalent of the Jeffersonian dream. 10. See Devendra Varma’s The Gothic Flame (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966) and David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (London: Longman Group, Ltd., 1980) for discussion of this theme. 11. Esther Forbes, A Mirror for Witches (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1969), p. 5. All subsequent text references, designated by M, are to this edition. 12. Forbes’s writing in this passage is obviously a homage to Hawthorne and “Young Goodman Brown,” though that earlier story is less concerned with a political view of history than a glimpse of the terrors of radical subjectivity. 13. American Women Writers, ed. Lina Mainiero (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1968), v. 2, p. 63. 14. [Obituary, New York Times, August 13, 1967, p. 80.]

ERIC SAVOY (ESSAY DATE 1998) SOURCE: Savoy, Eric. “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic.” In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, pp. 3-19. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. In the following essay, Savoy discusses various literary theories and analyses of the Gothic in American literature. “Think of him,” she said, placing a finger against the front-view portrait of the blond young man. “Think of those eyes. Coming toward you.” Then she pushed the pictures back into their envelope. “I wish you hadn’t shown me.” Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

A “theory” of gothic cultural production in the United States is necessarily invested in a poetics of terror—a tropics, a recurring turn of language. If such generally structuring turns are most strikingly conceptualized in particular moments, then this brief excerpt from Capote’s work suggests the multiple, inevitable, and even casual ways in which narrative might take a decidedly gothic turn. These chilling words are spoken by Marie Dewey—the wife of Alvin Dewey, an agent of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation—late in 1959 as she studies the photographs of two men

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who, without apparent motive, murdered a farm family “on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’” (3). While the photographs give a face, a human agency, to a crime whose horror lies in its absence of meaning and its distance from the rationally explicable, her discourse betrays the desire to situate the static image of the face in a narrative, a desire from which she immediately recoils. What is most striking in Marie Dewey’s language—what is most suggestive of the gothic turn—is her syntax of reiterated imperative. “Think of . . .” insists upon both the imaginative reconstruction of a historical event—a moment just prior to violent annihilation—and what might be called “being out there,” an intuitive, visceral knowledge of terrible affect that approaches the experiential. In the queerly hybrid “nonfiction novel” that Capote attempted in the writing of In Cold Blood, Marie Dewey’s brief appearance signifies both the act of reading “America” and the writerly turn toward the fascination of the fearful, a fascination that, she implies, ought not to be indulged but inexorably is. Her fleeting comments suggest that the gothic tendency in American culture is organized around the imperative to repetition, the return of what is unsuccessfully repressed, and, moreover, that this return is realized in a syntax, a grammar, a tropic field. Once instigated, Marie Dewey’s impulse to narrate the body that violates and the violated body can only escalate in the structure of haunting textual return: the photograph of Richard Hickock’s face, especially his eyes, gives her what might be colloquially called a “turn,” which is turned into a narrative obligation, which subsequently recurs in the rumor that Hickock bequeathed his eyes “‘to an eye doctor. Soon as they cut him down, this doctor’s gonna yank out his eyes and stick them in somebody else’s head’” (338). This final gothic turn provides a compositional vanishing point in which there is no vanishing; horrific history acquires a body, a face, a figure that recedes into futurity. The failure of repression and forgetting—a failure upon which the entire tradition of the gothic in America is predicated—will be complete in those conscious eyes. Such a return is not merely monstrous and unthinkable, it is uncanny. And the writing of the uncanny is the field—or, more precisely, the multivalent tendency—of American gothic, an imaginative requirement by which, as Leslie Fiedler pointed out, “the past, even dead, especially dead, could continue to work harm” (131).

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In the American scene, it may be that broad generalizations about the gothic—overshadowed as they are by the genealogical tracing of British and continental influences—have reached a limit of conceptual or explanatory usefulness, and further particularization is urgently required. Louis S. Gross is surely right to read the gothic as a “demonic history text” (2) in Redefining the American Gothic and to grasp its “common thread” as “the singularity and monstrosity of the Other: what the dominant culture cannot incorporate within itself, it must project outward onto this hated/desired figure” (90). However, this observation raises the question of how the project of narrating “Otherness”—which indeed is a “dominant” cultural mode—embodies a “figure” that it “cannot incorporate within itself.” I suggest that

the difficult task of such incorporation—of gesturing toward that which resists an explicit lexicon— has situated American gothic continuously in a tropic field that approaches allegory: the gothic is most powerful, and most distinctly American, when it strains toward allegorical translucency. Given the thinness, the blankness of the American historical past and much of the American landscape, allegory—which is not, properly speaking, a “figure” but which is supremely conducive to the ghostly figures that we commonly associate with gothic, particularly prosopopoeia—provided a tropic of shadow, a kind of Hawthornian “neutral territory” in which the actual is imbued with the darkly hypothetical, a discursive field of return and reiteration. It is, of course, the lesson of Melville that nothing is so terrible as nothingness itself, the absence of a coherently meaningful symbolic: it is precisely the semantic impoverishment of allegory, the haunting consequences of its refusal of transparency, that impelled American gothic’s narrativization of Otherness toward its insubstantial shadows, and vice versa. Like allegory, the gothic is a fluid tendency rather than a discrete literary “mode,” an impulse rather than a literary artifact. Such thinking seems to prompt Anne Williams’s refusal to consider the gothic—“a ‘something’ that goes beyond the merely literary”—as simply a genre, a tradition, or a set of conventions; rather, in asking “what noun would ‘Gothic’ appropriately modify,” she suggests the term “complex,” which denotes “an intersection of grammar, architecture and psychoanalysis” (23-24). A model of gothic “complexity” that tends toward allegory—and I shall have more to say about the particular figures that are generated by allegory—is a useful corollary to theories of the historiographical orientation of gothic narrative. “American gothic” does not exist apart from its specific regional manifestations; the burden of a scarifying past is more typical of New England and southern gothic than, for example, that of the prairies, yet common to all is a narrative site that tends to be an epistemological frontier in which the spatial division between the known and the unknown, the self and the Other, assumes temporal dimensions. The gothic cannot function without a proximity of Otherness imagined as its imminent return; consequently, allegory’s rhetoric of temporality—its gesturing toward what cannot be explicitly recovered—aspires to a narrative of the return of the Other’s plenitude on a frontier

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In the thirty years since the publication of Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler’s genealogy of American gothic has remained vitally suggestive; indeed, his broad connections between historiography and psychoanalysis have shaped the parameters of subsequent conceptualization. He insists on the absolute centrality of the gothic in American literature, for “until the gothic had been discovered, the serious American novel could not begin; and as long as that novel lasts, the gothic cannot die” (143), while gesturing toward its essentially paradoxical status in “America,” that eighteenth-century construction “pledged to be done with ghosts and shadows, committed to live a life of yea-saying in a sunlit, neoclassical world” (144). Influenced by his argument that “the whole tradition of the gothic is a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement” (135), much post-Fiedlerian analysis has been preoccupied with accounting for the role of the gothic as a negation of the Enlightenment’s national narratives. Maggie Kilgour and Anne Williams, whose work in British contexts is often applicable to American ones, understand both the binary logics that have required a darkness as the Enlightenment’s Other and the interlinearity of gothic cultural production and the rise of psychoanalysis. Williams argues, via Foucault, that “Enlightenment thought characteristically ordered and organized by creating institutions to enforce distinctions between society and its other. . . . Like the haunted Gothic castle, the Freudian discourse of self creates the haunted, dark, mysterious space even as it attempts to organize and control it” (248). Kilgour’s declaration that “psychoanalysis is a late gothic story” (221) surveys the cultural matrix that enabled the narrativization of irrepressible Otherness.

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in which “geography” supplements the impossibilities of language, of both national and personal historiography.

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1925-1964)

O’Connor is considered one of the foremost short story writers in American literature. She was an anomaly among post-World War II authors—a Roman Catholic from the Biblebelt South whose stated purpose was to reveal the mystery of God’s grace in everyday life. O’Connor chose to depict salvation through shocking, often violent action upon characters who are spiritually or physically grotesque. In her fiction O’Connor frequently criticizes the materialism and spiritual apathy of contemporary society, faulting modern rationalism for its negation of the need for religious faith and redemption. Employing scenes and characters from her native southern environment, she depicts the violent and often bizarre religiosity of Protestant fundamentalists as a manifestation of spiritual life struggling to exist in a nonspiritual world. The protagonists of both of O’Connor’s novels—Hazel Motes in Wise Blood (1952) and Francis Marion Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away (1960)—experience intense spiritual conflict. Often considered “Christhaunted” characters, they are tormented by visions of God and the devil and by the temptation to deny the reality of their revelations. Critics have described O’Connor’s protagonists as grotesque in personality, inclined to violence, and isolated and frustrated by their spiritual struggle. Reflecting the religious themes of her novels, a recurrent motif in O’Connor’s thirty-one short stories is that of divine grace descending in an often bizarre or violent manner upon a spiritually deficient main character. She often depicts a rural domestic situation suddenly invaded by a criminal or perverse outsider—a distorted Christ figure who redeems a protagonist afflicted with pride, intellectualism, or materialism. In one of O’Connor’s bestknown stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955), a smugly self-complacent grandmother is shocked into spiritual awareness by a murderer who kills first her family and then her. While sometimes faulted for gratuitous use of the grotesque, O’Connor is almost universally admired, if not fully understood.

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According to David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski, “gothicism must abide on a frontier—whether physical or psychical”; despite the specific locatability of frontiers in various cultural moments, American gothic historiography generally “derives from [a] conflict between the inscripted history of civilization and the history of the other, somehow immanent in the landscape of the frontier” (17, my emphasis). A symbolic Otherness that is “somehow immanent,” that must be figured forth in narrative, suggests the resonance between gothic historiography and the haunting insubstantialities of allegorical trope. Also conducive to the allegorical corollary—a mode of narrative that is organized around semiotic gaps or “rifts”—is their model of the historical matrix that is inhabited by the gothic. “Gothicism results,” they argue, when the epic moment passes, and a particular rift in history develops and widens into a dark chasm that separates now from what has been. The history that suffers this rift is the inscripted past, the literal re-presentation to ourselves of a [hi]story that integrates people, events, and places, and makes of the world and its landscape a locale . . . whose experience is comfortable, confident, coherent and known. This inscripted history is privileged; it functions as the logocentric past. . . . When we become aware of breaks in the logocentric history, of gaps in the authorized text of the past, the inscriptions of another history break through into meaning. (16)

This model suggests that logocentric historiography is an essentially nostalgic mode, if nostalgia is understood as a will to sustained cultural coherence, a desire for the seamless authenticity of national narrative; the fracturing of this mode by the irruption of “another history” is explained by Mogen, Sanders, and Karpinski as an everwidening “dark chasm,” a spatial or structural metaphor that, once again, evokes an allegorical temporality. This chasm is opened by the strategies of gothic signification, for it is not simply the case that a horrific “alternate” history emerges as a cohesive or fully explanatory corrective that is superimposed upon nostalgic history. Rather, it irrupts by fits and starts in a semiotic that is fragmentary, one that is more suggestive than conclusive. As such, the gothic “turn” toward compelling but unthematizable narrative might be conceptualized as the emergence of the Lacanian Real, which, according to Judith Butler, “is that which resists and compels symbolization” G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

While gothic narrative emphatically refuses nostalgia, it seems to be the case that nostalgic representations of “America” veer toward the gothic with remarkable frequency; invariably associated with self-consciously “late” cultural production, this turn problematizes nostalgia’s simplicity by invoking a darker register that, ironically, emerges as the very consequence of nostalgic modes of knowing. A prototype might be Henry James’s return to America at the turn of the century: his late writing explores the contrast between sunny myths of return and the pull toward a tropics of devastation and the attractive threat of a hypothetical, unlived American life. Such contrasts recur but in very different terrains: in the spring of 1996, the highly popular film Twister locates the terrible in the vertical that descends from the sky upon the horizontal stretch of America from Iowa to Oklahoma, geographically contiguous with the mythic “West” that, according to Jonathan Raban, is a “bleak and haunted landscape” that “looks like a landscape in an allegory” (81). While its primary nostalgic referent is The Wizard of Oz, the narrative turns and twists in its uneven course toward gothic historicity. In one spectacular sequence, a tornado spirals through the face of a cinematic screen at the Galaxy Drive-In, upon which is projected the most memorable scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of Steven King’s novel The Shining. In a perfect moment of ironic congruence, the tornado destroys the image of Jack Nicholson axing through a door, behind which Shelley Duvall cowers in terror. The point of this intertextual strategy is thoroughly allegorical; while it is in keeping with a long tradition in American gothic of attributing terrible violence to the muteness of landscape, it “explains” this terror by juxtaposing nature—literally—against cinematic culture, against what it is not, in an escalating spiral of signification that laminates the Symbolic into a coherent order even as it blows it apart. Twister’s framing of the cinematic screen—the cultural face fleetingly inhabited by Nicholson and then imploded— mediates an exchange of attribute between human and natural agency in an aesthetics of the

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(70). The congruent and compatible strangenesses of gothic and allegorical image manifest what Anne Williams describes as “a pattern of anxiety about the Symbolic” and reveal “the fragility of our usual systems of making sense of the world,” for “an extraordinary number of Gothic conventions . . . imply disorder in the relations of signifiers and signifieds” (70-71).

Flannery O’Connor, 1925-1964.

gothic sublime; the tornado itself veers toward allegory, a personification of the qualities of Nicholson’s performance which David Thomson describes as “the wicked naughty boy, the thwarted genius, the monster of his own loneliness. No one else could have been so daring and yet so delicate” (546). Yet, such a maneuver is not entirely new; it represents a further development of what Fiedler called “the grafting of Jamesian sensibility onto the Southern gothic stem” (476). Such are the strange, defamiliarizing uses of the gothic in a late culture that wants nostalgia simultaneously to have a playful edge and to approach the unthinkable. If allegory is the strangest house of fiction, haunted by a referentiality that struggles to return in a narrative mode that is committed to repress what it is compelled to shadow forth (for allegory’s suspension between avowal and disavowal must somehow fail to repress if it is going to “work”), then it is not surprising that the house is the most persistent site, object, structural analogue, and trope of American gothic’s allegorical turn. Consider a partial catalog of American gothic houses: Poe’s House of Usher, Hawthorne’s Cus-

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indistinct. Crucially important for this project of conceptualizing the gothic as a tropic field is the narrowing focus of Freud’s translation across languages and cultures, the figurative turn toward a spatialized, “architectural” psyche in the slide of signifiers from unheimlich to “uncanny” and its gothic equivalent, “haunted.” If the Freudian text, and its translation, might be understood as allegorizing the uncanny in its figurative turns, then it does so under the auspices of the gothic’s tendency to generate an allegorical sign—a human agency, a prosopopoeia—that returns the repressed Other to the vitally performative.

Truman Capote, 1924-1984.

tom House, James’s house on the “jolly corner,” Sutpen’s Hundred, Stephen King’s Castle Rock, and Capote’s Kansan farmhouse are structures whose solid actuality dissolves as they accommodate (and bring to spectacular figure) a psychic imperative—the impossibility of forgetting. In accounting for this imperative, Freud reveals the gothic origins of his conceptual lexicon by bringing forward the gothic’s major architectural metaphor; to illustrate his theory of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) as “something repressed which recurs”—resonant with “Shelling’s definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light”—he points out that some languages “can only render the German expression “an ‘unheimlich house’ by ‘a haunted house’” and suggests that “this example [is] perhaps the most striking of all, of something uncanny” (“The Uncanny” 241). Freud’s illustration seems to confirm the participation of psychoanalysis in gothic epistemology and narrative structures; he asserts that “psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people” (“The Uncanny” 243). What is the status, the discursive materialization, of such “hidden forces” in narrative? Can language ever “lay bare” the Other? The entire tradition of the gothic suggests that a “haunting” return requires a poetics of the ephemeral and the

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The psychic “house” turns toward the gothic only when it is “haunted” by the return of the repressed, a return that impels spectacular figures. More specifically, prosopopoeia may be conceptualized as the master trope of gothic’s allegorical turn, because prosopopoeia—the act of personifying, of giving face to an abstract, disembodied Other in order to return it to narrative—disturbs logocentric order, the common reality of things. Paul de Man observes not only that “prosopopoeia is hallucinatory,” because “to make the invisible visible is uncanny” (49), but also that such uncanny trope generates epistemological incoherence: “it is impossible to say whether prosopopoeia is plausible because of the empirical existence of dreams and hallucinations or whether one believes that such a thing as dreams and hallucinations exists because language permits the figure of prosopopoeia. The question ‘Was it a vision or a waking dream?’ is destined to remain unanswered. Prosopopoeia undoes the distinction between reference and signification upon which all semiotic systems . . . depend” (49-50). This theory can be broadly extended to the gothic’s allegorical turn, which, in complicating the “distinction between reference and signification,” veers away from the clarity of denotation toward the ghostly realm of connotation: accordingly, the gothic registers a trauma in the strategies of representation as it brings forward a traumatic history toward which it gestures but can never finally refer. Paradoxically, the various kinds of trauma represented by the gothic—the proximity of Otherness which occasions allegorical approximation—constitute both a return and a loss, and the gothic might be broadly conceptualized as a cultural ritual of inscribing the loss of coherent ego formation, the negation of national imaginary, and the fragmentation of linguistic accountability. For the uncanniness of the gothic is simultaneously terrible and melancholy, and the conjunc-

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The doubleness of American gothic’s allegorical impulse—which represents “trauma” in a traumatized discourse that splits the sign from the referent—appears early in the tradition, most remarkably in Poe’s architecture of remembering and return, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe’s “house” might be called a master text for the subsequent history of American gothic, both in its sense of what might accrue as “story” and its indirect strategies of narration, the complex that

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as “the difficulty the story has in getting itself told” (14). The content of Gothic story remains radically inaccessible: the occasion of the Ushers’ melancholia inheres in the strange relation between Roderick Usher and his sister, Madeline, a historical dimension that lies in the realm of the proscribed and the unspeakable and as such is not subject to recovery. Consequently, the narrative must gesture toward the absent explanatory core of the story by organizing a tension between two allegorical currents. The first represents what might be called the volition toward repression: Madeline must die, and her body must be interred in the deepest recess of the house. The second represents the return of the repressed secret, the rise of the Real, the irruption of history in Madeline’s ascent as revenant, uncannily anticipated by, or predicated upon, the act of reading an old romance. In the work of conceptualizing a poetics of American gothic, the narrative trajectory of Poe’s “House” is less important than the allegorical signs it generates, the most striking of which occurs in the final moment of Madeline’s interment, when the narrator allows himself to gaze upon her face: we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead—for we could not regard her unawed. (329, my emphasis)

This passage sustains and is organized around a complex resistance between its literal level—the gaze upon the face of the dead—and its allegorization of this gaze as an act of intuitive, incomplete historical reconstruction. As a sign, the countenance of Madeline Usher remains stubbornly mute in its somatic materiality, yet Poe’s “gothic” emerges precisely as such only when this sign turns faintly toward prosopopoeia and generates the narrator’s allegory of reading, a moment in which Poe’s writing performatively gestures toward the reading of the gothic text by hermeneutic energy in the text. I regard this passage as typical of how American gothic requires a discursive matrix of preterition: an unspeakable, irrecoverable historical preterite is marked, and its consequences brought forward to the present, only in a species of circumlocution. Thus, Madeline’s face

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tion of fear and sorrow is powerfully annihilating of the ego’s investment in things as they comfortably “are.” This conjoined gothic affect is to be located not exclusively in the irruption of the id or in Lacan’s revision of the death drive that posits the id’s overwhelming of the ego but perhaps more immediately in the agency of the super-ego. This is suggested by a striking repetition in Freud’s diverse writings that move toward the conceptualization of the super-ego. In his 1919 essay on “The Uncanny,” he takes up the gothic figure of the double, which he seems to understand as an allegorization of the splitting of the ego: while the double originates in primary narcissism, its Otherness becomes “the uncanny harbinger of death” in later stages. “A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and criticising the self.” This “special agency” is arguably the site of the uncanny return of the repressed both in psychosis and in the paranoid gothic, for “in the pathological cases of being watched, this mental agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego . . . able to treat the rest of the ego like an object” (“The Uncanny” 235). The superegotistical double emerges into discourse, into narrative, through allegorical personification, a turn that entails both the loss of a coherent self and the fracturing of a transparent, clearly referential lexicon of the self, a turn that marks loss as terrible. Previously, in his 1917 essay on “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud explained that melancholia arises from the traumatic loss not of an object but in regard to the ego, and he did so in virtually the same language. The “melancholic’s disorder,” he argues, manifests when “one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object” (“Mourning” 256). If gothic trauma can be understood as the imminence of the ego’s violation, as something to be scared of, then such possibility is signifiable only through the tropic turn toward the hypothetical face of the Other, a face that haunts the house of the psyche and its allegorical narrativization.

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becomes the text of the double, the twin, the Other, inscribed with the faint traces of an illegible history of “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature.” Poe anticipates the fullness of prosopopoeia, Madeline’s return as revenant, in the metaphor of tenancy, of a house within the House of Usher: Madeline is not completely consigned to the realm of the dead, nor is her historical significance; a mere “tenant” of the coffin, she will return to consciousness. Perhaps it is a critical inevitability to read an allegorical sign allegorically, that is, to situate it as a suggestive trope in an explanatory narrative of one’s own; I argue that the entire tradition of American gothic can be conceptualized as the attempt to invoke “the face of the tenant”—the specter of Otherness that haunts the house of national narrative—in a tropics that locates the traumatic return of the historical preterite in an allegorically preterited mode, a double talk that gazes in terror at what it is compelled to bring forward but cannot explain, that writes what it cannot read. Such a model might go far in expanding the American grain of the gothic that Donald A. Ringe sees as fully realized in Poe’s refusal to “vacillate . . . between the rationally explained and the frankly supernatural” and his assumption of “a position that can best be called noncommittal” (151). If American gothic flourished in the noncommittal strategies of the allegorical, then the overarching tendency of the gothic has been toward a suspension between the immediacy of terrible affect and its linguistic and epistemological unaccountability. The prevailing tendency of critical discourse to explain gothic’s allegorical strategies by a reversion to allegory itself suggests the tenacious power that gothic tropologies and epistemologies continue to exercise. In particular, the architectural metaphor of the haunted house is frequently transferred from its gothic origin—where, as I have suggested, it functions simultaneously as site and structure of narrative, as the vehicle for representing the return of the repressed Other and the prosopopoeial mode of its signification—to deconstructive and queer theoretical projects. Here, the “house” denotes both the text that is inhabited by the specters of referentiality and the subject who is haunted by the repudiated Other. It is not surprising that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model of homosexuality’s closet and its epistemological rigors emerged from her work in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980), where she locates the gothic convention’s requirement that the “self is spatialized”: at issue within this architectural model is self-knowledge, which is urgently com-

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pelled even as it is preterited. In the turn toward personification allegory, “it is the position of the self to be massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access. . . . The inside life and the outside life have to continue separately, becoming counterparts rather than partners [which creates] a doubleness where singleness should be” (12-13). She compares the occluded knowledges of gothic narrative to “the Watergate transcripts. The story does get through, but in a muffled form, with a distorted time sense, and accompanied by a kind of despair about any direct use of language” (15). Sedgwick’s model of the psychically spatialized self is predicated upon the social construction of “normative” and “Other,” and the function of the gothic is to trouble “the stable crystalline relation . . . that enforces boundaries with a proscriptive energy” (38). The gothic disrupts the regulatory relations of proscription by returning the “blocked off” Other from the temporal field of the preterite to signification: in this sense, the gothic might seem to arise when the will to preterition fails. Yet, while preterition resembles a discursive tactic of repression, the two are not identical; more accurately, the “muffled form” of the gothic is constituted by the double impulses of preterition, which, as a particular manifestation of allegory, articulates indirectly what it cannot obliterate. Suspended between a knowledge that is blocked and a knowledge that is repudiated, preterition tracks and mobilizes, marks the course while it serves as a discursive recourse, of “return” across violated boundary. As both “form” and “content” of narrative, it figures the uncanny while it uncannily figures, which might explain why the gothic houses the Freudian “uncanny” in the several senses connoted by the adjective “queer,” an adjective that strains toward prosopopoeial nomination. Predictably, the recent queer theoretical project conceptualizes the interplay between repression and preterition by redeploying the allegorical tropes of the gothic, in particular by personifying the haunting “Other.” Diana Fuss broadly surveys the domain of queer critique through a revisionist cartography of the unstable borders between heterosexuality and homosexuality: “[e]ach is haunted by the other, but . . . it is the other who comes to stand in metonymically for the very occurrence of haunting and ghostly visitations.” Current work in the field of gender and sexuality, she observes, reveals “a certain preoccupation with the figure of the homosexual as specter and phantom, as spirit and revenant, as abject and un-

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This introductory overview of the representational strategies of the gothic—and their persistence in American cultural work of various kinds— concludes in Iowa, where this collection of essays originates. Much of the preceding argument about the gothic’s straining toward allegory, its historiographical matrix of prosopopoeial return that attempts to invoke “the face of the tenant,” is suggested by Grant Wood’s 1930 painting, American Gothic, the national icon under which this text is produced. In keeping with the general refusal to interrogate the national symbolic, Grant Wood’s art was dismissed as simplistic, as merely regional, as naively realistic, until a major retrospective of his work in 1983-84 shifted the current of reception. A subsequent flurry of commentary responded to Wood’s implication that the Midwest, in the words of Donald B. Kuspit, “is fertile with more than neat rows of wheat and corn” (139): Thomas Lawson detects “an edge of unsettledness” in Wood’s career that bespeaks “a claustrophobia of the spirit among the rolling fields” (77), while Kuspit sees Wood as a painter of “an inward strangeness” whose enduring subject is “a powerful psychological undertow . . . under the veneer of Social Realism” and whose mode is a “temptation by allegory” (141). The doubleness of allegory is suggested, too, by Karal Ann Marling’s opinion that American Gothic inflects nostalgia through irony to frame a “tension between modernism and tradition, between corrosive self-knowledge and delusional retrospection” (97). Representational “tensions,” like an inconclusive or incomplete turn toward allegory that fails fully to achieve its semiotic, are critical models that are solicited by the liminal, the indirect, the shadow of signification that is cast by American Gothic. As James M. Dennis observes, the figures in Grant’s painting

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dead.” Thus, she concludes in a statement that marks the convergence of the queer and the tropic field of the gothic, “homosexual production emerges . . . as a kind of ghost-writing, a writing which is at once a recognition and a refusal” (34). It is ironic, perhaps, that the current academy— driven by the imperative to illuminate the margins of America’s national narratives, to bring the occluded and excluded others of sexual, gendered, and racialized difference to presence—performs its revisionist work in the conventional house of the gothic’s allegorical structuration, epistemology, and tropic discourse. However, these cultural and discursive returns indicate not a failure of the critical imagination but rather the revolutionary potential of American gothic, its long history of accommodating new interventions.

“are permanently armed against any conclusive speculation as to what they stand for. . . . The spectator therefore confronts interminably the quiescent couple that haunts the national imagination” (85). American Gothic achieves, among other things, an allegorization of American gothic: like all allegories, its silence inheres in the gap between signification and reference, but, more particularly, this allegory sustains a paradoxically illuminating silence in the space between the planes of composition, between foreground and background, between the couple’s performance of preterition and the historical preterite that resides in the “Carpenter Gothic” house. Wood’s subject is less the stubborn hardness of a mythic prairie character than what Fiedler calls “the pastness of the past” (137), the inexplicable, melancholy continuity between historical suffering and the visible textures of the present. According to Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood intended American Gothic to be primarily a study in vertical composition: the architecture of Carpenter Gothic “appealed to Wood because of its . . . emphatic design— particularly the verticals . . . and the Gothic window, prominently placed in the gable. With his fondness for repeating geometries, Wood immediately envisioned a long-faced and lean couple, ‘American Gothic people,’ he called them,

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to complement the house and echo its predominantly vertical lines” (129).

Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995.

I would argue, however, that the energy of the painting is divided between its upward reach—the vanishing point above the gothic arch and the gable peak—and its inward reach that laminates the silent couple to the supplementary resonance of the house across a supremely suggestive narrative gap. If this painting strains toward allegory, then it does so by invoking the historical preterite that resides in that house and haunts the national couple, a preterite that, typically, is preterited. As such, the house allegorizes historical consciousness itself, subject to the imminent irruption, the proximate quality, of the not-forgotten. Grant Wood’s American Gothic suggests the regional precision, the very specificity, of the gothic’s recurring manifestations: it belongs to what Jonathan Raban calls “that sad and unlamented West where bitterness and fury were the natural offspring of impossibly great expectations” (62); like all gothic, it haltingly brings forward the underside, the Otherness, of the narratives of national selfconstruction. The sign of the house yearns not for reconciliation with the past but for inhabitation by the past, the ghosts of return, as it strains toward prosopopoeia. It leaves us more or less in Capote’s “out there,” attending to the “whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat” (343).

Kuspit, Donald B. “Grant Wood: Pathos of the Plain.” Art in America 72.3 (March 1984): 138-143.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

Lawson, Thomas. “Grant Wood: Whitney Museum of American Art.” Artforum 22.3 (November 1983): 77. Marling, Karal Ann. “Don’t Knock Wood.” Art News 82.7 (September 1983): 94-99. Mogen, David, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski, eds. Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1993. Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1984. Raban, Jonathan. “The Unlamented West.” New Yorker, May 20, 1996, 60-81. Ringe, Donald A. American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1982. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Arno, 1980. Thomson, David. A Biographical Dictionary of Film. Rev. ed. London: André Deutsch, 1994. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

EUROPEAN GOTHIC RONALD PAULSON (ESSAY DATE AUTUMN 1981)

Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Random House, 1965.

SOURCE: Paulson, Ronald. “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution.” ELH 48, no. 3 (autumn 1981): 53254.

Corn, Wanda M. Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.

In the following essay, Paulson examines the Gothic novel’s connection to the French Revolution in terms of the treatment of rebellion and sexuality in such works as The Monk, Northanger Abbey, and Frankenstein.

de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Dennis, James M. Grant Wood: A Study of American Art and Culture. 2nd ed. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1986. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Doubleday, 1960, rpt. 1992. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, vol. 11 of The Penguin Freud Library. Trans. James Strachey et al. New York: Penguin, 1984, 245-268. ———. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17. Trans. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press, 1955, rpt. 1991, 219-252. Fuss, Diana. “Introduction: Inside/Out.” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. Gross, Louis S. Redefining the American Gothic. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989.

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In Chapter 5, Volume II, of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey Henry Tilney regales Catherine Morland with his version of the Gothic fantasy she loves to read. When she arrives at Northanger Abbey, he says, she will be taken by the housekeeper “along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before.”1 She will discover that the door has no lock, and shortly (a couple of nights later) there will be a violent storm. “Peals of thunder so loud as to seem to shake the edifice to its foundation will roll around the neighbouring mountains—and during the frightful gusts of wind which accompany it, you will probably think you discern (for your lamp is now extinguished) one part of the hanging more

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Certain elements of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic are here, including the passivity of the sensitive heroine, the labyrinthine passages and chambers through which she wanders, the violent storm, and the perusal of written documents that record experiences with which she never herself makes contact. Elsewhere in Northanger Abbey, the Gothic fiction is reflected in vocabulary—in, for example, Isabella’s “amazing” or “inconceivable, incredible, impossible!” or Catherine’s remark, “Udolpho [is] the nicest book in the world,” to which Henry replies, “The nicest;—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding” (p. 107). The adjective is just another sort of exaggeration, another expression of a point of view, a way of looking at the world as if it were a book. Henry Tilney himself, we have learned in an earlier chapter (I, Chap. XIV), is a reader of history (“Yes, I am fond of history,” he says). Catherine reads history only “as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me” (p. 108), whereas from Gothic novels she presumably gains comfort. Henry, however, has his own Quixotic version of sensibility: he is a student of the Picturesque, believing that a “beautiful” sky does not signify good weather but a drawable picture. He instructs Catherine in these mysteries until she views “the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing”—and at length “voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape” (pp. 110-11). At this point in the conversation, Tilney moves from the subject of the Picturesque to politics, “and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.” It is in this context—of the Gothic, history, the Picturesque, and politics—that Catherine remarks, “I have heard that something very shocking indeed, will soon come out of London. . . .

more horrible than any thing we have met with yet”—by which of course she means the publication of a new Gothic novel. Miss Tilney, however, thinks she means a riot. It is left to Henry to explain the discrepancy between a new publication “in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first,” and (in a fantasy parallel to the Gothic fantasy I have quoted above) “a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George’s Fields; the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the 12th Light Dragoons . . .” and so on (pp. 112-113). This was written in 1797 or 1798 when Austen if not Tilney was thinking of history: the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the French Revolution of 1789.2 In the context of Northanger Abbey the irony is that the exaggeration of the sign falls short of the grim reality. But precisely what reality? The lies of the Thorpes and the fantasy of General Tilney as wife-murderer generated by the Gothic-infatuated Catherine turn out to signify, but not something close to the sign, not a Gothic but rather a worse, because more banal, more historical evil—one perhaps like the French Revolution itself: General Tilney’s abrupt dismissal of Catherine because he thinks she will interfere with his dynastic plans for Henry.3 In Northanger Abbey there is posited something we might call the real, or the thing itself, and then something else we can call the word, and Austen shows that they can only come together in formalized, conventionalized ways.4 We notice the difference between the Gothic fiction and history, but also the similarity. General Tilney is indeed the reality beneath Manfred, Montoni, and the other Gothic villains: a man concerned with property, heirs, and wealth; a man who tries unscrupulously to preserve his family and fortune against the incursions of a penniless outsider, who in fact does disrupt it. In the real world, the Gothic casts up (or is bettered by) the reality of a General Tilney or a French Revolution in which, in Burke’s terms, penniless parvenues infiltrate the aristocratic family—or the royal family itself, ultimately breaking through its doors into the bedroom of the queen—and ravish the wife-mother-daughter.5 The principal elements are the same: the Gothic only supplies the metaphors and the gushing response of the safely distant spectator, who hears the storm (remembering perhaps the metaphors of natural upheaval—hurricanes and erupting volcanoes—that were immediately applied to the

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violently agitated than the rest.” These details are punctuated by “Will not your heart sink within you?” The next step is to lift the tapestry, try the door found behind it, and proceed into “a small vaulted room.” The walk through several such chambers reveals a dagger, some drops of blood, torture instruments, and an old cabinet in a secret drawer of which is found a roll of paper: “you seize it—it contains many sheets of manuscript—you hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you been able to decipher ‘Oh! thou—whomsoever thou mayst be, into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall’—when your lamp suddenly expires in the socket, and leaves you in total darkness.”

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Revolution), notices the bloody daggers and racks, and reads—or starts to, until her candle is extinguished—a letter from an actual participant.

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)

Known as a major English Romantic poet, Shelley lived a brief but colorful life. Before the age of twenty Shelley had published two wildly improbable Gothic novels, Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811), and two collections of verse. Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810), written with his sister, continued in the Gothic mode. In what is usually regarded as his masterpiece, the verse drama Prometheus Unbound (1819), Shelley combines myth, political allegory, psychology, and theology to transform the Aeschylean myth of Prometheus the fire-giver into an allegory on the origins of evil and the possibility of regenerating nature and humanity through love. The verse drama The Cenci (1819) is based on the history of a sixteenthcentury Italian noble family, and depicts the evil Count Cenci’s rape of his daughter, Beatrice, who determines to murder him, seeing no other means of escape from continued violation, and is executed for parricide. Although Shelley hoped for a popular success on the English stage, his controversial treatment of the subject of incest outraged critics, preventing the play from being produced. In 1814 Shelley, who was married, fell in love and eloped with Mary Godwin, the sixteenyear-old daughter of the radical English philosopher William Godwin and author and reformer Mary Wollstonecraft. He continued to provide for his first wife and their two children, but lived with Mary. In the summer of 1816, Shelley met Lord Byron, with whom he developed an enduring friendship that proved an important influence on the works of both men. In the fall of that same year, following his first wife’s suicide, Shelley legalized his relationship with Mary. In 1822 Shelley and his companion, Edward Williams, drowned when their boat capsized in a squall off the coast of Lerici, Italy. Shelley’s body was cremated on the beach in a ceremony conducted by his friends Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Edward John Trelawny. His ashes, except for his heart, which Byron plucked from the fire, were buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

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The Gothic did in fact serve as a metaphor with which some contemporaries in England tried to come to terms with what was happening across the Channel in the 1790s. The first Revolutionary emblem was the castle-prison, the Bastille and its destruction by an angry mob, which was fitted by Englishmen into the model of the Gordon Riots of nine years before. But if one way of dealing with the Revolution (in its earliest stages) was to see the castle-prison through the eyes of a sensitive young girl who responds to terror in the form of forced marriage and stolen property, another was to see it through the case history of her threatening oppressor, Horace Walpole’s Manfred or M.G. Lewis’ Ambrosio—the less comforting reality Austen was heralding in the historical phenomena of London riots. In Lewis’ The Monk (1795) the two striking phenomena dramatized are first the explosion—the bursting out of his bonds—of a repressed monk imprisoned from earliest childhood in a monastery, with the havoc wreaked by his self-liberation (assisted by demonic forces) on his own family who were responsible for his being immured; and second, the bloodthirsty mob that lynches—literally grinds into a bloody pulp—the wicked prioress who has murdered those of her nuns who succumbed to sexual temptation. Both are cases of justification followed by horrible excess: Ambrosio deserves to break out and the mob is justified in punishing the evil prioress, but Ambrosio’s liberty leads him to the shattering of his vow of celibacy, to repression, murder, and rape not unlike the compulsion against which he was reacting; and the mob not only destroys the prioress but (recalling the massacres of September 1792) the whole community and the convent itself: The incensed Populace, confounding the innocent with the guilty, had resolved to sacrifice all the Nuns of that order to their rage, and not to leave one stone of the building upon another. . . . They battered the walls, threw lighted torches in at the windows, and swore that by break of day not a Nun of St. Clare’s order should be left alive. . . . The Rioters poured into the interior part of the Building, where they exercised their vengeance upon every thing which found itself in their passage. They broke the furniture into pieces, tore down the pictures, destroyed the reliques, and in their hatred of her Servant forgot all respect to the Saint. Some employed themselves in searching out the Nuns, Others in pulling down parts of the Convent, and Others again in setting fire to the pictures and furniture, which it contained. These Latter produced the most decisive desolation:

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The end, of course, as it appeared to Englishmen in 1794—remembering Thomas Paine’s words (“From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished”)7 and the imagery of light and fire associated with the Revolution—was the destruction of the revolutionaries themselves in the general collapse.

I. Rebel/Tyrant I do not mean to suggest that Ann Radcliffe or Monk Lewis was producing propaganda either for or against the French Revolution. Lewis’ treatment of the lynching scene, for example, is far removed from the morally clear-cut renderings of anticlericalism exemplified by the drames monacals popular in the theaters of Revolutionary Paris. In one of these plays—de Menuel’s Les Victimes cloîtrées of 1791, which Lewis saw, admired, and translated—the wretched prisoners held in the dungeons below a convent are finally rescued by a Republican mayor brandishing the tricouleur. Lewis exploits the dramatic resonances of the Revolution and its anti-clericalism, but simultaneously portrays the rioting mob as blood-thirsty, completely out of control, animal-like in its ferocity. The convent of St. Clare represents corruption, superstition, and repression, but its overthrowers, no more admirable than the tyrants, are capable of the same atrocities or worse. In the same way, many observers (conservative and otherwise) by 1793 saw the brutally oppressed masses of France usurping the tyrannical roles of their erstwhile oppressors.8 In his critical essay “Idée sur les romans” (1800) the Marquis de Sade, who considered The Monk superior to all other works of its kind, asserted that the bloody upheavals of the French Revolution had rendered everyday reality so horrific that contemporary writers necessarily had to invoke the supernatural and demonic realms for material which could still shock or startle their readers. I do not think there is any doubt that the popularity of Gothic fiction in the 1790s and well into the nineteenth century was due in part to

the widespread anxieties and fears in Europe aroused by the turmoil in France finding a kind of sublimation or catharsis in tales of darkness, confusion, blood, and horror. The Gothic, however, had existed from the 1760s onward, and we are talking about a particular development in the 1790s, a particular plot which was either at hand for writers to use in the light of the French Revolution, or was in some sense projected by the Revolution and borrowed by writers who may or may not have wished to express anything specifically about the troubles in France. As a descendent of Walpole’s Manfred, for example, Ambrosio has to be seen as a conflation of rebelling son and tyrant father. Manfred was the servant who murdered his master in order to usurp the family castle—or the castle of his father or older brother, in later versions of the story— and then sacrificed his own children to retain his property. But Ambrosio is notably unconcerned with property—only with liberty of a sexual sort. This is why he is sympathetic in a way that Manfred is not, even given Walpole’s assurances that Manfred is otherwise a great soul. Ambrosio’s story is of his insane, uncontrolled rush into freedom and, incidentally, of its consequences, which include repression of other people’s liberty for the end of self-gratification. In short, The Monk is about the act of liberation, whereas The Castle of Otranto was about a man’s attempt to hold together his crumbling estate and cheat others of their rightful inheritance. One is a fable of revolution, the other of the ancien régime. The earlier phase produced fictions that continued to be copied throughout the period of the Revolution. Not long after the notorious September Massacres, the Monthly Review attacked a Gothic novel called The Castle of St. Vallery in the following terms: Of all the resources of invention, this, perhaps, is the most puerile, as it is certainly among the most unphilosophical. It contributes to keep alive that superstition which debilitates the mind, that ignorance which propagates terror, and that dread of invisible agency which makes inquiry criminal.9

The critic sees the Gothic practiced in this novel as the representation of tyranny which was a central contribution of the pre-1789 genre, and so an example of everything the French Enlightenment and Revolution was seeking to correct. He detects nothing of either the analysis of unrestrained energy that appears in some of Radcliffe’s work of the 1790s or the representation of the energy of revolution itself in The Monk. Many such writers simply ignored the fact of the French

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Indeed the consequences of their action were more sudden, than themselves had expected or wished. The Flames rising from the burning piles caught part of the Building, which being old and dry, the conflagration spread with rapidity from room to room. The Walls were soon shaken by the devouring element: The Columns gave way: The Roofs came tumbling down upon the Rioters, and crushed many of them beneath their weight. Nothing was to be heard but shrieks and groans; the Convent was wrapped in flames, and the whole presented a scene of devastation and horror.6

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Revolution. As John Garrett writes of one of these, Mary Meeke, her “conservatism was based on a belief that the 1789 revolution was some sort of aberration of history,” and so she continued to portray France of the ancien régime as if nothing had happened.1 0 Other writers were concerned about the significance of the events in France. But the castle as prison was already implicit in The Castle of Otranto and Radcliffe’s Castles of Athlin and Dynbayne (1789), and it may have been only this image and this frame of mind that made the Fall of the Bastille an automatic image of revolution for French as well as English writers. By the time The Mysteries of Udolpho appeared (1794), the castle, prison, tyrant, and sensitive young girl could no longer be presented naively; they had all been sophisticated by the events in France. At this point another strand of novel, the novel of reform (the so-called “Jacobin” novel), joins the Gothic in the representation of tyranny and revolution. The Gothic tended to be the form adopted by those who were either against or merely intrigued by the Revolution, or by problems of freedom and compulsion. The reformers Godwin, Holcroft, Bage, and Inchbald are for the Revolution; they call their works “Things as they Are,” “Man as he Is” or “Man as he is Not”; they avoid the Gothic and theatrical trappings Burke associated with the Revolution; they have a sometimes dismaying singleness of purpose and go straight to the contemporary Englishman, the General Tilney, illustrating Arthur Young’s insistence that “The true judgment to be formed of the French revolution, must surely be gained, from an attentive consideration of the evils of the old government.”1 1 This was, of course, what the English Jacobins usually represented in their novels, tracts, and poems, for their real subject was not France but forms of compulsion in England. Gothic and Jacobin novels had a similar ancestry in Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa; both show the family as a compulsive force on the children, in particular on the marriageable daughter or the young wife. The distinction is rather between a novel about the tyranny seen from the point of view of the helpless (most helpless because female) individual, and a novel about the rebel. William Godwin’s Things as They Are: or the Adventures of Caleb Williams appeared just a year before The Monk, combining the two fictions in a more schematic, more coherent form. The relationship between Falkland and Caleb is the same explored by Inchbald and Holcroft between

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society the cruel hunter and the suffering individual, its victim. But by the time Godwin was writing, the French Terror had cast its shadow on libertarian dreams, and his work reflects that constant potential for simple inversion of the persecutor-persecuted relationship which events in Paris had so terribly exemplified. In his initial, discursive response to the Revolution, Political Justice (1793), Godwin argued that “the great cause of humanity” is hindered by both the ancient tradition of Burkean thought (in his Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790) and by the “friends of innovation.” He focuses on the second, bringing to bear Burke’s own argument that “to dragoon men into the adoption of what we think right is an intolerable tyranny”: the French have shown that to overthrow tyranny is to have to become greater tyrants themselves.1 2 Godwin’s own point is that the orderly process of growing philosophical awareness—a passive process—was dangerously interrupted by the Revolution, and perhaps directed into the wrong channels. His second point is that “Coercion first annihilates the understanding of the subject upon whom it is exercised, and then of him who employs it.” For Caleb Williams, in his way, becomes as much a persecutor (and ultimately a murderer) as his master—and is eventually brought to commit similar crimes through an equally obsessive concern to protect the “honour” he no longer possesses. The potentially invertible relationship in Caleb Williams is between two wholly isolated beings who play out their equally agonizing parts in a series of physical and psychological hunts and flights, wherein they repeatedly exchange the roles of persecutor and victim, hunter and hunted. Their final miserable realization of the simultaneity of both roles in their natures (each having previously viewed only the other as the real persecutor) results in the climactic moment in the novel when Falkland collapses into Caleb’s arms and confesses to the murder of Tyrrel—and when Caleb realizes that his own awakened sense of guilt and responsibility must deny him the possibility of ever receiving any happiness from his long-desired liberty. Both The Monk and Caleb Williams offer embryonic versions of the titanic Romantic hero who comes into being with the blurring of the old black-white morality of earlier Gothic fiction.1 3 This figure is in part characterized, as was the French Revolution, by the appalling ease with which his nature could be inverted, either by assuming the vices of the tyrant he has overthrown,

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II. Crowd and Cabal Some of the ambivalent feelings we have registered to Ambrosio, Caleb, and the crowd that destroys the prioress and her convent can be sensed in the meditations of a first-hand witness to the early stages of the Revolution. Arthur Young argues that release—the violent, destructive explosion of release Lewis depicts in Ambrosio—was a consequence of oppression, signifying only in relation to that original oppression. He asks whether it is “really the people to whom we are to impute” the excesses they are committing: —Or to their oppressors who had kept them so long in a state of bondage? He who chooses to be served by slaves, and by ill-treated slaves, must know that he holds both his property and life by a tenure far different from those who prefer the service of well treated freemen; and he who dines to the music of groaning sufferers, must not, in the moment of insurrection, complain that his daughters are ravished, and then destroyed; and that his sons throats are cut.1 4

The fact that neither Lewis nor Godwin stresses the cruelty of the masters of Ambrosio and Caleb does not alter the general point that the revolt is understood only in terms of the oppression against which it acts. As to the crowd, which does react against specific and monstrous cruelty on the part of the prioress (who, after all, is a minor character in the novel), Young admonishes: “Let it be remembered that the populace in no country ever use power with moderation; excess is inherent in their aggregate constitution . . .” (p. 516). From the Fall of the Bastille to the September Massacres, and to the levée en masse and Napoleon’s armies, this crowd is in many ways the central phenomenon of the Revolution. The crowd, with the related terms “natural sovereignty” and “General Will” (or Burke’s “swinish multitude”), was among the most ambiguous concepts to arise from the Revolution. Ambrosio, it should be recalled, was at the very outset

presented as a spell-binding orator, the master of the crowd that later proves beyond mastering. The crowd, the mobile vulgus, was an image that was ready to hand in the literature of conservative Anglo-Catholic royalists like Dryden and Swift, but materialized by the Gordon Riots and the actual events in France. With this past history, and with its own development in France, the crowd merged with the conflicting or overlapping fictions of, on the one hand, the cabal or small secret society that governs the crowd and determines events, or, on the other, the single great man who expresses in himself the General Will. The disturbances in Ireland, for example, the Times of 22 February 1793 reported, “arise from the pure wantonness of a set of desperadoes called Defenders . . . encouraged and abetted by a secret junto, that like the French Jacobins, wish to throw all government into confusion. . . .” The largest such fiction was the one woven by the Abbé Augustin de Barruel, who argued that the illuminati masterminded the whole Revolution. As J. M. Roberts has written in his Mythology of the Secret Societies: Educated and conservative men raised in the tradition of Christianity, with its stress on individual responsibility and the independence of the will, found conspiracy theories plausible as an explanation of such changes: it must have come about, they thought, because somebody planned it so.1 5

Such myths as plots of the Freemasons, philosophes, and illuminati were “an attempt to impose some sort of order on the bewildering variety of changes which suddenly showered upon Europe with the Revolution and its aftermath.” The assumption of individual agency (as opposed to the more popular modern explanation of social and economic determinism) is evident not only in the allegorizations of revolution as the actions of a single man—an Ambrosio—but also in the comforting retreat to Satanic responsibility in the Miltonic fictions of rebellion in heaven and in the Garden of Eden—in Rosario-Matilda, the Devil who in fact determines all the events that Ambrosio seemed responsible for. The crowd could thus mean either complete uncontrol of unruly passions or the carrying out of the designs of a single man or a very small group of schemers—or even diabolic possession or inspiration. The historical villain (as in many of the theories Barruel collects) is the Duc d’Orléans type (Philippe Egalité), the cadet who wants power himself and therefore topples the rightful older brother or cousin by masterminding a plot that moves the crowd (Satan in heaven, jealous of the

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or by a simple shift of moral perspective. Ambrosio seen from one point of view is the cruel hypocrite, matricide, and incestuous rapist, who lets no barrier stand between him and the fulfillment of his lust; but from another he is the helpless, passive victim of his repressive environment and of Satanic persecution, rendered vulnerable by his miseducation, seduced by a demon, tricked into ravishing his own sister, driven to sell his soul when an earthly reprieve is at hand, and finally betrayed and destroyed by the Arch-Fiend.

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raising of his “brother” Christ, or Schedoni in Radcliffe’s The Italian), and is himself swept away by the tempest he has unleashed. The force then becomes the Jacobin Club or a Robespierre, who eventually loses his own head, and ultimately a Napoleon. General Tilney (or Montoni or Schedoni) and the rioters are, of course, polarities: one concerned with the preservation and the other with the destruction of property, but both with its appropriation. Tilney is the malign individual, the Radcliffe villain; the rioters, something she only hints at in the vague figures of the sexually threatening soldiers of Montoni whom Emily fears (in this sense related to Burke’s mob that threatens Marie Antoinette), are mere misdirected action, chance, the natural force of a crowd—in some ways even more terrifying to contemplate. Both, however, were historical phenomena, not exactly unthinkable before 1789, but largely Gothic fantasies or satiric exaggerations. Taken together, however, they represent the two chief explanations offered for the phenomenon of the Revolution by conservative theorists, the spokesmen of counter-revolution. The sense of unresolved mystery that was one aspect of the Gothic fiction of Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Radcliffe also fitted the way many contemporaries “read” the Revolution. The feeling the reader has in Gothic fiction is of never knowing exactly where he is, where he is going, or what is happening. This is a feeling which corresponds to the puzzlement of the protagonist too, whether a passive Emily or an active plotter like Ambrosio. The Gothic describes a situation in which no one can understand or fathom anyone else’s motives or actions. The narrative structure the Gothic inherited, and carried to its greatest degree of subtlety in Radcliffe’s novels (and of formal innovation in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner), was one involving a theme of communication, the unresolved difficulty of understanding actions; this was expressed in the aposiopesis of Sterne’s and Mackenzie’s novels, in the authentic manuscript lost in gun-wadding or hair curlers, the resort to typographical excesses, and the alternative accounts that leave the reader as uncertain of the responsibility for the protagonist’s actions as the protagonist himself. This is, of course, also a feature of the sublime style, “where half is left out to be supplied by the hearer”—and so a logical and syntactical obscurity joins revolution and sublimity.1 6

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Behind all of this obscurity, however, is the elaborate plot, masterminded but slipping out of control, which involves the overthrow of a property owner. When the Revolution itself came, and as it progressed, it was precisely this inability to make out the events on a day-to-day basis, but with the suspicion of personal skulduggery beneath each new changing-hands of property, that made the Gothic novel a roughly equivalent narrative form. But this is not to say that the Revolution produced no plot structures of its own. There was a discernible scenario that began with the Fall of the Bastille and progressed to the march on and back from Versailles, the flight to Varennes, the September Massacres, the Terror, Thermidore, Brumaire, and so on. Even Waterloo was followed, for Englishmen, by Peterloo, an ironic, domestic extension. Depending on what stage one looked back from, he had a different structure, though it was increasingly colored on the dark side by the Terror, by the further disillusionment of the Directory, and by the threat to national security of the Empire. Behind all of this was a new sense of history, of what could or should happen in history, and what history was in fact about. From being about the kings, it became, in certain ways, about larger groups of subjects and their attempts to come to terms with, or create a new order from, the disorder consequent upon the overthrow of the old established order. The process was one of evolution or revolution, probably of both, involving circular motion but in a spiral that was either ascending or descending, as Caleb overthrows while at the same time becoming Falkland, as Orc overthrows and then becomes Urizen, and so on. The standard features that emerged were the rebellion itself with the enormous possibilities and hopes it opened up; this was followed by a stage of delusion, dangerous and unforeseen consequences, and disillusionment.1 7

III. Sentimental Response and Sexual Energy It is difficult not to agree with Nelson Smith that in many ways Emily St. Aubert is used by Radcliffe in precisely the critical way Jane Austen uses Catherine Morland.1 8 The (remote) potential of Ambrosio in Emily is broached at the beginning in M. St. Aubert’s death-bed warning to her, “do not indulge in the pride of fine feeling” or “illgoverned sensibility,” which is dangerous to its possessor and to others as well; and it is materialized at the end in the nun Agnes’ expostulation to Emily based on her own slip from sentiment into

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was a silent anguish, weeping, yet enduring; not the wild energy of passion, inflaming imagination, bearing down the barriers of reason and living in a world of its own.1 9

The terms I have emphasized are precisely those applied by contemporaries like Burke to the Revolution. The deeply intuitive feelings of Emily are the quiet English virtues of the spectator of sublime overthrow across the Channel; the “wild energy” of Montoni is what Burke associates with the French rabble. Both derive from the sentimental novel, but one is the delicate sensibility of a Toby Shandy or a Harley, the friendship and compassion that can join parental duty, justice, and prudence; the other is the dangerous love of a Clarissa, even the benevolence of a Charles Surface, and the “Jacobin” view that “It is the quality of feeling that sanctifies the marriage; not, as the anti-Jacobins were to have it, the other way around.”2 0 Emily is therefore, as Mary Poovey has argued, the susceptible young spectator who might be seduced by the real center of energy into becoming another Agnes; and this center of energy, Montoni, is based on a need to dominate that draws on the conventions of both Gothic and revolutionary mythology.2 1 There is, in short, a distinction between misperception—believing a General Tilney to be a Montoni, or (to take Blake’s contemporary case, in “The Tyger”) a lamb to be a tiger, a gallant French Revolution to be a bloodthirsty uprising or vice versa—and exploitation either of the sensitive soul by others or of others by the sensitive soul expanded until out of control. Emily is obviously the former, but this is because she never allows herself to slip completely out of control, and because Radcliffe has already given us this rebel figure in the male villain, whose motives are unrelievedly bad. If Radcliffe produces a fiction about a spectator of revolutionary activity who can be confused by her experience, whose response though virtuous is both ambivalent and liable to the temptation to misperceive, then Lewis’ Monk reproduces the exhilarating but ultimately depressing experience of the revolutionary himself. I have already rehearsed the trajectory of Ambrosio’s explosion of energy. Although this pact

with the Devil introduces the Faustus story, it is significant that Ambrosio does not want the intellectual, spiritual, or specifically political power we associate with the Enlightenment. He wants only sexual power. The world of the Enlightenment no longer represented intellectual knowledge; the Revolution had, in Burke’s and Lewis’ terms, exposed the reality under Enlightenment to be unrestrained sexual “knowledge.” Faustus’ Mephistopheles becomes Ambrosio’s Matilda. It is Ambrosio’s desire for her that drags him into the world of Lucifer, and his lust for Antonia that draws him further into the Satanic power. At the same time, Raymond’s violent love for Agnes permits the supernatural to penetrate the human world, for it is as he waits to elope with her and consummate his desire that the Bleeding Nun appears to him in her place. In The Monk it is the unleashing of repressed sexual desires that shatters the barrier between the natural and supernatural worlds. Caleb Williams is also a Faustus figure, who describes his “crime” or “offence” as a “a mistaken thirst of knowledge.”2 2 Although he is, unlike Ambrosio, in pursuit of an intellectual goal— knowledge of his master’s crime—he describes his obsessive quest in sexual terms. Such words as “pleasures,” “pains,” “perpetual stimulus,” “insatiable desire,” “satisfaction,” and “gratification”— all directed to the subject of his quest—have sexual resonances. When he realizes that Falkland is the murderer, he says “My blood boiled within me”—as we are told that Ambrosio’s “blood boiled in his veins” when he looked upon RosarioMatilda’s bosom. “I was conscious to a kind of rapture for which I could not account,” Caleb goes on. “I was solemn, yet full of rapid emotion, burning with indignation and energy.” Based on Godwin’s brilliant insight into the nature of the servant-master relationship for both parties, Caleb’s almost sexual curiosity releases all the darker potentialities of Falkland’s inner self, and lays Caleb open to inhuman pursuit and persecution, as well as to the corruption of his own nature. Man searches for body equivalents for any important, unexplained phenomenon, from unordered nature to economics to revolutions. But there is probably some connection between love and revolution in the political experience itself—or at least in the mind (or vocabulary) of the person who writes about revolution, who is imaginatively recreating the experience. “Revolution is the sex of politics,” as H. L. Mencken said. But if at the outset the most common metaphor

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sexual passion. In general, however, Radcliffe contrasts Emily’s gentle sentiments in Udolpho with the “fierce and terrible passions . . . which so often agitated the inhabitants of this edifice,” “those mysterious workings, that rouse the elements of man’s nature into tempest.” Emily’s, she assures us,

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was of sexual release—whether spring’s bursting buds (in Paine’s Rights of Man) or Blake’s Orc breaking his chains and raping his tyrant-captor’s daughter—by the end it had become images of parturition, of giving birth to creatures like Victor Frankenstein’s, regarded as (depending on the point of view) a victim or a monster.

IV. The Retrospect of Frankenstein The plot of The Monk can be seen as a version of the revolutionary scenario as far as the Terror; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, the year in which Northanger Abbey was finally published) was to some extent a retrospect on the whole process through Waterloo, with the Enlightenmentcreated monster leaving behind its wake of terror and destruction across France and Europe, partly because it had been disowned and misunderstood and partly because it was created unnaturally by reason rather than love in the instinctive relationships of the Burkean family. One aspect of Shelley’s fable we can see by recalling her remarks, on her elopement journey across France in July 1814, on the swath of devastation cut across France by the Russian troops following Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.2 3 The Cossack terror was in some sense the final consequence of Napoleon’s—ultimately the French Revolution’s, or the French ancien régime’s—Frankenstein monster. In this crescendo of destruction can be read an allegory of the French Revolution, the attempt to recreate man and the disillusionment and terror that followed, not ending until Waterloo in 1815, the year between the Shelleys’ two trips to Switzerland.2 4 We also know that Mary Shelley read in 1815 the Abbé Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797-98) as well as her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794). In the first of these, Barruel uncovered sources of the Revolution in the occult practices of the Freemasons, the illuminati, and the Albigensians, Manicheans, and Assassins. 2 5 Victor Frankenstein initially apprentices himself spiritually to Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, and he goes off to college at Ingoldstadt. Munich or Heidelberg would have been closer to his home in Geneva, but Ingoldstadt (as Shelley knew from the Histoire du jacobinisme) was where Adam Weishaupt, the symbolic arch-demon of revolutionary thought, founded the Bavarian illuminati in 1776, and from this secret society supposedly grew the French Revolution. The illuminati were sworn to further knowledge for the

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betterment of mankind, no matter what the cost or the means. The words of M. Waldman to Victor could have been Weishaupt’s own: “These [Agrippa and Paracelsus] were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. . . . The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.”2 6 We can feel the pervasive influence of Barruel, who saw the essence of the illuminati and of the Revolution he believed they propagated to be atheism, universal anarchy, and the destruction of property.2 7 The three elements of the Frankenstein syndrome are the aim to replace God the creator with man, to destroy the family and its ties, and to destroy property and human life. Barruel offered an extremely symbolic explanation (down to the detection of the Masonic triangle in the guillotine blade, invented by Dr. Guillotine, a Freemason), one that could be called Gothic in its bias toward historical explanations and extreme causality, on devious and secret plotting, and on pseudo-science and occult philosophy. The reading of her mother’s book on “the Origin and Progress” of the Revolution was for Mary Shelley a way of connecting the personal and the public reality of history with Barruel’s Gothic fictions of origins. Mary Wollstonecraft, writing about this “revolution, the most important that has ever been recorded in the annals of man,” made it very clear that its cruelties were the consequence of the ancien régime. From the court’s imprisonment of representatives to the assembly, the troops’ crushing public demonstrations, and the king’s substituting retaliation for justice, she says, we may date the commencement of those butcheries, which have brought on that devoted country so many dreadful calamities, by teaching the people to avenge themselves with blood!2 8

The origin of the Revolutionary bloodbath was in the cruelty of the tyrant himself, much as Arthur Young and Godwin had asserted. Percy Shelley offered the same explanation in his preface to The Revolt of Islam (1817-18): “Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent?” And he wrote in his review of Frankenstein: Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn:—let one being be selected, for whatever cause, as the refuse of his

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If these texts were the ambience, the immediate experience behind Mary Shelley’s writing was the trauma of her giving birth to a dead child in February or March 1815 and the memory of her own birth, which had killed her mother nearly twenty years before in 1797.3 0 Birth trauma is one of the central concerns of Frankenstein, as it was metaphorically of Wollstonecraft’s history of the “Origin and Progress” of the Revolution, and in Mary Shelley the points of view of the parent and child merged. Private and public life first joined in Mary Wollstonecraft’s love affair with Gilbert Imlay (as it had also in Wordsworth’s with Annette Vallon), their idyll in Paris during the Revolution, and his betrayal of her at the same time the Revolution itself betrayed her. The result was the commonplace similitude between revolution and sexual love. Wollstonecraft’s recovery was through her relationship with Godwin, and this time the offspring was Mary Shelley—in whose birth (the symbolic joining of these two revolutionary spirits) the mother died, leaving Mary with the trauma of seeming rejection by the mothercreator, as well as by the father who held her responsible for the death of his beloved wife. At the age of four she was further rejected by her father when he took Mary Jane Clairmont as his second wife.3 1 Now to the guilt of having killed her mother was added the birth and death of her own first child, and the birth in January 1816 of her second (who survived until 1819), not long before the trip to Switzerland, and at a time when she was seeing the French Revolution in its final stage: political reaction following the rejected and rejecting Revolution. The construction of the monster, as of the makeshift, nonorganic family, is the final aspect of the Frankenstein plot. Burke’s conception of the state as organic and of the Revolution as a family convulsed was joined by Mary Shelley with the fact of her own “family,” the haphazard one in which she grew up with other children of different mothers and with a stepmother.3 2 This creation of a family of children by some method other than natural, organic procreation within a single love relationship is projected onto the Frankenstein family, a family assembled by the additive process of adoptions and the like, and so to Victor’s own creation of a child without parents or sexual love. The autochthonous family, made up of bits and pieces, a substitute for organic

growth, begins with Victor’s father and leads to his own putting together of his creature from a variety of different bodies. The construction of the “child” is then followed by its rejection by its “father”; and then by the creature’s desire for a proper mate in order to carry on its own line, the “father’s” refusal, and the creature-son’s systematic destruction of the father’s whole family—including his bride (who would have been the mother had there been one). The conventional tyrannical family (Turkish in this case) is contrasted with the new rational family Frankenstein projects: A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s. (p. 49)

Frankenstein predictably sees himself as the father who “deserves” the gratitude of his children more “completely” than any other, and in saying so becomes the tyrant himself. As an allegory of the French Revolution, his experiment corresponds to the possibility of ignoring the paternal (and maternal) power by constructing one’s own offspring out of sheer reason, but it shows that the creator is still only a “father” and his creation another “son” locked in the same love-tyranny relationship Mary’s own father had described so strikingly in Caleb Williams (another book Mary had reread as she undertook her novel). We have by now distinguished two phases of the Revolution, one seen from the point of view of a lover, and the other from the point of view of the child of the union. These are not as distinct as they might at first appear. The first is an Oedipus, or, in Blake’s terms, the Orc who becomes a rival to his father; and the second is Electra or Polyneices, the child of the incestuous union, the offspring of the Revolution. It is precisely this juxtaposition (or conflation) of points of view, including the parallel one of the author (expressed again, looking back from the Preface of 1831, when she says, “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper”), that distinguishes Frankenstein as a fictional work. The description of the creator and his creature looking at each other in turn (pp. 52, 53), and thereafter reporting the same scenes from their respective viewpoints, inevitably evokes the passage in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) in which, as an example of how the sublime operates, Milton’s Satan and Death are described as if facing each other, each seeing the other from his

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kind—divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations— malevolence and selfishness.2 9

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own point of view, as mutual challengers.3 3 There is, of course, no mother in the case of Frankenstein’s creature, and so no Sin of the Satan-SinDeath paradigm, because Victor thinks he can create out of himself alone (as Satan originally did Sin). But the mutually destructive conflict proves to be over the creature’s mate, and the victim is Victor’s own mate. As in Burke’s example, Sin is the invisible third party standing between the father and son. The world seen by creator and creature is constructed of the most familiar image patterns of the Revolution, beginning with Barruel’s illuminati. The word illuminé; was, of course, radically ambiguous, “used by people in diametrically opposed ways” as reason and as revelation, as right and as wrong, as royal authority and as human liberty.3 4 When Victor reads Cornelius Agrippa, he finds that a “new light seemed to dawn upon my mind” (p. 32), and this is the familiar illumination which (in terms similar to Paine’s) becomes fire in the thunderstorm that first suggests the idea of how to galvanize inert matter into life: on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbands of wood. I never beheld any thing so utterly destroyed. (p. 35)

I . . . was overcome with delight at the warmth I experienced from it. In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects. (p. 99)

Frankenstein’s monster runs the gamut of the associations of birth, springtime, and the heat that becomes destructive fire, found in so many of the writings of the Revolution. His birth is described as a kind of emergence into spring, and his progress is to the beautiful spot of the cottagers, from winter to spring (p. 111), followed by the disastrous confrontation and dispersal of himself and the foster-family he had tried to join. Victor describes his own breakdown following the “birth” of the monster, and then his recovery, in terms of the seasons: I perceived that the fallen leaves had disappeared, and that the young buds were shooting forth from the trees that shaded my window. It was a divine spring; and the season contributed greatly to my convalescence. I felt also sentiments of joy and affection revive in my bosom. . . . (p. 57)

This description of lightning-electricity as both life-giving and utterly destructive, aimed at “an old and beautiful oak,” is a final echo of the vocabulary in which Shelley’s mother and her opponents (in particular Burke with his British oak) had described the Revolution. The effect is that of the crowd’s vengeance in The Monk, but the image leads into the Promethean associations of light and fire, benevolence and destruction. (Napoleon was associated with Prometheus by Byron and by his own propaganda machine.) The creature is born into light, so strong that “I was obliged to shut my eyes” (p. 97), and darkness and light alternate as he closes and opens his eyes. While light allows him to move about and “wander on at liberty,” it leads him to seek relief in its opposite: “The light became more and more oppressive to me; and, the heat wearying me as I walked, I sought a place where I could receive shade” (p. 98). His enlightenment-oriented master, we recall, was given to remarking that “Darkness had no effect upon my fancy” (p. 47).

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As the creature’s eyes become “accustomed to the light” so that he can now “perceive objects in their right forms,” he comes upon light in its next higher incarnation, fire:

The irony is that Victor fails to recognize the connection between his production of the monster and this rebirth and the conventional imagery going back to Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft of the Revolution seen from a positive point of view as the beautiful. Victor sees it instead as the terrible, the sublime, the threatening, and the tragedy of his reaction is that, like Burke, he turns the creature into the sublime destructive force he reads into his aesthetic response to it—when his response presumably should rather have been that of a sensitive parent. What is needed is the beautiful love of a mother, not the sublime fear of a father. The warmth of spring ends, however, as destructive and then self-destructive fire. The creature tells us that he is going to end his life on a funeral pyre at the North Pole: Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace. . . . (p. 221)

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New River (which supplied London with its water). But the insurrection in fact comes down to the planting of a Liberty Tree by some schoolboys:“Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane,” as Sheridan concludes (Speeches, 1816, III, 89-91).

It seems not possible to write about the Revolution and avoid the aesthetic categories first introduced by Burke in his Reflections. Victor has made the creature out of beautiful features, but the scale is too large and the juxtapositions ugly— and the whole inspires terror. Thus, as Victor says when he sees the creature for the first time instilled with life: “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (p. 53). And the beautiful cottage, its surrounding scenery, “the perfect forms of my cottagers” (as the creature says), and Safie with her “countenance of angelic beauty and expression” (pp. 109, 112), are set against the looming presence of the monster which destroys the locus amoenus and disperses this, another family.

3. As John K. Mathison put it: “From the gothic novels, Catherine had come to believe in the possibility of cruelty, violence, and crime that her sheltered life had shown no signs of” (“Northanger Abbey and Jane Austen’s Conception of the Value of Fiction,” ELH, 24 [1957], 149). See also Marily Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, 1975), for an interesting account of the background of Austen’s novels in anti-Jacobin fiction.

Mary Shelley is summing up all we have seen about the Gothic as a fiction in which to describe the French Revolution. The positive representations of the Revolution tended to stop—insofar as they remained positive and did not move on to the next phase of response—at the burst of sexual energy, which was creation. Beyond that, Paine, Price, Blake, and others suggested a vaguely pastoral life, an ideal of a Golden Age of leisure defended by Godwin and predictably attacked by Malthus, Crabbe, and Burke. The negative, dark side of the Revolution thus not unnaturally tended to fall into the fiction of the Gothic; and this suited Burke’s way of thinking in his Reflections, for precisely what was being destroyed was the beautiful, passive, feminine, chivalric, pastoral world that is embodied in the maiden fleeing down dimly lit, tortuous corridors, followed by the active, masculine, sublimely aggressive force of the French revolutionaries who threatened the queen and abducted, humiliated, and overthrew her husband, the father of his people, the king.

Notes 1. The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (London, 1923), V, 158-60. Page numbers cited in the text refer to this edition. 2. Part of the context of the passage is the sort of response a revolutionary sympathizer like Richard Brinsley Sheridan made to the rumors being bandied about. He tells his fellow Members of Parliament with mock seriousness “that there was a plan for taking the Tower by the French; after which, the whole of our constitution was to be overturned, and the Royal Family were to be murdered. At the head of this plot was to be placed that most execrable character, Marat. . . .” There were also to be attempts to poison the

4. At one point Henry tells Catherine, “I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage,” and fills in the analogies. “But they are such very different things!—” says Catherine, the reader of Gothic romances (p. 76). Tilney extends the comparison to other details, and we remember that his view is through most of the novel normative of the real as opposed to Gothic fictions. “[B]ut still they are so very different,” Catherine, however, responds again; and indeed they are. Both Henry and Catherine are right. They are talking about the relation of the sign or the representation to reality—which finds a particularly interesting case in the French Revolution. 5. See Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790); and Paulson, “Burke’s Sublime and the Representation of Revolution,” in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), pp. 241-70. 6. The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson (London, 1973), pp. 357-58. 7. Rights of Man, Pt. II (1792; rpt. London, 1969), p. 232. On the imagery of light, to which we shall return, see Paulson, “Turner’s Graffiti: The Sun and its Glosses,” in Images of Romanticism, ed. Karl Kroeber and William Walling (New Haven, 1978), pp. 171-83. 8. The caricaturist James Gillray presents equally undifferentiated images (as to good and evil) of Louis XVI and the canaille who abuse him (French Democrats surprising the Royal Family, 27 June 1792). 9. Quoted by Robert D. Mayo in his Introduction to George Moore’s Grasville Abbey (1797; Arno Press ed., 1974), p. x. 10. Introduction to Count St. Blancard by Mary Meeke (1795; Arno Press ed., 1977), p. xv. 11. Travels during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789 (Dublin, 1793), II, 517. For the Jacobin novel, see Butler, pp. 29-87; Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805 (Oxford, 1976); and Paulson’s review of Kelly in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 11 (1978), 293-97. 12. Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (London, 1978), pp. 262, 639; see also pp. 639-41. 13. See Robert C. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 282-90. 14. Young, Travels, II, 515, 516. 15. Mythology of the Secret Societies (London, 1972), p. 10 (on Barruel in general, see pp. 188-202); and Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797-98; English eds. also published in 1797-98).

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And having said this, he makes off on his ice raft, and the novel ends: “He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance”—a final sublime object.

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16. Abraham Cowley, quoted by Martin Price, “The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers,” Yale Review, 58 (1969), 206. 17. A related, more specific progression, which was one way of reading the events, began with moderate leaders who had intended no violence or mass upheaval but were swept away by the movement they unleashed. The “moderates,” by upsetting the existing order, released other forces of society: in Paris, the mob, the Jacobin clubs, and the politicians who wanted equality of taxes and representation; in the country, the naturally conservative peasants who rose in agrarian revolt. 18. Nelson C. Smith, “Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radcliffe,” SEL, 12 (1973), 577-90. See also Mary Poovey, “Ideology in The Mysteries of Udolpho,” Criticism, 21 (1979), 307-30. 19. The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London, 1966), p. 329. 20. Butler, p. 28. Sheridan’s indulgence toward Charles Surface in School for Scandal was attacked by Henry Mackenzie in Anecdotes and Egotisms, ed. H. W. Thompson (London, 1927), p. 204, and by the anti-Jacobins Robert Bisset (Douglas, or the Highlander [1801], III, 111-14) and Charles Lucas (The Infernal Quixote [1801], I, 252). 21. Poovey, passim. 22. Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London, 1970), p. 133. 23. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland (1817), pp. 19-24. 24. We should also recall Mary Shelley’s account of her visit to Versailles, and of seeing a particular boar hunt illustrated in a book in the royal library, and of reading into it the origin of a chain of events that had only now come to an end in the prostration of France (Mary Shelley’s Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman, OK, 1947], I, 63). 25. Tracing the Assassins through Gibbon and his sources, Mary then read Louis Maimbourg’s History of Dualism. She seems to have been interested in 1815 and 1816 in the relationship of Enlightenment thought to the interest in occultism and psychic phenomena that immediately preceded the Revolution (Mary Shelley’s Journal, I, 19). 26. Frankenstein, ed. James Rieger (New York, 1974), pp. 42-43. Page numbers cited in the text refer to this edition, which is based on the first edition of 1818. 27. Roberts, Mythology of the Secret Societies, p. 196. See also Clarke Garrett, “Joseph Priestley, the Millenium, and the French Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 34 (1973), 51-66. 28. Historical and Moral View, pp. 56-57. 29. The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford, 1904), p. 36; Shelley’s Prose, ed. D. L. Clark (Albuquerque, 1966), pp. 307-8. 30. See Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York, 1976), pp. 91-100; Mary Shelley’s Journal, I, 40-41; and her letter to T. J. Hogg, 6 March 1815, in Shelley and his Circle, ed. K. N. Cameron and D. H. Reiman (Cambridge, MA, 1970), III, 453.

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31. She later recalled the “excessive and romantic attachment to my father,” which she said the second Mrs. Goodwin “had discovered” (The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman, OK, 1944], II, 88). 32. Godwin’s second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, was a widow with two children of her own. Additional members of the “family” were Fanny Imlay (Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate child by Gilbert Imlay) and William, the child of Godwin’s second marriage. 33. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, Pt. II, Sect. III-IV, ed. J. T. Boulton (London, 1958), pp. 58-64. 34. Roberts, p. 134.

ALISON MILBANK (ESSAY DATE 1994) SOURCE: Milbank, Alison. “From the Sublime to the Uncanny: Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction.” In Gothick Origins and Innovations, edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, pp. 169-79. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994. In the following essay, Milbank explores the development of Gothic fiction in the Victorian period through analyses of “sensation fiction” and through the use of feminist literary theory.

This paper begins by tracing an extremely schematic double genealogy for gothic writing of the Victorian period in texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then focuses on the tales and novels of Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Le Fanu. To illuminate the various binary oppositions by which the paper is structured, I shall employ concepts of the sublime, especially as found in Freud, and also in the work of the feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray. My primary concern is with the production of sexual difference in gothic writing. One can discern two contrasting strands of Gothic in the 1790’s and beyond. First, the ‘female’ Gothic, which takes the subjectivity of the endangered, aristocratic heroine as its hermeneutic, and charts her incarceration in castle or convent. Her body is threatened with violation and death, but she resists, succeeds in escaping the tyrant’s power, and is finally revealed as the true heir. Ann Radcliffe is the exemplar of this tradition, and authors of both sexes in the ranks of the Minerva Press imitate her romances. Even Maturin tries his hand at the form, but without the same emphasis on feminine expression. Secondly, the ‘male’ Gothic delineates ingress rather than egress, especially entrance into private domestic space, such as the woman’s bedroom, the convent and the female body by a transgressive masculine protagonist like Ambrosio in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), who contemplates copulation in a convent mortuary, or the resource-

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The next binary opposition which is to be brought into play is taken from Sigmund Freud. It is noticeable, both before and after David Morris’s influential article on gothic sublimity, how frequently Freud’s essay, ‘On the Uncanny’, with its elegant presentation of the return of repressed material as an uncanny, literally ‘unhomely’ experience is invoked by commentators on the Gothic.1 As Freud emphasises, the uncanny can only be felt when that which has been repressed is allowed to surface, and to be represented.2 If incest, for example, a common trope of the Gothic, is presented in the desire of Manfred in Otranto, or the unfortunate result of Ambrosio’s rape of Antonia in The Monk, then it cannot, as David Morris argues in his article, be sublime, since the sublime is precisely the point at which representation fails. The sublime is that which cannot be represented. Indeed, the uncanny in a text acts often to turn what might be sublime back into the beautiful.3 However, at the same time that Freud was completing his modernist uncanny essay, he was also embarking on a rather more postmodern work, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in which the death instincts are introduced as in agonistic struggle with those of eros, and resistance to symbolisation produces a sublime.4 Now if the use of the uncanny can be said to characterise the ‘male’ Gothic’s supernatural incursions, its transgressions and forced repetitions by means of which the tabooed is brought into representation, then ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ more closely interacts with what I have described as ‘female’ Gothic, with its structure of sexual antagonism, its presentation of gaps in consciousness, its death fears and its delight in the sublime as that which ‘subjects’ the human being. In Lewis’s The Monk, in Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), and in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), there is indeed a sublime, which is located in the ambitious reach of

the hero or anti-hero; in Ambrosio’s oratory, Melmoth’s agonies, Falkland’s superhuman stature. Theirs is the sublime described by Longinus and the civic humanists, but it is a sublime that has come adrift from its audience, so that it no longer overcomes its hearers to empower them, but merely dominates them.5 Rather it is an antisublime and a parody. In Radcliffe by contrast, the sublime is often a shared, equalising experience, as when Adeline and the la Lucs gaze upon the Alps in The Romance of the Forest (1791), or Emily, St Aubert and Valancourt behold the Pyrenees. Even Elena, viewing the landscape from the confinement of an Apennine convent in The Italian (1797) can invoke an absent community of taste by sublime response. For this aesthetic is not merely a matter of individual emotion, but of universal claim.6 It is in this context that one can begin to make distinctions in the area of Victorian Gothic. It is, I believe, the ‘male’ Gothic and the mock-sublime, infused with such democratic materials as trial accounts, police reports and popular ballads, that finds its articulation in the ‘sensation’ fiction of the mid-nineteenth century by writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade and Mary Braddon. These novels combine extreme situations with detailed contemporary settings. They set in train excessive emotions and perverse mental states, which are expressed primarily in action, as the protagonists pit themselves against social convention and legal process. Whereas the male protagonist of the earlier form was justified to some extent by the excess of his passions, or the lack of free range for his abilities, so these later, often female characters are shown to be excluded from social presence and positioning as women by unjust laws and social hypocrisy. They become housebreakers, forcing ingress to gain control by marriage to a powerful man, and the taboos they break are those of sexual conduct and private morality, and the laws concerned with these, such as bigamy. They are also not above a little burglary, blackmail, and forgery. Predicated upon the production of bodily effect, of sensations, the novels depend upon the devices of the uncanny— doubles, disguises, repetitions and horror. This last effect, unlike terror, is the dread of understanding what one fears; it is the fear of knowledge, rather than ignorance. In contrast to the works of less ‘pure’ sensationalists, such as Dickens, whose pages have more than their fair share of death scenes, the sensation novel avoids death, or, as in the case of Lady Audley’s husband thrown by her down a well, involves deaths that turn out not to

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ful debauchees of de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, who set out to break every sexual taboo. In their different ways, Maturin, Hogg and Godwin continue this emphasis on the guilty transgressor. Horace Walpole, author of the earlier tale, The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the drama, The Mysterious Mother (1768), can be seen as engenderer of both ‘female’ and ‘male’ forms, which co-exist in often uneasy relation in his work. But as Manfred’s daughter, Matilda, in Otranto, dies at her father’s hand, sacrificed to his passion for Isabella, so the ‘female’ elements of his work are subsumed by his greater interest in the range and extremity of masculine passion.

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be fatal. Even in Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), the villains do not, after all, need to murder their destined victim, Anne Catherick, since she dies naturally. Instead, the typical sensation ‘murder’ is that of Fosco: ‘With my vast resources in chemistry, I might have taken Lady Glyde’s life. At immense personal sacrifice, I followed the dictates of my own ingenuity, my own humanity, my own caution—and took her identity instead.’7 The form’s playfulness with identities, assumed and denied, and the deliberate act of transgression performed by its heroines, has given it a privileged status in some feminist criticism. Magdalen Vanstone, the ambiguous heroine of Collins’s No Name (1862), is the paradigm of liberal feminist virtue because she ‘acts for herself . . . using men to her advantage rather than subordinating herself to them. Though her conscious goal is to regain the name and inheritance unjustly taken from her, she is more profoundly rebelling against the fragility and emptiness of conventional feminine identity’.8 This verdict is shared by a number of writers on Collins. The plot of No Name is engendered by the lately discovered illegitimacy of two orphans, one of whom, Magdalen Vanstone, becomes an actress to gain money to mount an amatory assault in disguise on the cousin who inherited her name and fortune. After his death she disguises herself again, as a housemaid, to gain access to a family trust, only to be discovered, fall ill in East London, and be rescued by an admirer, Captain Kirke, who marries her. The ‘sensations’ of the narrative lie in the dizzy rapidity of plot and counter-plot of opposing groups, as the heroine’s shady uncle works to deceive Noel Vanstone’s watchful housekeeper, and effect an elopement. Magdalen acts passively, as her uncle instructs her: she is far from the independent heroine of feminist criticism; rather, she is the source of the uncanny in the novel. This is first located in her facial features, with their opposing characteristics that defy union: the eyes ‘incomprehensively and discordantly light’, the firm chin showing stability contrasted to a giddy mobility of expression. The dislocation of the parts of her body fetishises it, making it an erotic focus by its very contradictions, which is a technique Collins uses for Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White, and the siren Lydia Gwilt in Armadale (1866). This uncanniness is shown in a second way in Magdalen’s lack of name or identity which causes her to assume her various roles. First, she becomes

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an actress not on the public stage with a company but rather in a semi-private setting in which she gives a series of ‘At Home’s. She acts her former self, as a young lady entertaining her family and friends with songs and monologues. Her second role is as vamp, and her third, as housemaid, exposes her to mild sexual liberties by her employer and fellow servant. It completes her objectification. To much recent criticism this roleplaying de-stabilises assured categories of womanhood. But the novel’s ending suggests quite another purpose is thereby served. Magdalen questions Kirke about his response to reading her account of her adventures: ‘Say what you think of me with your own lips.’9 He does not reply with words of admiration, but bends down to close her lips with a kiss, thus assuring her of her sexual if not her moral perfection. Rather the two are revealed as one and the same. What the transgressions of the sensation heroine so often produce is a demystification of the feminine other, whose public antics only serve to render her the more nubile. In the case of Magdalen Vanstone, her essaying of the roles of actress, vamp and maid prepares her perfectly for marriage, in which they will be ‘privatised’. No longer uncanny, now that she has been re-assimilated by a name, she is revealed as the beautiful, the formed, in contrast to the Unform of Kant’s version of the sublime. Time and again in Collins’s work, rising to an apogee in The New Magdalen’s marriage of the prostitute and the clergyman, the uncanny, displaced woman (or jewel, in The Moonstone), is restored to patriarchal ordering, and her errancy is but a necessary stage in the construction of her value on the sexual market. In The Woman in White, Collins’s most traditional gothic tale, one seems to be closer to the Radcliffean tradition, but there is present the same uncanniness applied to the female characters, especially to Laura Fairlie, whose face evokes a sense of something lacking to the narrator. This is a classic case of repression, since it is her resemblance to her illegitimate half-sister, Anne Catherick, herself a blank ‘woman in white’, that causes the effect. The transgressive act of adultery has made two daughters where there should have been but one. The novel’s villain, Count Fosco, plays indeed with the term, ‘the sublime’, which he constantly applies to Marian Halcombe, but its use serves to undercut her authority, especially when one finds an invocation to ‘the sublime Marian’ in Fosco’s intervention in Marian’s own diary, at the point when she has lost control of the plot, and of her own narrative. Fosco com-

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The ‘female’ Gothic does, however, find a voice in Victorian fiction, notably in Charlotte Brontë’s fiction, in which entry into the gothic plot of enclosure creates a self of value, and in Dickens’s excursions into gothic terrain in Esther Summerson’s narrative in Bleak House (1852-3), and his re-writing of The Mysteries of Udolpho in Little Dorrit (1855-7). But the most Radcliffean writer then active was undoubtedly J. Sheridan Le Fanu, editor of the Dublin University Magazine. His shorter fiction, mainly concerned with the supernatural, consists of exercises in an extreme version of ‘male’ Gothic, in which a guilty man’s secrets are disclosed by ghostly invasion, and his self-narrative deconstructed into damnation. However, just as Freud’s work on the uncanny leads to what I should describe as a sublime— something ‘beyond the pleasure principle—so Le Fanu’s uncanny, supernatural tales give way to longer fictions mainly concerned with the escape of the aristocratic heroine of virtue from imprisonment in the time-locked great house, and from the burden of inherited guilt. In Wylder’s Hand (1864), the union of ‘male’ and ‘female’ forms is attempted, leading to a bizarre ending (for a Victorian novel) in which the two heroines, romantically unattached, are glimpsed by the narrator adrift on the Venetian Lido, still wedded to their family loyalties as the doge is to the sea, but exiled from their own house because of their awareness of its guilty history. They escape the narrator’s comprehension, and remain unassimilated by his text. The Rose and the Key (1871) goes further in its denunciation of the evils of the present as well as a past social system. Maud Vernon sets off innocently, like Maturin’s Stanton, for a country house visit, only gradually to realise that her genteel, though eccentric, companions are lunatics, and that her mother has had her made an inmate in an asylum. Le Fanu so develops this theme about the relative normality and domesticity of the place as to suggest that the social order itself is a Foucaldian prison, and Maud’s eventual release has, perforce, an apocalyptic quality.

However, it is in Uncle Silas: A Tale of BartramHaugh (1864) that Le Fanu’s work most closely follows Radcliffe, to whose heroine, Adeline de Montalt, his heroine compares herself. It also contains his most extended version of the sublime in its apocalyptic form. In Uncle Silas, the young heiress, Maud Ruthyn, moves on her father’s death from one isolated great house to another, even more isolated, and indeed, ruinous mansion, and the care of her uncle who had once been suspected of a bookmaker’s death, so lives retired. The murder is proved by a later replication, when Silas’s son enters Maud’s room to kill her by means of the same window machinery. Her malign governess accidentally murdered in her stead, Maud flees death and the house for freedom. Unlike the sensation novels of Collins and Braddon, Le Fanu’s novel, which he entitled a ‘tragic romance’, is obsessed with the idea of death, which is the frame of the heroine’s speculation. Elizabeth Bowen has therefore described Maud Ruthyn as death’s self-chosen bride. The two brothers Ruthyn have mortuary associations, and Silas once appears like a corpse, leading a recent television adaptor of the novel to associate Maud’s death fears with repressed incestuous desires. This would be a reading of Uncle Silas in terms of the uncanny. But Maud’s father’s Swedenborgian friend tries to lead the young child Maud’s gaze beyond the frame of death, and its house, the tomb. He leads the motherless girl to a high wall, then behind it, to see the scene of bucolic felicity it hides. Next he takes her to her mother’s mausoleum, and asks her what she sees: ‘Oh that—that place where poor mama is?’ ‘Yes, a stone wall with pillars, too high for either you or me to see over. . . . But Swedenborg sees beyond it, over and through it, and has told me all that concerns us to know. He says your mama is not there.’ ‘She is taken away!’ I cried, starting up, and with streaming eyes, gazing on the building which, tho’ I stamped my foot in my distraction, I was afraid to approach. ‘Oh is mama taken away? Where is she? Where have they brought her to?’1 1

Like Mary Magdalene at the tomb of Christ, the child can only imagine a materialistic explanation of an empty tomb. Her thoughts refuse to move beyond the fact of death, and the return of the ghost, to the sublime vision. Death for Maud is uncanny, and this uncanniness and fear of the supernatural precludes her understanding of the material threats which actually face her. Similarly, this passage with its use of a wall to image death,

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mends his wife for sublimity precisely because of her subjection to him.1 0 Both the use of the uncanny and the mock-sublime presage the phallocentric closure of the novel, when Laura’s lack, after she has lost name, position and character is filled by her low-born lover’s recreation of her, while she lives under his protection. Both heroines are displaced on the novel’s last page by the new male ‘Heir of Limmeridge’.

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suggests that the house itself is a barrier to perception. It is, after all, the balustrade of Knowl that provides the Swedenborgian with his first analogy. At Bartram-Haugh, whenever Maud tries to look out beyond the house through the window her breath mists the glass, and she sees nothing. In Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, the death instincts and repetition are in some way directly related, as movement occurs only to reestablish an original stability.1 2 Similarly, Le Fanu’s protagonist moves house only to repeat the forms and situation of her earlier residence. She also reinforces the sense of repetition by her frequent attempts to show resemblances between her father and her uncle. This fact runs counter to a conventional Freudian reading of the novel purely in terms of the projection of repressed characteristics of Austin Ruthyn, and in terms of incest and the uncanny.1 3 For Maud, as Dr Bryerly and Cousin Monica Knollys try to indicate, Silas is uncanny, a riddle, a Rembrandt portrait only partially emerging from shadow, because Maud refuses to allow his malign character and to separate him from her father, and the latter’s system of values. Far from creating a victimised self as part of a paranoid fantasy, as W. J. McCormack claims, Maud’s belated realisation of her intended murder is necessary in order for her to achieve any action, to move out of her frozen stasis. There is another repetitious journey, as Maud is taken, as she believes, to France, but in fact in a circle back to Bartram-Haugh, and close confinement while her death is prepared. This final series of repetitions is what enables her to cease viewing death as uncanny, and to face its reality. She confronts her uncle: ‘I think I must have looked like a phantom newly risen from the grave. ‘What’s that? Where do you come from?’ ‘Death! Death!’ was my whispered reply, as I froze with terror where I stood.’1 4 Maud becomes herself a representation of death, the final taboo, and it is this assumption of uncanny status that enables her to move beyond the uncanny perspective. For as the false window of her prison opens, and the murderer enters, Maud truly looks on death, but also beyond it. In the Pauline language that Le Fanu uses elsewhere, she moves from seeing ‘in a glass darkly’, to vision ‘face to face’. This direct sight is, in St Paul, only possible out of this world, in the world to come, at the eschaton. But this novel has another revelation to make, as well as a spiritual one. Maud’s escape from the great house is an escape from death, but also from the confinement of the house and its patriarchal authority, which is revealed as murderous. House

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and tomb are indeed revealed as one and the same. With the patriarchal house goes also its uncanny aesthetic, to which Maud had been equally in thrall, and the death/pleasure/repetition nexus of her earlier fears. In the 1947 film version of the novel, Lord Ilbury, Maud’s suitor, is allowed to carry her away to safety. The account of her flight in the novel itself is quite different. There, it is her devoted friend Meg, the keeper’s daughter, who at risk to her own life manages the escape. Maud’s haven is not her lover’s arms but the house of her elderly cousin Monica, a woman. In the paeon of praise in the book’s conclusion, only one man’s name, that of Dr Bryerly, is included in a female pantheon of cousins, friends and servants. The members of this list are both the recipients of the heroine’s affection and also the first-fruits of a world outside the collapsed culture of the great house. (For in Le Fanu the woman escapes not from private house to the public domain like a sensation protagonist, but from a ruined feudal social order.) Freud ends Civilisation and its Discontents with a hope that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary’.1 5 It is Eros which alone opposes stasis and death in Freud, and it is love alone, Maud Ruthyn notes in her narrative, that can, as St Paul says, be eternal when hope and faith ‘vanish into sight’. At the end of Uncle Silas it is women’s love for each other that can resist the deathly power of patriarchal control and point to a new order, a new heaven and earth, an eschatological sublime. It is a sublime because, despite the paradisal landscape of the novel’s conclusion, it is incomplete, unrepresentable except in the language of the Book of Revelation. As Jean-Francois Lyotard, speaking for Kant, says of the concept: ‘this feeling demands, and in a sense promises community. But this community is yet to be. It is not realized.’1 6 In her Ethique de la difference sexuelle, Luce Irigaray posits a new model of rapport between the sexes, not to be achieved through the female sublime and the awareness, as one finds in Lacan, of the unrepresentable supplementary nature of female jouissance.1 7 In Lacan, woman is the lack of a lack, and continually uncanny, just as she is continually desirable. She appears sublimely other because of her repression of her castration. The Ethique gestures towards a female transcendent, what Irigaray terms, eschatologically, a parousie, but I do not believe that this is the opening of the sublime, for this transcendent is to be represent-

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This is the point at which Irigaray’s work can bear upon ‘female’ Gothic, both Radcliffean and Victorian. By excessive emphasis on feminine integrity and on sexual difference, both of which are asserted (and constructed) at the moment of threat, the ‘female’ Gothic is engendered. And in Irigaray and ‘female’ Gothic alike, the ‘gap’ is what is brought into representation. Through the representation of this sublime difference, and through the new family experience of mothering which usually follows the heroine’s escape from the tyrant, she is able, to use Irigaray’s phrase, to be ‘reborn in her desire’ as a woman, and to consider entering upon an equalised sexual relation.2 0 Irigaray has been accused of feminine essentialism, which is unfair for a number of reasons, not least her assertion that we have no idea in what the feminine might consist. 2 1 Most importantly, Irigaray seeks the feminine not in some abject pre-Oedipal maternal wholeness but in language. The feminine needs to be represented, to be symbolised. It is sexual difference itself at which one wonders, not just the female sublime. This too is a project on which the ‘female’ Gothic can be said to have embarked. In her early novel of 1790, A Sicilian Romance, Radcliffe’s heroine, Julia, in escaping from her father’s plans for a forced marriage penetrates a series of caves where she finds her mother. She had believed that her mother died many years before, but she was, in reality, locked by her cruel husband in the vaults under the house so that he could make another marriage. Julia does not remain in maternal nostalgia for oneness but releases her mother into social presence and speech, and thereby herself into sexual fulfilment. Caroline Helstone in Brontë’s Shirley similarly finds a silent and selfpunishing mother whom she leads into public acknowledgement, while Maud Ruthyn’s mother is allowed to flee the tomb for the ascent of fantastic mountains, ‘peopled with human beings translated into the same image, beauty and splendour’.2 2

I have tried to suggest that the ‘female’ Gothic has a Utopian project, one based on an awareness of the sublime as an empowering aesthetic, which yet allows full place to a sense of loss and rupture, and to the subjected nature of the human. The Slovenian Lacanian, Slavoj Zizek regards the unsymbolisable Real of the Lacanian sublime as itself a trauma, an antagonism, that produces a tragic subject.2 3 But the ‘female’ gothic tradition places a positive ethical and erotic value on that very antagonism, so that we may less tragically repeat the Lacanian mantra: ‘ne pas ceder sur son desir’.

Notes 1. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, ed. James Stratchey and Anna Freud, Vol. XVII 19171919 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 217-56. Employers of the uncanny concept in Victorian Gothic criticism include Albert Hutter, ‘Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction’, Victorian Studies, 19, no.2 (December 1975), pp. 181-209; Peter Brooks, Reading For the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Columbia, 1984), especially the chapter on Great Expectations; Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What is “Sensational” about the Sensation Novel?’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 37, no.1 (June, 1982), pp. 1-28; and Diane Sadoff, ‘Locus Suspectus: Narrative, Castration and the Uncanny’, Dickens Studies Annual, 13 (1984), 207-30. David B. Morris’s article, ‘Gothic Sublimity’ is to be found in the special issue on the sublime of New Literary History, 16, no.2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 299-320. 2. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Ibid, p. 249. 3. Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Idea of the Sublime and the Beautiful is often accused by modern commentators of precisely this move. See Francis Ferguson, ‘The Sublime of Edmund Burke’, Glyph 8 (1981), pp. 62-78. 4. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol XVIII (1921-1922), pp. 3-64. 5. The author of Longinus’s On the Sublime states that the orator’s words ‘exercise an irresistible power of mastery and get the upper hand with every member of the audience’, p. 107 in Classical Literary Criticism, tr. T. S. Dorsh (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1974). 6. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Complexity and the Sublime’ in ICA Documents 4: Postmodernism (London: Free Press, 1989), p. 23, on the Kantian sublime in this respect. 7. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed Harvey Sucksmith, (Oxford, 1980), p. 581. 8. Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald and Myra Stark, Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins and the Victorian Sexual System (New York: Columbia 1982), p. 121. Nina Auerbach’s Woman and Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (New York: Columbia, 1979) and Sue Lonoff’s Wilkie Collins and His Victorian readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship (New York: AMS, 1985) share this view of Magdalen Vanstone. 9. No Name, (New York: Dover, 1978), p. 609.

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able in language.1 8 Rather, in her turn to Descartes’s siting of the origin of the passions in admiration, in wonder, is located Irigaray’s human sublime. She suggests the original admiration or wonder that the sight of the other’s difference evokes is the point of the possibility of a new ethical and sexual relation between them.1 9 The sexes are not in themselves sublime, indeed, they are all too representable, but the point of difference between them is illimitable.

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10. The Woman in White, p. 267 and p. 562. 11. Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh, ed W. J. McCormack (Oxford, 1981), p. 13. 12. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 36. 13. See W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). 14. Uncle Silas, p. 410. 15. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, Complete Psychological Works, Vol 21, p. 145. ‘But who can forsee with what successs and what result?’ was added in 1931, with reference to the rise of Hitler. 16. Lyotard, ‘Complexity and the Sublime’, p. 23. 17. Luce Irigaray, Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Paris: 1984). 18. Ibid, p. 139. 19. Ibid, pp. 75-77, especially p. 77: “Un exces resiste: son existence et son devenir comme lieu qui permet l’alliance et/par la resistance a l’assimilation ou la reduction au meme.” 20. Ibid., p. 141. 21. On Irigary and essentialism see Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990), and Margaret Whitford, Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991). 22. Uncle Silas, p. 410. 23. Slavoj Zizeck, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 3. Zizeck’s is, of course, an Hegelian reading of Lacan in terms of Hegel’s own reading of tragedy.

DEIDRE LYNCH (ESSAY DATE SPRING 2001) SOURCE: Lynch, Deidre. “Gothic Libraries and National Subjects.” Studies in Romanticism 40, no. 1 (spring 2001): 29-48. In the following essay, Lynch analyzes the role of libraries in revealing expressions of national identity within the Gothic tradition. This domain of phantasms is no longer the night, the sleep of reason, or the uncertain void that stands before desire, but, on the contrary, wakefulness, untiring attention, zealous erudition. . . . Henceforth, the visionary experience arises from the black and white surface of printed signs, from the closed and dusty volume that opens with a flight of forgotten words. . . . The imaginary now resides between the book and the lamp. —Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library”

In a Gothic novel, to enter the chambers a household sets aside for its reading and writing is to be recruited into a genealogical plot. The secret cabinets of Gothic libraries house memorials and legacies. To visit them is to stumble on wills made by dead fathers; long lost certificates of marriage; musty manuscripts; even, as in The Mysteries of

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Udolpho, the miniature-portrait of an unknown lady, concealed within a bag of coins—raw materials, all, for narratives of reproduction and succession. Walter Scott, not just an aficionado of old spectre-stocked mansions, but also romanticism’s most indefatigable bibliographer, can be counted on to comply with a basic rule of this literature: while surrounded by books, ink, and paper the protagonists of Gothic fiction embark on their projects of memory and mourning. These projects establish the terms on which the generations will be linked and on which the living will relate to the family dead. And when Gothic protagonists use the Gothic library as they are meant to, when they read, they are haunted. One site in which Ann Radcliffe’s Emily St. Aubert remembers the dead and, seeing spectres, receives assurance that the dead remember her, is the library of La Vallée. Re-entering it after an absence from home, Emily finds her way to the armchair in which her father had been accustomed to read and sees a book lying open as he had left it. “She immediately recollected that St. Aubert, on the evening before his [final] departure from the chateau, had read to her some passages from this, her favourite author. The circumstance now affected her extremely; she looked at the page, wept, and looked again. To her the book appeared sacred and invaluable, and she would not have . . . closed the page . . . for the treasures of the Indies.”1 The passage presages a pattern in the scenes that follow, in this novel and those of Radcliffe’s many romantic-era imitators: a pattern in which the supernatural will, to paraphrase Foucault, reside between the book and the lamp. Later, for instance, Emily’s manservant Ludovico will use a book picked up “in an obscure corner of the Marquis’ library” to kill time as he stands watch in a room rumoured to be haunted (551). It is, or so it appears, his very act of reading that raises the chateau’s ghosts: the narrator implies that once Ludovico ceases to regard the characters on the printed page, he instead sees the space before him filled by the spectral shape of the dead. The audience invited to put themselves in Ludovico’s place are reminded of how as readers they also are enlisted in a process characterized by periodic disappearances and apparitions, a process in which, time and again, the book as object, the thing of paper that one grasps in one’s hands, will, as one is engrossed by one’s reading, cease to be a material reality, while the ideas this book “contains” will begin “to exist” and to be embodied in their turn.

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This leads me to the second way I have to identify the Gothic libraries at issue in my essay— and leads me, too, to the terms in which this rereading of the Gothic might also reopen the question of Scott’s role in instituting the discipline of literary studies and with it the category of “English Literature,” which he helps equip with a canon, history, and tradition. (This is a question often engaged of late, but in work that tends to underestimate Scott’s debt to the female practitioners of the Gothic and to overlook the emotional baggage—the melancholy, trepidation, and even aggressivity—that freights the project of canon formation almost as much as it freights the ghostseeing that this “English Literature” depicts and abets.)2 As writing erected “within the archive,”3 Gothic fictions themselves do the cultural work of a library, the institution dubbed the national library in particular. Gothic fictions make us contemplate not only family origins but also literary sources—and, crucially, make us contemplate them in tandem. It is, of course, a critical commonplace that, in its obsessing over the secrets of the child bed, the Gothic gives voice to the culture’s anxieties about procreation, about the slippage between kinship arrangements and individuals’ sexual desires. My aim here, while preserving the feminism that informs that scholarship, is to relocate the base from which we investigate that anxiety over reproduction. What if the home base for our discussions of Gothic convention were not the bedroom but rather the library? To answer this question, I’ll be aligning the Gothic with other (often North Briton-monopolized) institutions of national cultural formation (the ballad collection, the anthology, “lives” of the poets and the novelists)—those projects of literary revivalism that so often proved irresistible for Scott, who frequently seems to have dreamt of single-handedly reissuing “English” in its entirety.4 The Gothic novelists conceive of themselves as the target market for enterprises of this kind, and they advertise their bibliophilia. Scarcely

canonical themselves, they are among the period’s chief exemplars of canon-love. Their texts are remarkable accordingly for the density of their intertextual allusions. The Castle of Wolfenbach, in Eliza Parsons’ 1793 Minerva Press novel of that name, is typical of its domiciliar kind in being endowed to excess, as a neighbor complains, with “‘bloody floors, prison rooms, and [in]scriptions, they say, on the windows to make a body’s hair stand on end.’”5 We know that, with its endowment of “[in]scriptions,” the typical Gothic text resembles that house. It is crowded with quotations and epigraphs from Shakespeare and Milton and the graveyard poets. This writing selfconsciously offers itself to British readers as the site where they may claim their ancestral birthright. The books-within-books I called attention to earlier are the conventional media of that selfconsciousness, of the interrogation of literary reading that is a central drama for the Gothic.6 And we know—because it is as if these novelists all did business with the same props department, because horror movies have likewise made the Gothic library a standard element in their mise-enscène—how any one of these books should look. Its dilapidated state, quaint woodcuts, and mildew will announce the fact that it has survived generations of readers, a longevity that casts into relief the truncated life expectancy accorded mere humans. My hope in this essay is that by tracing to its eighteenth-century origin this conventional source of Gothic suspense—the moment when the protagonist pries up the cover of the old book and begins to read—I will be able to demonstrate how this figure of reading (which is also a figure of what it means to probate one’s cultural “inheritance”) functioned in the program the first Gothic novels pursued both self-consciously and equivocally via their modelling of canon-love: that of addressing their audience as a nation. This reconstruction will involve me in a dispute with recent accounts of the geopolitics of the Gothic and attempts to specify the real object of the terror this tradition mobilizes. Cannon Schmitt and Judith Halberstam agree on how best to name that terror. They call it xenophobia. Schmitt, for instance, proposes that even or especially when set in foreign parts—the Black Forest or Catholic Italy—the Gothic functions as a “mechanism of Englishness, a technology of national subject-formation that works to confirm identification between English readers and ‘English’ characters and characteristics.”7 In this account of the novels’ Continental settings,

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Alerted to the uncanny aspects that attend on this everyday phenomenology, readers of Gothic fictions learn to associate the textual and the spectral. What Radcliffe’s reference in the earlier passage of Udolpho to “the treasures of the Indies” suggests as well is another point crucial to my argument: that the page the character regards in these episodes of phantasmagoria can be a legacy. Within these narratives, so often geared to resecuring the line of succession and the transmission of property, even the time of reading is given the reader by the dead. Literature is a family trust.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH (1805-1882)

Ainsworth was a Victorian novelist who helped popularize historical and criminal fiction in the nineteenth century. The widespread appeal of his early works gave Ainsworth celebrity status and immediate entrance into social and literary circles; his friendships with numerous authors and artists, including Charles Lamb and Charles Dickens, as well as his lavish dinners and weekend retreats, established him as the most noted literary host of his time. With few exceptions, Ainsworth’s novels readily fall into two categories: the Newgate novels, notable for their criminal heroes, and the historical romances, characterized by Ainsworth’s unusual mix of antiquarian detail and improbable, dramatic action. Rookwood (1834), a Newgate novel, features among its subplots the career of Dick Turpin and is the work which brought to final formulation the legend of that notorious highwayman. The supernatural aspects of the novel are focused on the curse which afflicts the family of the novel’s eponymous hero and the ominous signs which embody its threats and visitations. Windsor Castle (1843) is a tale of the court of Henry VIII, which includes the fates of the much-married king’s first three wives. A Gothic element is added by means of the symbolic figure of Herne the Hunter, who has become the Devil’s instrument as a result of a pact made in the distant past. In Ainsworth’s incomplete Gothic novel Auriol; or, The Elixer of Life (1865), written in imitation of Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, the hero is gifted with eternal youth by the elixir of life discovered by his grandfather, but in order to maintain his unnatural perfection, he must offer sacrifices to the Devil at tenyear intervals under the tutelage of the villainous Rougemont. Though Ainsworth is not ranked as a firstrate author by modern scholars, his works and the early critical reactions to them are valued as evidence of the social and literary climate during his era.

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nationality requires a foil to set it off. The Gothic makes itself useful, accordingly, by purveying a mode of distinguishing us from them. It seems pertinent, however, that these exotic Continental settings also invite writers like Radcliffe to use them in fantasies about romances’ power to establish communal systems of belief. Indeed, the distinctive feature that links the Gothic’s array of alien nations is the capacity that each has to be internally self-identical, that each has to be a nation. Italy, hence, is the site where a “taste for classic story [descends] to the peasants of the country,” as Radcliffe’s Emily discovers (421). And romance—“inventions which had captivated the . . . imagination in every rank of society in a former age” (552)—operate there as the media of cultural integration: “they sung of the wars of the Moors against Charlemagne and then of the woes of Orlando: afterwards the measure changed, and the melancholy sweetness of Petrarch succeeded” (177). Because, in Italy, literary history is, literally, in the very air a Gothic heroine breathes, floating on the breath of the “people,” such encounters with romance’s ubiquity suggest for me a dynamic of projection: one in which Italians figure not so much as demonized outsiders to “Englishness” but rather as exemplars of the unified interpretive community that a nation sufficiently enamoured of “English Literature” might be. So, although in this essay I’ll be following recent scholarship in associating the Gothic with the advent of a new and specifically cultural nationalism, my intent here is not to demonstrate, as it does, the efficiency with which the Gothic machinery terrorizes its protagonists and readers into a more secure because more xenophobic national identity. My attention to what happens with reading, quotation, and structures of address in this fiction has left me unconvinced that the Gothic simply gives form to what terrifies the national community. In my account, the Gothic also gives form to that which terrifies in the idea of a national community, of a literary nation especially, and that which mystifies as well. As archives conserving the national subject’s literary legacy, Gothic fictions reinstate those premises about the temporality, the locality, and the commonness of culture that underwrite the very concept of a national literature. I’m going to argue that it’s equally the case that, in this guise, these fictions literalize those premises and thereby make them strange. Radcliffe and her Minerva Press imitators/rivals—women such as Eliza Parsons and Eleanor Sleath—have an investment in reproducing and transmitting the nation’s literary G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

The canon love that these women stage is, I want to stress, a more Gothic event, more pressured by occult influences (unconscious desire, secret guilt) than the happy, hygienic (and voluntarist) affair we customarily have in mind when espousing our “love of literature.” For this reason, an account of the eerie literal-mindedness with which they render the nation as a dead poets’ society may also enrich recent discussions of how “Celtic cultural workers represented the ‘ghosts in the machine’ of English print culture”—not just by revivifying that dead metaphor, but also by illuminating the affective elements of fantasy and wish within that cultural work. And, conversely, the (feminine) devotion the Radcliffean Gothic brings to the task of collecting and preserving literary remnants appears less pious when evaluated in conjunction with the hard-headed opportunism these discussions ascribe to those Scottish professors, antiquaries, and (not least) historical novelists, who, less colonial subjects than savvy “colonizer[s] of ‘English,’” devised through their invention of the English literary tradition a new “technology of access to the imperial clerisy.”8

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legacy. There is no disputing this. Nonetheless, the plots of inheritance that originate in their Gothic libraries can uncannily defamiliarize the idioms of filiation and consanguinity that were deployed as the writer’s nationality and voice came to be reconceptualized as bequests from the dead.

Caricature of William Harrison Ainsworth, c. 1855.

Hazlitt accused the Waverley Novels of necromantically administering “charms and philtres to our love of legitimacy.”9 But what the Wizard of the North seems to have learned by heeding the ghostly voices in, and of, the Gothic is that being haunted is a compromise formation: the canonlove that is staged within the haunted Gothic library is, like the forms of national-cultural allegiance it underwrites, an ambivalent affair.

(and especially “invading” Scots’) rights to publish Thomson’s Seasons be postponed for eternity, the Lords’ rhetoric in effect declared classic Literature a national property. Henceforth, British literature “belonged to the British people.”1 0 The decision, which scholars have described as one that effectively institutes the idea of the public domain, clarified that copyright should not in the long term impose limits on what Justice Yates called “this gift”: “books are by the author’s publication of them irrevocably given to the public.”1 1 The canon—now understood as, in effect, a national trust fund, as the epitome of the gift that keeps giving—was the Briton’s birthright.

Let me turn now to those ghostly voices that haunt the scene of Gothic reading. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Britons developed new ways of canonizing writing and of harnessing texts to the myths of racial purity and continuous, unitary identity that underpin modern nation-states. Trevor Ross’s account of the debate leading to the 1774 decision in the copyright case of Donaldson v. Becket suggests one way the consumption of literature was reconceived in this period. It was revalued for how it enabled citizens to probate their common cultural inheritance. When the House of Lords refused to grant the London booksellers a perpetual term of copyright, resisting the booksellers’ demand that all others’

“Shall we not endeavor to secure to future generations, entire and unchanged, their birthright in Milton, in Addison, and Swift?” asked Thomas Sheridan at the time when the first salvos in the literary property debate were being fired.1 2 The endeavor Sheridan promoted was buttressed by the growing prominence in criticism of historicist approaches. Criticism’s discussions of the tradition had formerly been devoted to prizing poems for how they encouraged additional poetizing. The function of criticism, that is, was to facilitate ongoing cultural production. Once reoriented, however, criticism was in the eighteenth century harnessed to a new desire to look backward: to see texts as means of linking the

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Poetic succession ceased in the later eighteenth century to be merely “a trope of legitimation among poets themselves,” becoming instead, as Ian Duncan writes, “the property of an expanding reading public.”1 4 As Duncan implies, there was nothing new about the practice of invoking a metaphor of “legitimacy” to authorize a work of literature. Yet in the later-eighteenth-century context, some old family trees of literary history became newly important. To think about that significance, and to shift our attention from the ways in which the relation of reader to book altered in the mid-century to the ways in which the relation of book to book was transformed as well, we might juxtapose a pair of Gothic libraries: the first, the setting for the opening chapter of Charlotte Smith’s 1788 Emmeline, or, the Orphan of the Castle; the second, the “Green Chamber” of Scott’s 1816 The Antiquary.

Title page of Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach: A German Story, 1793.

present generation to the generations preceding it. To this end, source studies (which cast the author under investigation as some one’s posterity in his turn) became standard parts of the literary critic’s arsenal. That the business of the critic was redefined along these lines intimates how the critic’s object had also altered. In the mid-century a transvaluation of literary antiquity brought about a state of affairs in which it really was the case that the best poet was a dead poet: a spectralization of “English” I’ll engage shortly. Mideighteenth-century commentators abandoned the progressive framework that they had worked within hitherto and that associated the writing of England’s past with an irredeemable linguistic unruliness and obscurity. In its place, we have something like Samuel Johnson’s test of time—his proposal that the only reliable way to appraise the author is to ascertain whether, “outliving his century,” he can retain the fidelity of multiple generations of readers. Such an arrangement effectually forestalls any claim writing by the living might make to value.1 3

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Having delivered proof after proof of its heroine’s “natural good breeding,” Smith’s novel concludes, as we expect it will, with the discovery of Emmeline’s legitimacy and her restoration to the estate that is her birthright. It begins correspondingly, with a parable of canon formation that evidences how the metaphorics of literary legitimacy and the literary legacy had been revivified. It seems utterly appropriate that when we first glimpse Emmeline, our foundling heroine should be exploring the castle’s ruined library, where books “of all ages” are likewise to be found. There she salvages those works not yet injured by time. They are, of course, (no surprises here either): “Spencer and Milton, two or three volumes of the Spectator, and [sic] old edition of Shakespeare, and an odd volume or two of Pope.” She cleans off the dust and removes them to the room which the village carpenter has equipped with a shelf, “on which, with great pride of heart, she placed her new acquisitions.” Emmeline has reconstituted the line of literary succession, and her canon-making prefigures the manner in which Smith throughout the novel will align questions of pedigree, the disposition of property, and nationality. (Ultimately, this heroine’s discovery of the documents certifying her parents’ marriage, in a chest that, among other “silent memorials of the dead,” also houses “several pieces of poetry,” will save her from the marriage to a foreigner and the expatriation that her plotting persecutors have arranged for her.)1 5 Its most notable furnishing an ancient tapestry to which a modern hand has added a border embroidered with Chaucerian verses, the Green Chamber in The Antiquary enables a plot twist that

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Lovel in these pages is also restored to the real estate of his biological father, but within Scott’s novel that restoration is made to appear a mere copy of the earlier reunion of one “kindred spirit” to the other that occurs when Lovel and Oldbuck bond over old books, a bond that rewrites genealogy, virtually, as surrogacy. Scott arranges for fictions and the fictitious (dreams and poems and the idea of a fellowship founded on shared consumer preference) to make common cause with sacralized notions of pedigree, patrimony, and home(land).1 9 Comparable alliances organized the discipline of English Literature at its inception. In fact, those fantastically parthenogenic genealogies that remain the stock in trade of our curricula, and

make it seem as if Chaucer begat Shakespeare, who begat Milton, and so forth, could accommodate with particular ease the narratives that the period devised to intensify the identity politics of a new age of nations. For, in some measure, it was by being placed within the discourse of family—being accommodated to the fiction of patrilineal succession—that the work of literature became national. This is not surprising. After all, the genealogical metaphor that renders the history of writing as a tradition, and remakes the history of writers as a history of an uninterrupted family line, also underpins Edmund Burke’s conception of nationality as a matter of inbred filial sentiments and of “the nation as self-inheriting, continuously bequeathing . . . national character to itself.”2 0 In his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France Burke defined the nation as a concentrically ordered web of kinship relations: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to . . . is the first principle . . . of public affections.” The central claim of his Reflections is that “It has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity.”2 1 The new idea of a literary tradition seems to promise something similar to what Burke wants for the nation and what he finds when he considers the entailed estate, property that cannot be alienated from a particular kin group. Like the entailed estate, the literary legacy promises a subordination of alterity to unity, an elision of past and present, and progress without change. Cultural nationalism demands that literature reproduce nationality. An episode in the reception history of Ossian’s (or James Macpherson’s) Fingal, which shows how the idea of cultural tradition was freighted with anxieties of its own, also shows how such a demand could rest on reproductive politics of the most familiar, familial kind. Macpherson, of course, was accused of having been over-zealous in his efforts to fill in the blanks in the literary family tree. In 1786 James Boswell used tellingly anxious terms when he contemplated the possibility that, in Ossian, Macpherson might have invented rather than recovered a new forefather. Defenders of Macpherson’s honesty and Fingal’s authenticity had previously conceded that some passages in that epic might indeed have originated not with Ossian but with his editor and translator. At the same time, those defenders had declined to distinguish the emendations from those passages that were authentic Ossianic creations. Their equivocation disgusted Boswell. One

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attests at once to Scott’s determination to make haunting something like a family affair and to a parallel determination to make literature something like a family heirloom. When Scott’s foundling hero Lovel, in numerous respects a Gothic heroine manquée, enters the room with his host, the eponymous antiquary, neither is in the frame of mind requisite for the ghostseeing that is de rigeur for the chamber’s inmates; both characters are instead indulging a lovelorn melancholy that Scott represents through a quotation from the Lyrical Ballads (“The Fountain”). For Lovel, however, this deficit in what Scott (describing the reader of the Gothic) elsewhere calls “that secret and reserved feeling of love for the marvellous and supernatural” proves temporary.1 6 As, respectively, modern and bygone specimens of the vernacular tradition, the quotations that are juxtaposed here to provide the episode with its mottoes bear witness to Wordsworth’s and Chaucer’s kinship as national poets.1 7 In comparable fashion, the episode also drops a hint about the foundling’s filiation; for, by the end of the chapter, the Oldbucks’ family ghost, “Aldobrand Oldenbuck,” has appeared in the young man’s dream, with book in hand, exactly as he has appeared in the Green Chamber on previous occasions.1 8 And this mark of favor from Monkbarns’ most permanent resident, its ancestral dead, is extended—as Scott intimates via the conclusion that discloses Lovel’s parentage which proves his legitimacy and makes his fortune—because Lovel virtually is family. The first love of Lovel’s long dead mother, readers learn in the novel’s last pages, was the present representative of the Oldbuck family, the eponymous antiquary himself. The idea of appending Chaucerian verses to the Green Chamber’s tapestry was her own home-making, historicizing touch.

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source of this disgust is registered when, expressing it, Boswell shifts the topic from an illegitimate text to illicit sex: “Antiquaries and admirers of [Fingal] may complain, that they are in a situation similar to that of the unhappy gentleman whose wife informed him, on her death-bed, that one of their reputed children was not his; and, when he eagerly begged her to declare which of them it was, she answered, ‘That you shall never know,’ and expired, leaving him in irremediable doubt as to them all.”2 2 The ingredients of a Gothic novel are assembled in Boswell’s anecdote. Boswell gives us a dead mother, he gives us a deathbed revelation of child bed secrets, and he gives us an illegitimate child who from this moment forward must feel, as the Radcliffean heroine does, that “there was a mystery in her birth dishonorable to her parents” (Udolpho 650). Worried about being cheated of his cultural birthright as a British reader, Boswell seems almost to contemplate his own retroactive bastardizing. That the worries of this nationalist reader should converge with the genealogical crises of all the possibly illegitimate children populating the Gothic makes sense—at least so I’ve been attempting to demonstrate. Boswell’s contemporaries—to recapitulate—saw the literary canon reconstituted as a category that comprised old works only. They witnessed the resurrection of much old literature, valued as the nation’s lines of communication with its dead, dead with the animating power to bring Britain to life and to imaginary community. A new, historicizing focus on writing’s life in time at once exemplified and contributed to the new urgency about reproducing old works, and to legitimate themselves, new texts began then to display their elegiac relation to works from the past. And henceforth the most legitimate reading was that which proved one’s continuing, filial attachment to those who had gone before. When writing and reading English Literature become (to borrow Esther Schor’s punning phrase) ways of “bearing the dead,” of embracing the pleasures and burdens of living with the past, do we not encounter something like a wish to be haunted? Romantic-period culture makes ghosts and authors interchangeable—the morning after a night spent in a haunted mansion one character in Scott’s Woodstock (1826) tells another that “Chaucer” is not (as his less literate companion infers from the name) a spectral “‘huntsman,’” but “‘one of those wonderful fellows . . . who live after they are buried and whose words haunt our ears after their bones are long mouldered in the

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dust.’” And within that culture’s dramas of canonlove it remains uncertain whether such a recasting of authorship is meant principally to empower the author, emancipating him from mortality, or rather to enthrall the reader. “Why should Milton and Shakespeare . . . die?” asked William Godwin in his 1809 Essay on Sepulchres, his scheme for marking the graves of heroes and poets and through these commemorative arrangements enabling a more thorough-going remembering of the nation’s dead. “Perhaps yet they shall not wholly die . . . some spirit shall escape from [Milton’s] ashes, and whisper to me things unfelt before.”2 3 There is something scary about the manner in which death here seems to breach the boundary between writer and reader: Godwin’s reference to a whisper brings a dead John Milton up close. Are the tutelary spirits of “English Literature” friendly ghosts? Canon formation, Joseph Roach has written, using terms that suggest that our cherishing of dead poets might in fact be meant to disarm them, “serves the function that ‘ancestor worship’ once did.” “The English classics help control the dead to serve the interests of the living.”2 4 I don’t wish to overlook how, as Boswell’s analogy testifies, communications controlling the dead could also serve as mandates for the control of female bodies. And at the close of this essay I shall return briefly to that perennial topic of the female Gothic, the gender injustice implicit in the idea of a cultural patrimony. First, let me discuss in more specific terms how Gothic conventions provided writers and readers with the means of accommodating the transformation of canonical literature that I’ve been reconstructing. If a figure like Chaucer had, at the start of the eighteenth century, been condescended to for belonging to “the infancy of English poetry,” his imperfections written off with a reference to the primitive time in which he lived and the observation that “we must be children before we grow into men,” the supernatural communications with the canon that organize Gothic fictions indicate how the order of generations was later to be transposed.2 5 Following that reversal the works inside the tradition were endowed with the mysterious authority that parents exert within the oedipal household, the authority of those who pre-exist us. The Gothic is where the nationalized literary tradition writes a story about itself. Gothic authors take dictation from tradition. As showcases for quotations from the classics, as well as for lyric poems their protagonists compose extemporaneously, these books must have seemed like antholo-

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The Gothic text’s epigraphs and the fragments of quoted poetry that interrupt its descriptions also help to make it the print equivalent of the soundscapes Scott loves—those ancient mansions, described in his essay on Walpole, whose halls “echo to the sounds of remote generations.” The voices of the remote generations of those ancestors the anthologists called “The British Poets” are to be found at the outermost levels of the Gothic and the Waverley novel alike. They are displayed in the books’ chapter headings. But poetry also finds its home in the interior confines of the character’s subjectivity—in lyric poems, spontaneously composed by the heroine or hero, that document inner selves. Some of the most haunting effects of Gothic fiction arise when this distinction between outside and inside is collapsed, hauntingly.2 8 Shakespeare has the first word in Eleanor Sleath’s novel The Nocturnal Minstrel (1810)—a quotation from Twelfth Night gives Sleath her epigraph for chapter 1. “That strain again!—it had a dying fall; Oh, it came o’er my ear like the sweet South.”2 9 Yet beyond representing the antique authority who legitimates the novel’s literariness, the dead bard resurrected so as to give cultural

capital to the living, Shakespeare also seems, a haunting presence, to have stolen into the characters’ reveries. When we move past that initial chapter heading in Sleath’s novel, the heroine’s first words seem to respond to the question the epigraph poses tacitly—“what music is that?” And yet this question is one the character cannot ever consciously have heard. Her words feel like the result of subliminal suggestion. The subject on which the Baroness Fitzwalter speaks is the mysterious music that has been heard in the neighborhood of her castle, the musician, like the echo, eluding efforts of location. Ultimately the nocturnal minstrel will be discovered—he is the Baroness’ husband, falsely reported dead months before the novel’s opening. The web of associations at work here links a character’s mournful fidelity to her beloved with something we would like to think of as more impersonal, the reader’s fidelity to Shakespeare. It links both modes of feeling to the phantasmatic, for, as one might expect, the eerie possibility the novel flirts with is that the music has no earthly point of origin, that the nocturnal minstrel is a ghost. It’s as if the Shakespearean words that supply the epigraph raise the spectre. It’s as if they are the spectre.3 0 The land is full of noises. The murmurings of the dead poets are in the air. In an Enquirer essay of 1797 William Godwin chose strangely spooky terms to write of the national literature’s secret ministry. “I cannot tell what I should have been, if Shakespear or Milton had not written. The poorest peasant in the remotest corner of England, is probably a different man from what he would have been but for these authors.” The influence that the national poets exert on the individual in modern times, Godwin goes on to explain, is so far-reaching as to affect even those who have never heard Shakespeare’s or Milton’s names: the inspiration “passes from man to man, till it influences the whole mass.”3 1 The account of the origins of collective life evoked by Godwin’s exercise in literary appreciation has its scary aspects: there is not much in the way of public spirit, or social contract, or even agency here. Instead there is a kind of fetishism that makes books into the actors and authors of collective life. The national subject Godwin portrays does not exactly take possession of his birthright. Instead, this national subject is possessed in turn. He is ghost-written by Tradition. Eliciting our paranoia, Godwin makes a statement about literary works’s spectral influence across time and space that we re-encounter in the echo chambers of a Gothic novel, transposed to a still more eerie register.

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gies to their first readers. Gothic authors also literalize the terms in which cultural nationalism reimagines the reader as a national subject. Thus within a novel like Eliza Parsons’ The Mysterious Warning (1796), texts literally represent legacies, bequests from the dead. Reading here is situated in a strange time of posthumousness. Death in Parsons’ novel is the precondition for the delivery of the packet that contains the sinning wife’s confession. Fatalities are the pretexts that send Parsons’ protagonist into the libraries of dilapidated castles, where he is wont to discover manuscripts—on one occasion, he finds with a guilty thrill, a manuscript that is addressed to him (to “The stranger, who calls himself Ferdinand”).2 6 These are manuscripts we read too, over Ferdinand’s shoulder as it were. In effect, death publishes the text that allows the novel’s readers to keep reading. In this time-frame made strange by what we might call the eerie “every-when-ness” of written language, reading represents an elegiac activity—or séance—by definition.2 7 The very form of the Gothic novel can, furthermore, seem a parable of its age’s literary revivalism. As they enclose stories within stories and mobilize the convention of frame and embedded tales, Gothic texts appear as scaled-down simulations of that literary tradition that was itself being reconceptualized in terms of seriality, sequels, and resurrections.

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So far, my description of the conventions shared by the practitioners of the Radcliffean Gothic and the Author of “Waverley” has emphasized the literal terms in which these writers keep faith with the ideas of literary tradition and national culture devised by their contemporaries. I’ve emphasized how they set their characters loose in poetry’s echo chamber; how they portray texts as legacies and readers as mourners. I’ve also suggested that this literalism can have the ironic effect of rendering their contemporaries’ national subjects unfamiliar and uncanny. This effect becomes apparent if we consider the Gothic convention of attributing a malign power to pieces of writing. Gothic narratives practice their own brand of fetishism as they endow writing per se with value and power, doing so at some cost to the ideal of an autonomous self. For frequently in these narratives, it is the chance finding of a book or a poem that inaugurates plot. It is texts that monopolize the supernatural power to begin: that text can be a lyric poem that (like an apparition) looms out of nowhere and thwarts readers’ efforts to reconnect it to an origin or author. Think of the sonnet that Emily discovers penciled on the wall of the fishing house at the start of The Mysteries of Udolpho (7), and whose discovery appears to be mortal to Emily’s parents, who sicken and die soon after. Or that text can be a book that has been ejected outside the edifice of linear history, like the volume that somehow falls into the hands of Victor Frankenstein and recreates him as that anachronistic creature, a living “disciple of Paracelsus” in this “enlightened and scientific” eighteenth century.3 2 Yet in representing the disruptive power of these texts the Gothic is also registering some of the new literary history’s prize tenets. Under the new arrangements, what makes a work of literature literary is that it aspires to decontextualization. Its value no longer measured solely by its effects in its own time, the classic is supposed both to document and to escape its cultural context, much as Milton’s and Shakespeare’s works do when, “whispering things unfelt before,” these living-dead poets proleptically script the feelings Godwin will feel next. In a letter she wrote as Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres was going to press, Mary Lamb speculated about the motives propelling Godwin in his desire to raise monuments to “the former and future great men.” The cultural nationalism that comes to fore when Godwin imagines a whole nation deriving their identities from the dead poets and allied to one another through their canonloving comes in Lamb’s account to seem a feeling

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rooted in Godwin’s fear of the consequences that follow from the formation of other sorts of collectivities, who have other definitions of their common birthright. Lamb clarifies, that is, how Godwin’s project allows him to cope with revolutionary times and does so as she describes, sneeringly, his scheme: “This wooden slab & white cross to be perpetuated to the end of time. To survive the fall of empire & the destruction of cities by means of a map, which was, in case of an insurrection among the people . . . to be carefully preserved; & then, when things got again into their usual order, the white-cross-wooden-slabmakers were to go to work again and set them in their former places.”3 3 I referred earlier to the fetishism that the Gothic practices in making books the origin of plot. Godwin’s claim, in the Enquirer essay, that Shakespeare and Milton touch “us all” enshrines (as does the rhetoric of the pamphleteers who declared their works the “property” of the nation) another almost supernatural notion of the canonical text. This supernaturalism, familiar to us (the basis of our discipline), portrays the classic as a perennially renewable and indeed magically unlimited resource. This canonical text cannot be exhausted by consumption (even by the conspicuous consumption we might associate with the profligate quotation practices of a Radcliffe or a Scott). It instead represents a resource that perpetually reproduces itself so as to meet an everescalating level of demand. It is in part in this fetishized guise that it functions for romantic nationalism as the image of a transhistorical cultural continuity, as well as of cultural unity. Engaging the strangely fearful modes of canonloving at work within the Gothic library seems to me a good way to become alerted to the mystifications at work in that nationalist idea of a cultural capital given to all. A visit to a Gothic library can alert us to how the charismatic idea of the canon as common property (an idea that has force, perhaps, by virtue of being propped on our infantile memories of boundless, unconditional love) obscures people’s dependence on finite resources whose distribution is far from equitable. In these Gothic novels—where the ruined library of the castle can seem like an unenclosed commons— the book can seem to evade the ties to particular persons that constitute a system of private property. It blurs the distinctions between the meum and the tuum. In fact, books tend, as I’ve noted, simply to fall into the hands of Gothic characters—out of the blue, as gifts from heaven. For both Gothic

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Nonetheless, a castle in the Rhineland isn’t Crusoe’s desert island: it isn’t a terra nullius, any more than it is an unenclosed common. In fact, there is a striking contradiction between, on the one hand, the suspension of the rights of ownership that enables those buildings and books to be used in the ways I’ve delineated and, on the other hand, the zeal that the conclusions to these novels bring to the task of restoring property rights and securing legacies for their protagonists. In some ways, the book culture portrayed in this fiction literalizes (as does the fiction’s proclivity for quoting the classics) that notion of the canonical text as a common, “national” property and as an infinitely renewable resource that transcends its

grounding in material finitude. In an essay in ecocriticism entitled “Reading Habits,” Marlon Ross writes of how idealizing accounts of our “primary sources” and their availability in “the public domain” operate to distract us from the fact that the resources for literacy as such—education, the money to buy books, the paper and ink and time it takes to write them—are unevenly distributed across and within cultures: “To become a member of the reading public . . . is to become free to consume reading materials as though there were no limit to the materials consumed. This concept of the reading public would make it more appropriate to be dubbed the reading private. . . . The materials and labor silently consumed in the reading act were once common property, and the moment of private consumption can never restore these common properties to their former public condition.”3 4 Ross’s observations underline the tensions mobilized when cultural nationalism invokes a nation of readers, or when, in particular, Godwin in his Essay on Sepulchres envisions a populace united by its mourning for bards who are no more. The discrepancy between nationalism’s tropes of a common cultural heritage and the harsh realities of an inequitable distribution of property is the reason that we can imagine how, in addition to responding to the prospect of “an insurrection among the people,” Godwin’s description of the loving fellowship produced by our mass séance with Shakespeare’s and Milton’s ghosts might in fact contribute to such insurrection. The stories of reading recounted in the Gothic novel, however, actually document that discrepancy, doing so in measure as they alternately suspend and enforce the rules of ownership. The glimpses those stories offer of a different moral economy suggest that the Gothic authors are in fact hyper-conscious of just who benefits and who is excluded when the dead poets endow the living and when the national literature is rendered a family trust. And so these architects of Gothic libraries illuminate the social production of the categories of the literary and the traditional. If canon-love in the main is a dark romantic affair involving self-estrangement, captivation, and subjection, it is still important to acknowledge the psychic utility that attaches to this conception of literary reading as gothic: how a portrait of a haunted reader might, for instance, compensate for the aggression involved in so strenuously insisting in the first place on authors’ death, on their spectral insubstantiality. When these Englishwomen writing at the turn of the nineteenth

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gentry and Gothic servants, castles may be counted on to contain spaces where one might “chance” to find an “ancient legend”; “an obscure corner,” where a book may have “fallen.” No one exhibits much compunction about appropriating these volumes. Books are there for the finding. (In this respect, too, books seem magical: dissociated utterly from the human labors that normally are involved in their making.) Etiquette permits Gothic characters to act as if it were certain that there would always be reading matter enough to go around. When Eliza Parsons’ Matilda returns from her foray into the haunted chambers of the Castle of Wolfenbach, which turn out to be the dwelling place of the lady of the castle, whom the world has long believed to be dead, the aged housekeeper asks her what she has seen. Her answer delivers only part of the truth: “‘An excellent library . . .’ replied Matilda . . . ‘I intend to sit there very often and shall borrow some books’” (1: 15). It is also a maxim of the Gothic that lovers should be expected to make themselves free with the books of those they love: we are to expect conduct like that of Udolpho’s Valancourt, who without her sayso leaves a volume of Petrarch for Emily to find in her private library and pockets another book in exchange. We might align the commonness that these novels ascribe to books with the manner in which they likewise arrange for their castles and abbeys to have a strangely skewed relation to the institution of private property. It is this relation that makes these edifices suitable haunts—or squats—for smugglers, for banditti and, above all, for those figures who in the Gothic epitomize dispossession—all those mothers who, having produced heirs for their husbands and so outlived their usefulness are fated to live on in these ruins in a ghostly manner, one that actualizes the civil death legally required of female Britons.

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century quote (or appropriate?) the words of the father-ghosts of the English canon they can, in short, look both reverential and self-serving. Their seemingly faithful inscriptions of the national canon, in addition to being considered as the testimonies with which they probate their cultural legacy, might as appropriately be seen as greedy raids on an empowering system. In this context, the canon appears both a “museum of wonderful relics” and “a store of commodities to trade in.”3 5 Walter Scott’s descriptions of the uses to which he puts his literary legacies mediate, of course, between these options. It’s characteristic of a Waverley novel to take magically acquired “crocks of gold, secret fountains and hidden treasures . . . unpredictable and limitless fortunes” and set such windfalls of romance against the humdrum bookkeeping required of the novelist who pursues “the business of fiction according to a trademan’s code.”3 6 From the practitioners of the Radcliffean Gothic Scott learned what it meant to inherit one’s nationality and language from a dead poets’ society. He learned that such possessions are also signs of possession.3 7 But it is worth emphasizing that—given the legitimist protocols of the literary legacy—no woman’s writing career could assume the shape that Scott’s did: a process in which the raw materials of tradition were converted into writing, that writing was exchanged for money, and that money was converted back into the trappings of tradition.3 8 Scott could envision himself in the posthumous terms that Woodstock conjures with when its Roundheads and Cavaliers marvel over how Shakespeare’s and Chaucer’s words “‘haunt our ears’” (in fact, the book’s allusions to the living-dead “conjurers” do double duty as an insider’s joke about the Wizard of the North [237]). For, as Lockhart insisted, his father-in-law was “the founder of the Abbotsford Museum”; and, building that Gothic library, he could already imagine the future in which “his children’s children should thank the founder.”3 9 Beyond recovering the traces of their ambivalent engagement with the emergence of a loveable literary nation, I want to note in concluding how, as commentaries on this notion of the library as a birthright, Gothic writings might illuminate later developments in literary studies and the history of literary pedagogy especially. In 1924, in the tellingly-titled English for the English, a phrase whose tautology I’ve tried to problematize, one founder of the English education movement, George Sampson, argued for the curricular centrality of literary appreciation by issuing the

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following warning: “Deny to working class children any common share in the immaterial and presently they will grow into the men who will demand, with menaces, a communism of the material.”4 0 In a double guise—as a site of possession in the supernatural sense, but also, as Sampson suggests despite himself, as a site that keeps alive a record of disinheritance and dispossession—in its guise as, in short, the literature classroom, the Gothic library haunts our practice still.

Notes 1. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966) 104. Subsequent references to Udolpho are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. 2. Fiona Robertson’s Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) is the exception. Robertson’s emphasis is on Scott’s engagement with both the narrative structure of Gothic fictions and the skeptical attitude toward historiographical legitimacy that this structure expresses. But, as I aim to show, Scott also recognizes in the Gothic a way of discussing canonical legitimacy. 3. Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 92. 4. One scheme, undertaken with James Ballantyne’s blessing, would have involved a one-hundred-volume reissue of “The British Poets” and an output of a new magna opera of novelists and dramatists to match. See John Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) 128-29. 5. Eliza Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach (London: Folio, 1968) 1: 3. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. 6. Garrett Stewart makes a similar observation about the Gothic fiction of the late nineteenth century: see Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), ch. 13. 7. Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997) 39; Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995). 8. Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in EighteenthCentury British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 112; Ian Duncan, “North Britain, Inc.,” Victorian Literature and Culture 23 (1995): 346. See also Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) and Crawford’s edited anthology The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). 9. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits (London: Henry Colburn, 1825) 151. 10. Trevor Ross, “Copyright and the Invention of Tradition,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1992): 24. Samuel Johnson describes the trade in reprints carried out by Alexander Donaldson, the Edinburgh bookseller, as

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20. I quote Lee’s gloss on Burke in “A Divided Inheritance” 539. See also my “Domesticating Fictions and Nationalizing Women: Edmund Burke, Property, and the Reproduction of Englishness,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996) 40-71.

11. Cited in Ross, “Copyright” 7. Ross quotes Yates’s dissenting opinion in Millar v. Taylor (1769), upheld when this decision by the Court of King’s Bench was overturned by the House of Lords in the case of Donaldson v. Becket.

21. Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) 136, 119.

12. Thomas Sheridan, British Education, cited in John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993) 101.

22. James Boswell, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, L. L. D., ed. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) 400-401.

13. See Jonathan Kramnick’s discussion of Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare: Making the English Canon: PrintCapitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 198-210, and Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon, from the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998). As Kramnick notes, because eighteenth-century canon-making took shape as a turn to antiquity it also effectually took shape as a turn away from a body of works significantly less “restricted in the gender and social class of the author.” Following John Guillory, Kramnick insists that it is reductive to see canon formation as entailing an expulsion, i.e., of women writers, but he concedes that “[f]or many [eighteenth-century] critics, this restriction was precisely the point” (Making the English Canon 9).

23. Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994); Walter Scott, Woodstock; or, The Cavalier: A Tale of the Year 1651 (New York: D. Appleton, 1877) 237; William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres (London: W. Miller, 1809) 76. Subsequent references to Woodstock appear parenthetically in the text.

14. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 4. 15. Charlotte Smith, Emmeline, or, The Orphan of the Castle (London: Pandora, 1988) 6-7, 384. 16. The quotation is from Scott’s account of the sensations produced in the reader by The Castle of Otranto: the hypothetical reader Scott conjures here is a new version of the ghost-seeing Lovel. See “Horace Walpole,” Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library, vol. 5 (1832), anthologized in Ioan Williams, ed., Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968) 87. 17. In fact, as David Hewitt notes in his new edition of The Antiquary, that section of the verses embroidered on the tapestry which is known as “The Floure and the Leafe” is no longer attributed to Chaucer, but instead to an anonymous (and possibly female) poet of his era. See his “Explanatory Notes,” in Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. David Hewitt, intro. David Punter (London: Penguin, 1998) 389. 18. On the earlier occasion that we hear about, the ghost led the town clerk, who had been assigned the Green Chamber for his sleeping quarters, to the cabinet that concealed the original deed to the property of Monkbarns. The ghost’s guidance enabled the Oldbuck descendants to win their lawsuit and ensured that his estate remained family property. 19. I am indebted here to Yoon Sun Lee’s rereading of The Antiquary and her insight into the fraught relation between a conservative narrative of national history that emphasizes “the transmission of priceless legacies,” and an antiquarianism that was situated in scandalous proximity to a marketplace in which everything had a price: see “A Divided Inheritance: Scott’s Antiquarian Novel and the British Nation,” ELH 64.2 (1997): 537-67; I quote 539.

24. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia UP, 1996) 77. 25. Dryden, Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), cited in Kramnick 18. 26. Eliza Parsons, The Mysterious Warning: A German Tale (London: Lane, 1792) 1: 261. 27. See Karen Swann, “The Strange Time of Reading,” European Romantic Review 9.2 (1998): 275-82; Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone, 1996) 279. 28. Scott, “Horace Walpole” 88. On epigraphs, quotations, and poetizing in the Gothic, see Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830 (London: Longman, 1989) 54-55; cf. Mary A. Favret, “Telling Tales about Genre: Poetry in the Romantic Novel,” Studies in the Novel 26.3 (1994): 281-300. 29. Eleanor Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstrel, or, The Spirit of the Wood (New York: Arno, 1972) 1: 1. 30. It is no accident, either, that this ghost’s First Folio has a place of pride in the haunted chambers of Woodstock; what this way of furnishing his haunted mansion suggests is that, as much as his female predecessors, Scott is well aware of the traditional identification of Shakespeare with the role of Hamlet’s Ghost. 31. William Godwin, “Of Choice in Reading,” in The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (rpt; New York: August M. Kelley, 1965) 140. 32. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) 45. 33. Mary and Charles Lamb: Poems, Letters, and Remains, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (London: Chatto and Windus, 1874) 76; my emphasis. 34. “Reading Habits: Scenes of Romantic Miseducation and the Challenge of Ecoliteracy,” in Lessons of Romanticism, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1998) 145. 35. I am tweaking here an opposition that Ian Duncan sets out in order to distinguish Adam Smith’s functionalist understanding of literary discourse—one that apprehends the belles lettres as a “resource for improvement”—from Johnson’s self-consciously nostalgic

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“an invasion of what [the Booksellers of London] had ever considered to be secure”: see James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970) 310.

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orientation toward the classics: see “Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, and the institutions of English,” in The Scottish Invention of English Literature 42.

Brown, Marshall. “A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel.” Studies in Romanticism 26, no. 2 (summer 1987): 275-301.

36. Kathryn Sutherland, “Fictional Economies: Adam Smith, Walter Scott and the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” ELH 54 (1987): 100.

Studies Immanuel Kant’s influence on the development of the Gothic novel, particularly in terms of the role of reason.

37. I draw here on Marjorie Levinson’s description of John Keats’s relation to the canon: see Keats’s Life of Allegory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) 19.

———. “From the Transcendental to the Supernatural: Kant and the Doctors.” Bucknell Review 39, no. 2 (1996): 15169.

38. This description of Scott’s career is Kathryn Sutherland’s: see “Fictional Economies” 106.

Examines Immanuel Kant’s treatment of selfconsciousness in his writings and how this relates to the treatment of the self and other in the Gothic novel.

39. J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 7 vols. (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell; London: John Murray, 1837) 4: 12; 2: 359. 40. Quoted in James Donald, “Beyond Our Ken: English, Englishness, and the National Curriculum,” in Dialogue and Difference: English in the Nineties (London: Routledge, 1989) 15.

Delineates the Gothic novel’s relationship to popular culture. Clarke, George Elliott. “Racing Shelley; or, Reading The Cenci as a Gothic Slave Narrative.” European Romantic Review 11, no. 2 (spring 2000): 168-85.

FURTHER READING Bibliography Frank, Frederick S. Gothic Fiction: A Master List of Twentieth Century Criticism and Research. Westport, Conn.: Meckler Corp., 1988, 193 p. Full-length bibliography of twentieth-century criticism on Gothic fiction.

Criticism Anderson, Howard. “Gothic Heroes.” In The English Hero, 1660-1800, edited by Robert Folkenflik, pp. 205-21. East Brunswick, N.J.: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Press, 1982. Analyzes and compares the depiction of heroes in several Gothic novels, including The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, The Castle of Otranto, and The Monk. Avsey, Ignat. “The Gothic in Dostoevskii and Gogol: The British Connection.” In The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, edited by Neil Cornwell, pp. 211-34. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999. Delineates the Gothic in works by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol and illustrates how these Russian authors were influenced by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Beers, Henry A. “The Gothic Revival.” In A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 221-64. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1899. A seminal work that traces the impetus for and the development of the Gothic Revival in eighteenth-century England. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Gothic Toxins: The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, and Caleb Williams.” In The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, pp. 25-48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Illustrates the ways in which the novels of Horace Walpole, William Godwin, and Matthew Gregory Lewis were viewed as a threat to morality and intellect by English society in the period following the French Revolution.

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Carson, James P. “Enlightenment, Popular Culture, and Gothic Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, edited by John Richetti, pp. 255-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Analyzes Shelley’s The Cenci in terms of the author’s use of Gothic conventions and the work’s relationship to the slave narrative. Clemens, Valdine. “Precedents for ‘Gothic’ Fear: Medieval Life, Jacobean Drama, and Eighteenth-Century Attitudes.” In The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from The Castle of Otranto to Alien, pp. 15-28. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Depicts the political, social, intellectual, and artistic traditions that preceded the rise in popularity of Gothic novels in England. De Bruyn, Frans. “Edmund Burke’s Gothic Romance: The Portrayal of Warren Hastings in Burke’s Writings and Speeches on India.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 29, no. 4 (fall 1987): 415-38. Compares Edmund Burke’s treatment of history— particularly his treatment of the figure of Warren Hastings—to the Gothic tradition and to the works of Jane Austen. Donaldson, Susan V. “Making a Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern Gothic.” Mississippi Quarterly 50, no. 4 (fall 1997): 567-83. Compares the portraits of women created by William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, noting that while Faulkner imposes cultural ideas of femininity on his Southern characters, Welty creates characters who resist placement in traditional roles and themes. Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2000, 261 p. Discusses the main topics and themes in Gothic literature and traces the development of the genre from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century. Gamer, Michael. “Confounding Present with Past: Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads, and Gothic Romance.” Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies 39-40 (1994): 111-38. Explores the literary and historical relationship of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads to the Gothic romance.

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Examines the relationship of gothicism in the eighteenth century to the classification of the cultural status and genre of literary works. Goh, Robbie B. H. “(M)Othering the Nation: Guilt, Sexuality and the Commercial State in Coleridge’s Gothic Poetry.” Journal of Narrative Theory 33, no. 3 (fall 2003): 270-91. Studies how Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s treatment of sexuality in his Gothic poetry provides commentary on social and political issues of his time, particularly displacement and economic challenges. Hadley, Michael. The Undiscovered Genre: a Search for the German Gothic Novel. Berne, Germany: Peter Lang, 1977, 155 p. Investigates the origins and existence of the German Gothic novel, or Schauerroman, and the Germanic sources for the English Gothic novel. Haggerty, George E. “The Gothic Novel, 1764-1824.” In The Columbia History of the British Novel, edited by John Richetti, pp. 200-46. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Offers a literary and historical overview of the development of the Gothic novel in England. Hennessy, Brendan. The Gothic Novel. Harlow: Longman for the British Council, 1978, 60 p. A critical overview of Gothic novels. Includes a bibliography. Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Gothic Ghost as Counterfeit and Its Haunting of Romanticism: The Case of ‘Frost at Midnight.’” European Romantic Review 9, no. 2 (spring 1998): 283-92. Examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s use of the ghost and Gothic conventions in “Frost at Midnight,” and how this relates to the Romantic literary tradition. ———. The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s Novel and its Progeny, pp. 2-62. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Analyzes the various versions of The Phantom of the Opera, and illustrates how each adaptation of the work represents the cultural beliefs and norms of the society and era during which it is created. Holbrook, William C. “The Adjective ‘Gothique’ in the Eighteenth Century.” Modern Language Notes 56, no. 7 (November 1941): 498-503. Detailed analysis of the cultural and linguistic traditions that led to the origination of the adjective “gothique” in eighteenth-century France. Horner, Avril, ed. European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 17601960. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002, 260 p. Collection of critical essays that illustrate the French, German, Russian, and Spanish influences on the development of the Gothic novel.

Komaromi, Ann. “Unknown Force: Gothic Realism in Chekhov’s ‘The Black Monk.’” In The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, edited by Neil Cornwell, pp. 257-75. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999. Analyzes the gothicism in Anton Chekhov’s short story “Chernyi monakh” (“The Black Monk”). MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, 289 p. Full-length study of major themes and figures in nineteenth-century English Gothic fiction. Madoff, Mark. “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 9 (1979): 337-50. Surveys the use of Gothic themes and figures in eighteenth-century English fiction. Malin, Irving. “American Gothic Images.” Mosaic 6, no. 3 (1973): 145-71. Traces the use of “the castle, the voyage, and the masquerade” in American literature. McIntyre, Clara. “Were the Gothic Novels Gothic?” PMLA 36, no. 4 (December 1921): 644-67. Examines the classification of works of literature as Gothic. Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy. London: Routledge, 1993, 258 p. Provides historical and social context surrounding eighteenth-century Gothic literature. Mudge, Bradford K. “‘Excited by Trick’: Coleridge and the Gothic Imagination.” Wordsworth Circle 22, no. 3 (summer 1991): 179-84. Explores the influence of the Gothic novel evidenced in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry. ———. “The Man with Two Brains: Gothic Novels, Popular Culture, Literary History.” PMLA 107, no. 1 (January 1992): 92-104. Discusses the Gothic novel’s place in literary history and its role in shaping popular culture. Oates, Joyce Carol. Introduction to American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, pp. 1-9. New York: Plume, 1996. Surveys the American landscape, beginning in Colonial times, the role that this landscape played in the development of American Gothic literature, and the places of the various works she has collected in the volume within the American Gothic tradition. Perry, J. Douglas. “Gothic as Vortex: The Form of Horror in Capote, Faulkner, and Styron.” Modern Fiction Studies 19 (1973): 153-67. Proposes that in addition to the commonality of themes and images, American Gothic fiction also uses traditional structures and techniques to create a concentric series of events, drawing the reader into an intense interaction between human communities that exist inside and outside the novel.

Hume, Robert D. “Gothic versus Romantic: A Re-valuation of the Gothic Novel.” PMLA 84, no. 2 (March 1969): 282-90.

Peterfreund, Stuart. “Keats’s Debt to Maturin.” Wordsworth Circle 13, no. 1 (winter 1982): 45-49.

A seminal essay that defines the nature of the Gothic novel, contrasting it with works in the Romantic tradition.

Studies the sources of the Gothic conventions in Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes” in Charles Robert Maturin’s Manuel.

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———. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 255 p.

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Platzner, Robert L., and Robert D. Hume. “‘Gothic versus Romantic’: A Rejoinder.” PMLA 86, no. 2 (March 1971): 266-74. Scholarly exchange of analysis and ideas originally offered by Hume in his 1969 PMLA article, “Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel.” Punter, David. “Ossian, Blake and the Questionable Source.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson, pp. 25-41. Athens: Rodopi, 1995. Studies the gothicism of Blake’s poem “Ossian,” and the sources for the poem in the Ossian Poems of James Macpherson. ———. “Modern Perceptions of the Barbaric: Mervyn Peake, ‘Isak Dinesen,’ John Hawkes, Joyce Carol Oates, James Purdy, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, Robert Coover, Angela Carter.” In The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Vol. 2, pp. 119-44. Essex, England: Longman, 1996.

Contrasts the German and American expression of the Romantic tradition in Gothic literature. Smith, R. J. The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688-1863. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 231 p. Considers the various returns to medieval aesthetic during periods of great change in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Thompson, G. Richard. “Introduction: Gothic Fiction of the Romantic Age: Context and Mode.” In Romantic Gothic Tales, 1790-1840, pp. 1-54. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Investigates the political and social context surrounding Gothic literature during the Romantic age, as well as the conventions utilized in the literature of this period. Tompkins, J. M. S. “The Gothic Romance.” In The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800, pp. 243-95. London: Constable, 1932. Study of the Gothic novel’s themes, techniques, and conventions, focusing on Ann Radcliffe’s novels.

Surveys the use of what Punter terms “the barbaric” in the works of several modern authors of Gothic and horror fiction.

Trott, Nicola. “Wordsworth’s Gothic Quandary.” Charles Lamb Bulletin 110 (April 2000): 45-59.

Roberts, Marie. Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. London: Routledge, 1990, 239 p.

Interprets the association between Gothic fiction and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.

Traces the connection between “Rosicrucian authors”— William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Robert Maturin, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton— and the secret society known as The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.

Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences, pp. 1-22. London: Arthur Barker, 1957.

Sabor, Peter. “Medieval Revival and the Gothic.” In Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, IV: The Eighteenth Century, edited by H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, pp. 470-88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Discusses the criticism of works in the medieval revival tradition, including Gothic fiction. Schleifer, Ronald. “Rural Gothic: The Sublime Rhetoric of Flannery O’Connor.” In Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, edited by David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski, pp. 175-86. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. Maintains that O’Connor effectively uses the backdrop of the rural South and combines it with elements of the supernatural to present a world of powerful possibilities in her fiction. Shelden, Pamela J., and Kurt Paul. “Daylight Nightmares.” Gothic 1, no. 1 (June 1979): 1-6.

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A comprehensive study of the Gothic novel in England. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, 235 p. Explores the connection of the Gothic novel to the English novel of manners by applying the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. Wilczynski, Marke. “From Edwards to Slosson: Typology, Nature, and the New England Domestic Gothic.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An International Review of English Studies, no. 36 (2001): 303-09. Examines the use of Gothic conventions in the works of nineteenth-century New England authors, such as in the short stories of Annie Trumbull Slosson. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 311 p. Surveys the Gothic in English and Irish literature.

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T

he Gothic tradition originated in response to a period of rapid and far-reaching societal, cultural, and theological change in eighteenthcentury Europe. Works written in this tradition are inherently linked to the social context in which they were created, and a great deal of critical commentary focuses on the representation of societal and cultural fear in the face of the dissolution of tradition, gender roles, oppression, and race in Gothic literature. As scholars have illustrated, people in nineteenth-century Europe and America believed strongly in physiognomy, the theory that physical appearance and “blood” determined and reflected a person’s character. The representation of villains and monsters in Gothic literature demonstrates this adherence to physiognomy, as these characters possess physical traits associated with evil—dark eyes, heavy eyebrows, and dark complexions. The racist implications of this belief in the biological determination of character are apparent, and have been examined by several scholars. In his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke challenges the ways in which other philosophers and aestheticians use the terms “sublime” and “beautiful,” contending that the words are often employed inaccurately and exclusively. He sets out to distinguish the two terms and define them in light of the basis of their psychological origins. The discussion covers three

aspects: individual passions, the essences that inspire emotion in an individual, and the rules of nature that govern the first two aspects. This approach is unique in relation to other aesthetic theories because it allows for psychological and physiological justifications for the aesthetic experience. In the first part of the essay, Burke explores and defines the sublime. He considers the origins of the sublime in the feeling of delight, which he maintains is based on the removal of pain or danger. It is a visceral response to the basic need for self-preservation and is characterized by such feelings as awe, surprise, and relief tinged with horror. In fact, the essence of the sublime is the feeling of horror; in this, his theory is unique in aesthetic study. Burke asserts that in order to inspire the sublime, one must be confronted with terrifying ideas. The human response is generated by the following fear-inspiring principles: vastness, difficulty, power, darkness, vacuity, obscurity, silence, solitude, infinity, massive solidity, and magnificence. This unique conception of the sublime is influenced by and has influenced Gothic literature, especially the novels and stories that contain such settings as the dark, mysterious graveyard, the haunted castle, and the lone house on the hill. Images like these have held a strong fascination for readers throughout the ages. Burke contends that nature images—such as the incomparable vastness of the ocean or the infinite darkness of a dense forest—inspire the highest and

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most intense feelings of the sublime. Many critics praised Burke’s ideas regarding the sublime and lauded his imaginative and innovative approach. In the 1890s, as noted by critic David Punter, the Decadent and the Gothic merged in four works— Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)—which, Punter asserts, “are all concerned in one way or another with the problem of degeneration, and thus of the essence of the human.” Gothic literature has also been used to portray experiences of class and national identity, such as the difficulties faced by the Irish in English society. Commentator Raphael Ingelbien has offered a psychological approach to the study of the use of the Gothic in representing Anglo-Irish identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and in works by Elizabeth Bowen. Recent scholarship has focused on the relationship between race and the Gothic, tracing the depiction of the African American experience as well as of white anxiety and fears surrounding the black presence in society and desire to maintain the status quo of whites in control and blacks in servitude. Toni Morrison, who employs the Gothic to depict the horrors of slavery in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987), discusses in Playing in the Dark (1992) how the image of “impenetrable whiteness” is used in works of Gothic fiction—notably in works by Edgar Allan Poe—to assuage white Americans’ anxieties about black Americans, and to reinforce the institution of slavery by portraying “black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control.” Morrison also links the portrayal of blackness in literature to writers’ investigations “of the self-contradictory features of the self.” In her analysis of the connection between the Gothic and the African American experience—particularly in such works as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)—, Teresa A. Goddu asserts that “a focus on slavery, America’s most glaring cultural contradiction, shows how it produced gothic narratives during the antebellum period and how these narratives reproduced the scene of slavery.” Teresa Derrickson illustrates that even authors whose works and personal actions espouse racial equality participate in the discourse of racism by examining Louisa May Alcott’s sensationalist Gothic story “Taming a Tartar” (1867). Derrickson maintains that “trac-

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ing the careful way in which the ‘monstrous’ nemesis of the narrative’s triumphant protagonist embodies nineteenth-century fears of racial degradation . . . underscores the infiltrating power of the Gothic impetus.” Anne K. Mellor has examined Charlotte Dacre’s novel Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806), in which Dacre depicts a sexual relationship between a black man and a white woman, to illustrate how “the Gothic has long enabled both its practitioners and its readers to explore subjective desires and identities that are otherwise repressed, denied, or forbidden by the culture at large.” Commentary on the relationship between women and the Gothic focuses on works of Gothic literature by women authors as well as on the depiction of women in Gothic literature written by men. In the mid-1800s, women had few rights and were expected to be subservient to men. Not only were women denied the vote, they were denied the right to own property. Cultural expectations required that women refrain from expressing themselves openly in the presence of men. Rather they were expected to be pure, pleasant, and supportive of men at all times. But, as reflected by the controversial Gothic novels, these rigid roles were changing. Feminist critics point out the unusual prevalence of strong female characters in Gothic novels, and the way their independent and often sexual behavior was harshly criticized by contemporaries of the novels. Modern critics also point out the way in which female sexuality was often used to denote strength, rebelliousness, and evil. Appearing as nefarious seductresses, female characters were often demons or villains who were punished or made to see the error of their ways at the story’s end. Feminist critics also claim that while women in earlier novels had been portrayed as victims waiting to be rescued, in Gothic novels the roles were often reversed and the male characters were victimized. Other scholars see the validation of marriage as a common theme of Gothic novels and still others argue that the genre allowed women readers of the mid-1800s to enjoy independence vicariously through the actions of the female characters. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) has received particular attention from feminist critics, as the novel offers common themes in the female Gothic tradition: fear and anxiety surrounding the birth process, female sexuality, and women’s bodies. In the twentieth century, the works of many women writers—including Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), and Diane Johnson’s The Shadow Knows

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Elizabeth Bowen Bowen’s Court (nonfiction) 1942 The Demon Lover, and Other Stories (short stories) 1945

Edmund Burke A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (essay) 1757 Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (essay) 1790

Charlotte Dacre Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century. 3 vols. (novel) 1806

Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (autobiography) 1845

William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom! (novel) 1936 “A Rose for Emily” (short story) 1930; published in the journal Forum

Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” (novella) 1892; published in the journal New England Magazine; published in book form as The Yellow Wallpaper, 1899

James Hogg The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (novel) 1824; republished as The Suicide’s Grave, 1828

Shirley Jackson

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris (short stories) 1949

Louisa May Alcott

The Haunting of Hill House (novel) 1959

“Taming a Tartar” (short story) 1867; published serially in the journal Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

Harriet Jacobs

Jane Austen Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 4 vols. (novels) 1818

William Beckford

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself [as Linda Brent] (autobiography) 1861

Diane Johnson The Shadow Knows (novel) 1974 The Shining [with Stanley Kubrick; based on the novel by Stephen King] (screenplay) 1980

*Vathek (novel) 1787

Sophia Lee Ambrose Bierce Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (short stories) 1891

The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times. 3 vols. (novel) 1783

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(1974)—were examined from a feminist, Gothic theoretical perspective for their modernized adaptation of the traditional Gothic that conveys the unique and often publicly unspoken, or even socially taboo, psychological and social realities of twentieth-century women. Modern women authors employ horror and the Gothic to convey the horror of being perceived as freakish by society for engaging in and espousing artistic and vocational pursuits considered outside of the traditional—and, thus, approved—women’s realm, or for choosing to delay or avoid pregnancy, marriage, or motherhood. These narratives relate the unique and deeply rooted fear and anxiety experienced by women who are afraid simultaneously of being trapped in stifling, repressive roles and of being rejected or isolated for challenging these prescribed roles. The work most frequently held as an example of female Gothic is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). The novella, a fictionalized account of Gilman’s real-life experience with the “rest cure,” a commonly prescribed treatment for depression, horrified readers and critics when it was published, largely because the female protagonist’s terror and eventual madness were chillingly true to life and offered a harsh indictment of a widely-held belief that women who found motherhood and domestic duties unfulfilling or even confining were mentally ill. Subsequent critical analyses of the work have focused upon Gilman’s use of horror and Gothic elements to convey the desperation experienced by women who were both physically imprisoned and deprived of intellectual freedom and expression.

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

Arthur Machen

Bram Stoker

The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (short stories) 1894

Dracula (novel) 1897

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Three Impostors (short stories) 1895

Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. 2 vols. (novel) 1852

†The Hill of Dreams (novel) 1907

Charles Robert Maturin Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. 4 vols. (novel) 1820

Carson McCullers The Member of the Wedding (novel) 1946

H. G. Wells The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Possibility (novel) 1896

Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) 1890; first published in the journal Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine; revised edition, 1891

Herman Melville Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (novel) 1852

Toni Morrison

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and Other Poems [as C.3.3.] (poetry) 1898

Beloved (novel) 1987 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (criticism) 1992

Mary Wollstonecraft

Joyce Carol Oates

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (essay) 1792

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America (short stories) 1974

Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman: A Posthumous Fragment (unfinished novel) 1799

Flannery O’Connor ‡“A Temple of the Holy Ghost” (short story) 1955

*

Sylvia Plath

†

The Bell Jar (novel) 1963

‡

Edgar Allan Poe The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, North America: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny, Famine, and Shipwreck, During a Voyage to the South Seas; Resulting in Various Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries in the Eightyfourth Parallel of Southern Latitude [published anonymously] (novel) 1838 #“William Wilson” (short story) 1840

Ann Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry. 4 vols. (novel) 1794

Clara Reeve The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story (novel) 1777; republished as The Old English Baron, 1778

#

The unauthorized translation of Vathek was published as An Arabian Tale, 1786. This work was first published serially in Horlick’s Magazine as “The Garden of Avallaunius” in 1904. This story was published in the collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 1955. This story was published in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840.

PRIMARY SOURCES EDMUND BURKE (ESSAY DATE 1757) SOURCE: Burke, Edmund. “Part II: Sections I and II, and Part IV: Sections V, VI, VIII, and IX.” In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. Fourth edition, pp. 79-131, 197254. Dublin: Sarah Cotter, 1766. In the following excerpt from an essay first published in 1757, Burke explains his theory of the connection between the sublime, pain, and terror.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Part II.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. (novel) 1818; revised edition, 1831

SECT. I. Of the passion caused by the Sublime.

Robert Louis Stevenson New Arabian Nights. 2 vols. (short stories) 1882 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (novella) 1886

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The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that

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SECT. II. Terror. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For, fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror, be endued with greatness of dimensions or not; for it is impossible to look on any thing as trifling, or contemptible, that may be dangerous. There are many animals, who though far from being large, are yet capable of raising ideas of the sublime, because they are considered as objects of terror. As serpents and poisonous animals of almost all kinds. And to things of great dimensions, if we annex an adventitious idea of terror, they become without comparison greater. A level plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the mind with any thing so great as the ocean itself? This is owing to several causes, but it is owing to none more than this, that this ocean is an object of no small terror. Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime. Several languages bear a strong testimony to the affinity of these ideas. They frequently use the same word, to signify indifferently the modes of astonishment or admiration and those of terror. ⍜␣µ⌸␱␵ is in Greek, either fear or wonder; ␦⑀␫␯␱␵ is terrible or respectable; ␣␫␦⑀␻, to reverence or to fear. Vereor in Latin, is what ␣␫␦⑀␻ is in Greek. The Romans used the verb stupeo, a term which strongly marks the state of an astonished mind, to express the effect either of simple fear, or of astonishment; the word attonitus, (thunder-struck) is equally expressive of the alliance of these ideas; and do not the French etonnement, and the English astonishment and amazement point out as clearly the kindred emotions which attend fear and wonder? They who have a

more general knowledge of languages, could produce, I make no doubt, many other and equally striking examples. . . . . .

Part IV. SECT. V. How the Sublime is produced. Having considered terror as producing an unnatural tension and certain violent emotions of the nerves; it easily follows, from what we have just said, that whatever is fitted to produce such a tension, must be productive of a passion similar to terror, and consequently must be a source of the sublime, though it should have no idea of danger connected with it. So that little remains towards shewing the cause of the sublime, but to shew that the instances we have given of it in the second part, relate to such things as are fitted by nature to produce this sort of tension, either by the primary operation of the mind or the body. With regard to such things as affect by the associated idea of danger, there can be no doubt but that they produce terror, and act by some modification of that passion; and that terror, when sufficiently violent, raises the emotions of the body just mentioned, can as little be doubted. But if the sublime is built on terror, or some passion like it, which has pain for its object; it is previously proper to enquire how any species of delight can be derived from a cause so apparently contrary to it. I say, delight, because, as I have often remarked, it is very evidently different in its cause, and in its own nature, from actual and positive pleasure. SECT. VI. How pain can be a cause of delight. Providence has so ordered it that a state of rest and inaction, however it may flatter our indolence, should be productive of many inconveniencies; that it should generate such disorders, as may force us to have recourse to some labour, as a thing absolutely requisite to make us pass our lives with tolerable satisfaction; for the nature of rest is to suffer all the parts of our bodies to fall into a relaxation, that not only disables the members from performing their sunctions, but takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which is requisite for carrying on the natural and necessary secretions. At the same time, that in this languid inactive state, the nerves are more liable to the most horrid convulsions, than when they are sufficiently

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state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor, by consequence, reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence and respect.

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ CLARA REEVE (1729-1807)

Although primarily a novelist who wrote in the eighteenth-century tradition of sentimental fiction, Reeve is remembered almost exclusively for her Gothic romance The Old English Baron (1778). Writing in response to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Reeve sought to compose a similar story avoiding what she considered Walpole’s flawed narrative conception. Whereas Walpole conceived his novel as an entertainment with an abundant display of supernaturalism, Reeve’s narrative is distinguished by her didactic theme and moderate use of supernatural elements. Immensely popular during the eighteenth century, The Old English Baron remains important for its role in the development of the Gothic genre. Reeve’s cautious approach to writing Gothic fiction anticipated the later, more critically acclaimed novels of Ann Radcliffe, whose characters inhabit a world in which realistic detail joins successfully with improbable occurrences. Reeve combined literary gothicism with the didactic concerns characteristic of sentimental fiction. The oldest daughter in a family of eight children, Reeve was born in Ipswich, Suffolk. Her father was a clergyman in the Anglican church, and biographers speculate that his influence on Reeve’s early development substantially contributed to the socially conservative, moralistic nature of her works. Educated at home under her father’s tutelage, she displayed a special interest in history and biography. After her father died in 1755, Reeve moved to Colchester with her mother and two of her sisters. It was here that she wrote her first book, Original Poems on Several Occasions, which was published in 1769. This collection of poetry received little notice, and it was not until the private publication of The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story in 1777 that her work gained recognition. On the advice of her friend Martha Bridgen, the daughter of novelist Samuel Richardson, Reeve revised this novel and published it in 1778 as The Old English Baron. While Walpole himself disparaged the work, it was an immediate popular and critical success.

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braced and strengthened. Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often, self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body. The best remedy for all these evils is exercise or labour; and labour is a surmounting of difficulties, an exertion of the contracting power of the muscles; and as such resembles pain, which consists in tension or contraction, in every thing but degree. Labour is not only requisite to preserve the coarser organs in a state fit for their functions, but it is equally necessary to these finer and more delicate organs, on which, and by which, the imagination, and perhaps the other mental powers act. Since it is probable, that not only the inferior parts of the soul, as the passions are called, but the understanding itself makes use of some fine corporeal instruments in its operation; though what they are, and where they are, may be somewhat hard to settle: but that it does make use of such, appears from hence; that a long exercise of the mental powers induces a remarkable lastitude of the whole body; and on the other hand, that great bodily labour, or pain, weakens, and sometimes actually destroys the mental faculties. Now, as a due exercise is essential to the coarse muscular parts of the constitution, and that without this rouzing they would become languid, and diseased, the very same rule holds with regard to those finer parts we have mentioned; to have them in proper order, they must be shaken and worked to a proper degree. . . . . . SECT. VIII. Why things, not dangerous, produce a passion like Terror. A Mode of terror, or of pain, is always the cause of the sublime. For terror, or associated danger, the foregoing explication is, I believe, sufficient. It will require somewhat more trouble to shew that such examples, as I have given of the sublime in the second part, are capable of producing a mode of pain, and of being thus allied to terror, and to be accounted for on the same principles. And first of such objects as are great in their dimensions. I speak of visual objects. SECT. IX. Why visual objects of great dimensions are Sublime. Vision is performed by having a picture formed by the rays of light which are reflected from the object, painted in one piece, instantaG O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

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neously, on the retina, or last nervous part of the eye. Or, according to others, there is but one point of any object painted on the eye in such a manner as to be perceived at once; but by moving the eye, we gather up with great celerity, the several parts of the object, so as to form one uniform piece. If the former opinion be allowed, it will be considered, that though all the light reflected from a large body should strike the eye in one instant; yet we must suppose that the body itself is formed of a vast number of distinct points, every one of which, or the ray from every one, makes an impression on the retina. So that, though the image of one point should cause but a small tension of this membrane, another, and another, and another stroke, must in their progress cause a very great one, until it arrives at last to the highest degree; and the whole capacity of the eye, vibrating in all its parts must approach near to the nature of what causes pain, and consequently must produce an idea of the sublime. Again, if we take it, that one point only of an object is distinguishable at once; the matter will amount nearly to the same thing, or rather it will make the origin of the sublime from greatness of dimension yet clearer. For if but one point is observed at once, the eye must traverse the vast space of such bodies with great quickness, and consequently the fine nerves and muscles destined to the motion of that part must be very much strained; and their great sensibility must make them highly affected by this straining. Besides, it signifies just nothing to the effect produced, whether a body has its parts connected and makes its impression at once; or making but one impression of a point at a time, it causes a succession of the same; or others, so quickly, as to make them seem united; as is evident from the common effect of whirling about a lighted torch or piece of wood; which if done with celerity, seems a circle of fire.

Clara Reeve, 1729-1807.

conference with you, upon certain points that will elucidate the design, and perhaps induce you to form a favourable, as well as a right judgment of the work. Pray did you ever read a book called, The Castle of Otranto? if you have, you will willingly enter with me into a review of it.—but perhaps you have not read it? however you have heard that it is an attempt to blend together, the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient romance and modern Novel; but possibly you may not know so much, still you have read some ancient Romance, or some modern Novel, it will be strange if you have not in this age! But suppose you should dislike or despise them both? ’tis no matter! I shall catch you some way or other. You delight in the fables of the ancients, the old poets, or story-tellers.

SOURCE: Reeve, Clara. “Address to the Reader.” In The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story. By the Editor of The Phoenix. A Translation of Barclay’s Argenis, pp. i-vii. Colchester, 1777.

Or, you are pleased with the wonderful adventures of modern travellers, such as Gaudentio di Lucca, or Robinson Crusoe.

In the following excerpt from an introduction to her novel, which was published in 1778 as The Old English Baron, Reeve urges her readers to appreciate her novel as part of a Gothic literary tradition, and declares that every reader will find something in her work to enjoy.

Or, if you are unacquainted with any of the books already mentioned, I would venture a good wager that you have read the Pilgrim’s Progress.

Address to the Reader. Reader, before you enter upon the history before you, permit the Author to hold a short

You smile! but I mean nothing ludicrous, the Pilgrim’s Progress is a work of genius, and as such I respect it.—is it possible that a book merely fanatical, should have run through fifty-four editions? you may safely conclude it has merit of a higher

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kind, that enables it to blunt the shafts of ridicule, and to stand its ground, notwithstanding the variations of times and tastes, and the refinements of literature and language. But what (say you) is all this to the purpose? patience a moment, and I will come directly to the point.—if you have read any fictitious or fabulous story, it will answer my intention, which is to assert, that all readers, of all times and countries have delighted in stories of these kinds; and that those who affect to despise them under one form, will receive and embrace them in another. History represents human nature as it is.— alas! too often a melancholy retrospect.—romance displays only the amiable side of the picture; it shows the pleasing features, and throws a veil over the blemishes: mankind are naturally pleased with what gratifies their vanity, and vanity like all other passions of the human heart, may be rendered subservient to good and useful purposes. I confess that it may be abused, and become an instrument to corrupt the manners and morals of mankind; so may poetry, so may plays, so may every kind of composition; but that will prove nothing more than the old saying lately revived’— “that every earthly thing has two handles.” The business of romance is first to excite the attention, and secondly to direct it to some useful, or at least innocent end. Happy the writer who attains both these points, like Richardson! and not unfortunate, or undeserving of praise, he who gains only the latter, and furnishes out of it an entertainment for the reader! Having, in some degree, opened my design, I beg leave to conduct my reader back again, till he comes within view of the castle of Otranto; a work which has already been observed, is an attempt to unite the various merits and graces of the ancient romance and modern Novel.—to attain this end, there is required a sufficient degree of the marvellous to excite the attention.—enough of the manners of real life, to give an air of probability to the work;—and enough of the pathetic to engage the heart in its behalf. The book before us is excellent in the two last points, but has a redundancy in the first; the opening excites the attention very strongly; the conduct of the story is artful and judicious; the characters are admirably drawn and supported; the diction polished and elegant; yet with all these brilliant advantages, it palls upon the mind, though it does not upon the ear, and the reason is

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obvious; the machinery is so violent, that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept within the utmost verge of probability, the effect had been preserved, without losing the least circumstance that excites or detains the attention. For instance, we can conceive and allow of the appearance of a ghost, we can even dispense with an enchanted sword and helmet, but then they must keep within certain limits of credibility, a sword so large as to require an hundred men to lift it, a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a picture that walks out of its frame; a skeleton ghost in a hermit’s cowl: when your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of imagination, and instead of attention, excite laughter. I was both surprised and vexed to find the enchantment dissolved, that I wished might continue to the end of the book, and several others of its readers have confessed the same disappointment to me; the beauties are so numerous, that we cannot bear the defects, but want it to be perfect in all respects. In the course of my observations upon this singular book, it seemed to me that it was possible to compose a work upon the same plan, wherein these defects might be avoided, and the keeping as in painting might be preserved. But then, said I, it might happen to the writer as it has to the imitators of Shakespeare, the unities may be preserved, but the spirit may evaporate; in short it will be safest to let it alone. During these reflections, it occured to my remembrance, that a certain friend of mine was in possession of a manuscript in the old English language, containing a story that answered in almost every point to the plan above-mentioned; and if it were modernised, might afford entertainment to those who delight in stories of this kind. Accordingly (with my friend’s permission) I transcribed, or rather translated a few sheets of it.—I read it to a circle of friends of approved judgment, they gave me the warmest encouragement to proceed, and even made me promise to finish it. Here it is, therefore, at your service; if you are pleased, I am satisfied; I will venture to assure you that it shall not leave you worse than it finds you in any respect. If you despise the work it will go to

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Illustration from The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story, 1778.

sleep quietly with many of its contemporaries, and the ghost of it will not disturb your repose. I am, with profound Respect, Reader, your most obedient Servant, The EDITOR.

SOPHIA LEE (NOVEL DATE 1786) SOURCE: Lee, Sophia. An excerpt from The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times. By the Author of the Chapter of Accidents. Vol. 1, pp. 1-10. Dublin, 1786. The following excerpt is from the beginning of Lee’s highly popular novel.

After a long and painful journey through life, with a heart exhausted by afflictions, and eyes which can no longer supply tears to lament them, I turn my every thought toward that grave on the verge of which I hover. Oh! why then, too generous friend, require me to live over my misfortunes? Such has been the peculiarity of my fate, that though tortured with the possession and the loss of every tye and hope that exalts or endears humanity, let but this feeble frame be covered with the dust from which it sprung, and no trace of my ever having existed would remain, except in the wounded consciences of those who marked me out a solitary victim to the crimes of my progenitors: For surely I could never merit by my own misery of living as I have done—of dying as I must do.

My life commenced with an incident so extraordinary as the following facts alone could incline any one to credit. As soon as capable of reflection, I found myself and a sister of my own age, in an apartment with a lady, and a maid older than herself.—Every day furnished us with whatever was necessary for subsistence or improvement, supplied as it seemed by some invisible hand; for I rarely missed either of the few who commonly surrounded me. This Recess could not be called a cave, because it was composed of various rooms; and the stones were obviously united by labor; yet every room was distinct, and divided from the rest by a vaulted passage with many stairs, while our light proceeded from small casements of painted glass, so infinitely above our reach that we could never seek a world beyond; and so dim, that the beams of the sun were almost a new object to us when we quitted this retirement. These remarks occurred as our minds unfolded; for at first we were content, through habit and ignorance, nor once bestowed a thought on surrounding objects. The lady I have mentioned called us her children, and caressed us both with parental fondness.—Blest with every gentle charm, it is not wonderful she fully possessed the affections of those who had no one else to idolize. Every moment we met in a larger room than the rest, where a very venerable man performed mass, and concluded with a discourse calculated to endear retirement. From him we learnt there was a terrible large place called the world, where a few haughty individuals commanded miserable millions, whom a few artful ones made so; that Providence had graciously rescued us from both, nor could we ever be sufficiently grateful. Young hearts teem with unformed ideas, and are but too susceptible of elevated and enthusiastic impressions. Time gave this man insensibly an influence over us, as a superior being, to which his appearance greatly contributed. Imagine a tall and robust figure habited in black, and marked by a commanding austerity of manners.—His features bore the traces of many sorrows, and a kind of early old age, which interested every observer. The fire

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Alas! your partial affection demands a memorial which calls back to being all the sad images buried in my bosom, and opens anew every vein of my heart. Yet consummate misery has a moral use, and if ever these sheets reach the publick, let the repiner at little evils learn to be juster to his God and himself, by unavoidable comparison. But am I not assuming an insolent consequence in thus admonishing? Alas, it is the dear-bought privilege of the unfortunate to be tedious!

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and nobility of his eye, the gracefulness of his decay, and the heart-affecting solemnity of his voice, While on his reverend temples grew The blossoms of the grave,

gave an authority almost irresistible to Father Anthony, as we called him from hearing our mamma, to whom we understood he was brother. He usually partook our dinner, and from that time ’till the next morning vanished, for we knew not how or where he went. The interval we passed in little useful works, or in conversation with our mamma, whose only employment was that of forming our minds, for the world we were taught to dread.—She was our world, and all the tender affections, of which I have since proved my heart so full, centered in her, and my sister. Time and sorrow had given a wan delicacy to features exquisitely regular, while the soft symmetry of her person united every common idea of beauty and elegance to a feminine helplessness, which is, when unaffected, the most interesting of all charms. Her temper was equal, and her understanding enriched by a most extensive knowledge, to which she was every day adding by perpetual study. Inclined strongly by nature to serious reflection, and all her favourite employments, I used to pass those hours at her side Ellinor devoted to her play-things, or to Alice, whose memory was overcharged with those marvellous tales children always delight in. As our ideas every day expanded, we thought more and more concerning our origin, and our imprisonment. We knew Father Anthony constantly disappeared, but how or where was a secret beyond our comprehension; for in all our researches we never found a door except those common to the family, and which shut us from the world. Ellinor, whose lively imagination readily imbibed the romantic and extravagant, conjectured we were in the power of some giant; nay, such was her disgust to Father Anthony, that she sometimes apprehended he was a magician, and would one day or other devour us. I had a very different idea; and fancied our retreat a hollowed circle to seclude us from the wicked, while Father Anthony was our guardian genius. Frequently we by agreement interrogated Alice, who though fond to the common degree of an old nurse of both, but more especially Ellen, resisted those little arts nature herself inspires. Our mamma we now and then ventured to sound, but her gravity always disconcerted us, and we retreated from a vain attempt. She once absented herself fourteen days, and left us to our own conjectures, in a spot truly

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chearless. Part of the time we spent in searching once more for a door, and the rest in childish lamentations for her loss; which Alice still assured us would be but a temporary one. Inflexible in the discharge of her duty, she still persisted in locking our apartment every day after dinner, at which time all who had occasion, doubtless, passed in and out of the Recess. Being deprived of my customary resource, books, to amuse a part of our melancholy leisure, we mutually agreed to invent tales from the many whole-length pictures, which ornamented the best room, and to take them as they came alternately. Ellinor readily invented a ludicrous story upon the portrait of an old man, which made us both laugh heartily. I turned my eyes to consider what I should say about the next; they rested on the figure of a man of noble mien, his dress I then knew no name for, but have since found to be armour; a page held his helmet, and his hair, of a pale brown, fell over his shoulders. He was surrounded with many emblems of martial merit, and his eyes, which seemed bent on me, were full of a tender sweetness. A sentiment of veneration, mingled with a surprising softness, pierced my soul at once; my tongue faltered with a nameless idea, and I rested my head against the shoulder of my sister. That dear girl turned to me with quickness, and the beam of her eye was like that of the picture. I surveyed her over and over, and found in every feature the strongest resemblance; when she frowned, she had all his dignity; when she smiled, all his sweetness. An awe, I could not conquer, made me unable to form any tale on that subject, and I directed my attention toward the next. It represented a lady in the flower of youth, dressed in mourning, and seeming in every feature to be marked by sorrow; a black veil half shaded a coronet she wept over. If the last picture awakened veneration, this seemed to call forth a thousand melting sensations; the tears rushed involuntary into our eyes, and, clasping, we wept upon the bosoms of each other. “Ah! who can these be? cried we both together. Why do our hearts thus throb before inanimate canvas? surely every thing we behold is but part of one great mystery; when, will the day come, destined to clear it up?” We walked arm in arm round, and moralized on every portrait, but none interested us like these; we were never weary of surveying or talking about them; a young heart is frequently engrossed by a favorite idea, amid all the glare of the great world; nor is it then wonderful ours were thus possessed when entombed alive in such a narrow boundary. I knew not why, but we lived in the presence of

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The moment our mamma returned, we flew into her arms, and interrupted her tender carasses with importunate enquiries concerning these favorite pictures. She regarded us with astonishment—her eyes filled with tears, and she bade us leave her to recover herself alone. Shortly after she summoned Alice, and held with her a conversation which restored her tranquillity; but she carefully avoided our enquiries, endeavouring to diversify our hours by music, drawing, poetry, geography, and every ornamental branch of education. Whenever we verged toward an hint about the retreat—“wait, my dear girls, she would say, the appointed hour—alas, one may follow it, when you will wish yourselves still uninformed.”—Impressed with an undesinable melancholy, our years passed on ’till womanhood approached. Pardon me if I linger over these scenes; I have but few such to relate, and they are all of my life upon which my heart dares to pause. How are we born to invent our own miseries! We start forward from the goal of youth, fearless and impatient, nor know the heights and depths through which we must labour; oppressed in turn by every element, and often overwhelmed with that most insupportable of all burthens, our own dissatisfied souls. How have I wept the moment I quitted the Recess—a moment I then lived but in hope of! To be always erring, is the weakness of humanity, and to be always repenting, its punishment.— Alas! could we learn wisdom without experience, mankind would perhaps be too happy. Father Anthony in time ingratiated himself with us, by his continual remonstrances against our being shut up in a place which bounded our ideas so much that he despaired of making us comprehend half of what he taught us. We seconded his advice with endless entreaties. Our mamma, who was persuasion itself in her own person, was not proof against it in that of another. “Alas, my children, would she often say, by what fatality do you so passionately desire to leave a home you will hereafter remember with a pleasure full of regret? In vain you would return to it—you will lose a taste for the tranquil enjoyments this solitude offers, without perhaps finding any to supply them. Yet far be the selfish weakness from my heart of punishing you, even for your welfare. You shall see this admired world. May it ever please you as it will at first sight!”

We embraced her with youthful transport, and then each other—“We shall go at last, exclaimed both together, we shall see many more like ourselves!” “What say you, children? cried she; ah! you will see few indeed like yourselves.” The next day was appointed for our enfranchisement. We packed and unpacked our little luggage fifty times over for mere employment ’till the appointed hour came; when we were summoned to the chamber of our only friend, who was walking about apparently agitated with a secret. “Are you grieved, mamma, cried I, that we are going to be happy?” “Ah, no Matilda! I am grieved, because I think you are just ceasing to be so. In this peaceful solitude I could supply to you every lost relation— the adopted children of my heart, I stood between you and a fate at once distinguished, obscure and affecting.—Alas, why do you wrest yourselves and your secret from me? Why do you oblige me to tell you, you must never more call me any thing but Mrs. Marlow?” “Never more call you mamma! sighed I, incoherently, who then are our parents?” “You have no father, he who gave you a being sleeps in the bosom of God. “Our mother———” “Lives—but not for you—enquire no farther; let this specimen of knowledge teach you to fear it.—When the time requires it, I shall disclose your whole story;—weep no more, my lovely, my affecting girls; I have lost but a name: for my nature is unalterable. All who will see us know I never was married, which absolutely compelled me to this discovery. But I dare believe they will rely on my rectitude, and welcome you by whatever name I shall give you. Reasons you will hereafter know, induce me always to conceal a retreat, where alone I could have hid you, and both must, ere we leave it, solemnly promise never to disclose the secret.” Chilled with this solemn preparation, our desire of liberty vanished; we felt like links struck from the chain of creation; and still with restless imaginations explored the remainder of a mystery which we wept by anticipation. “She lives, but not for you!” were words whose sound vibrated to my heart, while pleasure danced around me, and the doubt attending the future, often robbed the present of enjoyment. After we had made at her knees the strict promise required, she muffled our faces, and tak-

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these pictures as if they understood us, and blushed when we were guilty of the slightest folly.

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ing my hand, as Alice did my sister’s, led us through many cold passages for some minutes; when unbinding our eyes, we found ourselves in a noble cloister. We flew into the garden it bordered, and how strong was the impression of the scene before us! from the mansion, which stood on a hill, spread a rich and fertile valley, mingled with thickets, half seen or clustered hamlets, while through the living landscape flowed a clear river, ———and to the main The liquid serpent drew his silver train.

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SOPHIA LEE (1750-1824)

[Lee]’s most significant work, The Recess [(1783),] appeared in one volume three years after the publication of [her play] The Chapter of Accidents [(1780)]. Its reception was so encouraging that Sophia produced two additional volumes in 1785. . . . The tale traces the vicissitudes of Matilda and Ellinor, daughters of Mary Queen of Scots by the Duke of Norfolk, who, under threat of persecution by Elizabeth, are reared in the subterranean vaults of an abandoned abbey so that, in their father’s words, they may “never . . . know the Court of Elizabeth, but innocently and happily . . . die in the desart where they bloomed.” The central importance of the recess, or refuge, in the tale reflects the most complex exploration of a theme that was to interest Lee throughout her writing career: that of retreat. . . . Throughout the novel, Lee’s passionate attention to the “exquisite distress” of the tormented sisters announces her conviction of the relationship (explored in detail by later Gothicists like Radcliffe) of mental suffering and refinement, of anguish and the sublime. The critical response to The Recess was immediate and vigorous. Readers were arrested by the new combination of history and romance. . . . The Recess, in effect, reintroduced the genre of the English historical romance, which had lain dormant since Thomas Leland’s Longsword of 1762, and in so doing not only stimulated the composition of a host of novels along similar lines but helped to form public taste for the more popular and radical genre that was to captivate English readers in the last decade of the eighteenth century: the Gothic.

SOURCE: Napier, Elizabeth R. “Sophia Lee.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 39: British Novelists, 1660-1800, edited by Martin C. Battestin, pp. 301-06. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group, 1985.

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ

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SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC Title page of The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times, 1786.

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KATHLEEN L. SPENCER (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1992) SOURCE: Spencer, Kathleen L. “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis.” ELH 59, no. 1 (spring 1992): 197225. In the following essay, Spencer investigates Dracula within the social contexts of late Victorianism, discussing the novel in terms of British imperialism, contemporaneous theories of cultural degeneracy, and the New Woman movement of the time. I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created. —Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger1 The construction of categories defining what is appropriate sexual behavior (“normal”/ “abnormal”), or what constitutes the essential gender being (“male”/“female”); or where we are placed along a continuum of sexual possibilities (“heterosexual,” “homosexual,” “paedophile,” “transvestite” or whatever); this endeavor is no neutral, scientific discovery of what was already there. Social institutions which embody these definitions (religion, the law, medicine, the educational system, psychiatry, social welfare, even architecture) are constitutive of the sexual lives of individuals. Struggles around sexuality are, therefore, struggles over meanings—over what is appropriate or not appropriate—meanings which call on the resources of the body and the flux of desire, but are not dictated by them. —Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents (emphasis added)2

Interpreting Dracula’s sexual substrata has become something of a cottage industry of late, so much so that one more reading of the text’s unconscious may seem a bit pointless. Yet there is something curious going on here: despite certain disagreements as to what kind of sexuality is present in the novel, almost all readings presume a given sexuality that is repressed and displaced throughout the text, which it is the critical task to uncover and articulate. In other words, despite local disagreements, all of these readings approach the text from a fairly orthodox version of depth psychology.3 While this focus has certainly been productive, there are other questions about the text that cannot be answered by focusing on the unconscious sexuality of the author, or a character, or even, as in Freudian/Marxist readings, on the class system. What I propose is a different kind of historical reading of Dracula to supplement the previous apG O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

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OVERVIEWS

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proaches; my concern is less with Stoker’s position as a representative late-Victorian man than with the novel as a representative late-Victorian text. For Dracula is not an isolated phenomenon, but is part of a literary/cultural discourse comprised not only of other tales about vampires, but of other fantastic novels and stories that also focus on sexual dynamics, whether covertly or overtly.4 Whatever it is that Dracula is saying about sex, then, it is saying not in isolation but as part of a dialogue. The first step in this broader historical explication of Stoker’s novel is to identify its literary context: the “romance revival” of the 1880s and 1890s—more explicitly, that species of romance called “the fantastic.” Having located the text generically, we can then clarify its cultural context—the late-Victorian world of imperialism and degeneracy theories, purity crusades and the New Woman, materialist medicine and its opponents (continental psychology on the one hand, Spiritualism and assorted occultisms on the other). To illuminate this social context I will read the novel against models of cultures in crisis drawn from René Girard and anthropologist Mary Douglas. Finally I will consider the relationship between Dracula’s genre, its historical context, and its popularity, to see what light this analysis can shed on a larger question—why the fantastic as a genre should have flourished so dramatically in this period of cultural transformation.

I: The Fantastic Like “romance” itself, “the fantastic” is a much-disputed term. While some theorists use “fantasy” and “the fantastic” interchangeably, others see them as referring to two quite different kinds of stories, and still others see the fantastic not as a genre at all but as an element that can appear in many kinds of tales (as the term “gothic” can be applied either to a specific fictional configuration common at the end of the eighteenth century, or to a literary mode which can appear in works of any period). The most famous definition of the term “fantastic” is Tzvetan Todorov’s, but what seems to me the most functional, precise explanation of the fantastic is that proposed by the Polish semiotician Andrzej Zgorzelski. For Zgorzelski, the fantastic as a genre is signaled by “the breaching of the internal laws which are initially assumed in the text to govern the fictional world.” The opening of the text indicates that the fictive world is based on a “mimetic world model,” a model that is violently breached by the entrance of the

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fantastic element and changed into a different world, one in which the fantastic element does not violate the laws of reality. A fantastic text, then, builds its fictional world as “a textual confrontation of two models of reality.”5 Two elements are essential for the characteristic frisson of the fantastic: first, the impossible event must genuinely be happening (not a dream, a hallucination, a mistake, or a deliberate trick); and second, the tone of the narrative emphasizes initial disbelief, and (usually) horror. The characters react with fear and revulsion at encountering what is not only unexpected, but unnatural according to the laws of the world they inhabit, and readers usually respond with the same feelings, not only because we identify with the characters, but because the world the characters initially inhabit is our own world. Further, the narrative voice insistently emphasizes violation and transgression, the logical contradiction between the impossibility of the occurrence and its actuality. For example, when Dracula appears in Picadilly at high noon, the characters react initially with disbelief and a kind of horrified vertigo at discovering that the monstrous is real and walking the streets of their ordinary modern city. Defined in this way, the fantastic as a genre is relatively modern. The low mimetic (to use Northrop Frye’s familiar term) must be a wellestablished fictional convention before we can conventionalize its violation, a condition that does not obtain till the mid-eighteenth century. Before the convention of realism became the norm—in the medieval quest narrative or Renaissance romance, for example—the intrusion of the supernatural or monstrous did not create an experience of the fantastic for either the characters or the readers. A questing knight may be seriously dismayed to discover a dragon or a magician in his path, but the mere existence of the supernatural does not force him to rethink reality, because it does not violate the laws of nature. For Prince Hamlet, seeing his father’s ghost is certainly alarming; but it is the ghost’s message, not its presence, which so distresses him. The serious question for Hamlet is not whether the ghost is real but whether it is “honest”—genuinely his father’s spirit or a demon sent to tempt him to regicide. Modern readers of these texts need not believe in the actual existence of dragons or ghosts to recognize that the text treats these occurrences as natural. The conventions of fictional realism do not apply, any more than they apply to modern fantasy or science fiction, whose readers learn to respond without astonishment to the presence of

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In light of this requirement, I would argue that the Gothic tales of the late eighteenth century are the first fantastic fictions, Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe among the first writers to experiment with the emotional possibilities (for both characters and readers) of violating the laws of nature. Since such violations are radically new, the earliest writers tend to soften the effects a bit. In the first place, Gothic fictions are traditionally distanced somewhat from the world of their audience, set back in time and “away” in space— preferably in Spain or Italy during the Inquisition—making the stories more plausible (to an English audience) by the superstitiousness of their settings, and at the same time lessening the intensity of the fear, for the readers if not the characters. As another softening device, some of the early Gothic writers, notably Radcliffe, tidy away the fantastic by giving us rational explanations for the apparent supernatural events— though not till the end of the novel, so we have plenty of time to experience the fantastic frisson first. However, this tidying strategy was soon abandoned. While second-generation Gothic writers like Monk Lewis and Charles Maturin still set their novels in Inquisition Europe, they apparently felt less need to reassure their readers at the end that the ordinary rational laws of reality governed the world inside the text as well as outside. But the fantastic that develops at the end of the nineteenth century (exclusive of the ghost story, a popular but traditional form) is identifiably different from the Gothic of one hundred years before. First and most important, the new authors insist on the modernity of the setting— not on the distance between the world of the text and the world of the reader, but on their identity. A modern setting means, most profoundly, an urban setting, as by the end of the nineteenth century well over half the population of the British Isles lived in cities. To be modern also means that science is the metaphor that rules human interactions with the universe, so the new fantastic adopts the discourse of empiricism even to describe and manipulate supernatural phenomena. These characteristics of the modern fantastic, as distinct from the earlier variety, suggest we need a new term to refer to it; and I would argue that

“Urban Gothic” is particularly appropriate for the new type, acknowledging the eighteenth-century ancestry while identifying the major modifications that have been made to adapt the fantastic to the needs of a new era. The change from Gothic to Urban Gothic allows writers to call on the powers of what Henry James, in a review of the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, called “those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.” As James observed, the innovation of bringing the terror next door gave an entirely new direction to horror literature. The new strategy was fatal to the authority of Mrs. Radcliffe and her everlasting castle in the Apennines. What are the Apennines to us, or we to the Apennines? Instead of the terrors of “Udolpho”, we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely more terrible.

In 1865, James was moderately scornful of the supernatural as a fictional device, remarking in this same review that “a good ghost-story, to be half as terrible as a good murder-story, must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life.”6 But twenty-five years later he himself found uses for the supernatural by following his own advice and connecting it “at a hundred points to the common objects of life”—and so did his “fellow” (if we can so call them) romancers. In short, James, along with many of his contemporaries, explored the Urban Gothic.

II: The Romance Revival But the Urban Gothic was only part, if a crucial part, of a larger literary movement of the last two decades of the century: the romance revival. “Romance” is another of those protean literary terms whose meaning varies with the frame of reference, but in the context of the 1880s, the term has a fairly stable meaning. The “romance revival” began as a reaction against the “high realism” of the 1870s, which was, in its turn, a reaction against the “sensation novels” of the 1860s. The theorists of high realism rejected the sensation novel’s emphasis on plot, arguing that it demanded less of readers than novels that required them to interpret the subtleties of human motives. In addition, it was believed, too strong an emphasis on plot would interfere with the “naturalness” of characters. By the 1880s, these novels of “character analysis” themselves came under attack. First, being limited to and by “gross” reality, the novels (their critics argued) were dull and trivial. Second,

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wizards or of faster-than-light space vessels. But a wizard or faster-than-light ship introduced into a text whose opening pages signal a contemporary realistic setting would produce reactions from the characters, the narrator, and the readers that would signal the presence of the fantastic.

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these novelists had chosen to adopt the “heartless” methods of science (“vivisection” is a common metaphor), treating their characters with no sympathy or decorum, dissecting them in public. Then, when “high realism” transposes into naturalism, new grounds for rejection appear. For one thing, naturalist novels persistently tried to introduce moral, middle-class readers to the kinds of persons—prostitutes, criminals, beggars, and other “undeserving” or unappealing poor people—whom they had no desire to meet. For another, realism, especially when pushed to the extremes of naturalist determinism, allowed no room for the higher workings of Providence, no room for the reward of the virtuous and the punishment of the guilty. Finally, since naturalism was identified in the minds of English readers with Zola, James, and Howells, it became for some readers and critics a patriotic duty to resist “foreign influences,” and to call for a healthy English fiction.7 The result was a resurgence of interest in bold, high-stakes adventure, larger-(and simpler-) thanlife characters, exotic locales and incidents, idealistic quests, world-class criminals, disguises and escapes, rescues and disasters. Anthony Hope Hawkins, author (as Anthony Hope) of one of the best-known romances of the period, The Prisoner of Zenda (1893), exclaimed that in romance, Emotion must be taken at high pitch. It must be strong, simple, confident; otherwise it lacks the quality needed for romance. . . . romance becomes an expression of some of the deepest instincts of humanity. It has no monopoly of this expression, but it is its privilege to render it in a singularly clear, distinct, and pure form; it can give to love an ideal object, to ambition a boundless field, to courage a high occasion; and these great emotions, revelling in their freedom, exhibit themselves in their glory. Thus in its most worthy forms, in the hands of its masters, it can not only delight men, but can touch them to the very heart. It shows them what they would be if they could, if time and fate and circumstances did not bind, what in a sense they all are, and what their acts would show them to be if an opportunity offered. So they dream and are happier, and at least none the worse for their dreams.8

Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and (in his early works) H. G. Wells are the best-known figures of this new movement, along with Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Andrew Lang, several of whom also wrote manifestos for the critical journals in favor of romance.9 In addition to these relatively familiar names, a whole army

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of romancers, once popular but now practically unread and in many cases entirely forgotten, produced large quantities of this fiction to supply the new markets.1 0 But if the revived romance of the 1880s takes its declared form from an ancient tradition, the new romancers (like the authors of the Urban Gothic) draw on contemporary interests for their characters, settings, and themes: the exotic reaches of the empire—Africa, Egypt, India, Australia—as well as such regions as China, the South Pacific, and South and Central America; dead civilizations of the ancient past (Egyptian, Peruvian, Celtic, Neanderthal), their tales enlivened by information culled from the newest archaeological reports; lost races inside volcanoes, at the bottom of the sea, in the polar regions, on other planets, in the future; the thrilling possibilities of modern technology (electrically-induced immortality or eternal youth; brain transplants; memory recordings; time travel); or the beliefs and rituals of that other revival of the 1880s, the occult revival (Spiritualism, Theosophy, the Society for Psychical Research, and the magicians of the Order of the Golden Dawn).1 1

III: Purity and Danger Thus not only the Urban Gothic but the romance revival as a whole transforms a traditional literary genre by an infusion of modern perspectives. But the Urban Gothic and the romance share another crucial characteristic beyond their common reliance on contemporary adventure and exoticism: a concern for purity, for the reduction of ambiguity and the preservation of boundaries. Both attempt to reduce anxiety by stabilizing certain key distinctions, which seemed, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, to be eroding: between male and female, natural and unnatural, civilized and degenerate, human and nonhuman. At issue, finally, underneath all these distinctions, is the ground of individual identity, the ultimate distinction between self and other. Where once a complex web of traditional roles and relationships grounded individual identity, in the new capitalist world of the cash-nexus, Anthony Giddens observes, the bulwarks of identity were reduced essentially to two: the arena of intimate relationships (that is, the family, personal and highly sexualized), and the arena of “mass ritual,” of sporting events and political ceremonies, especially the fervent impersonal group identity we call nationalism. “In such conditions of social life,” writes Giddens, “the ontological security of the individual in day-to-day life is more

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Instead of being broadly supported by a web of interlocking kinship links, work groups, ceremonial societies, traditions, routines, and even the continuities of place and seasonal cycle, identity for the ordinary middle-class Briton now hung delicately on two slender threads at the extreme margins of scale, the intimate and the national. So it is hardly surprising that many people grew anxious to preserve the clarity and purity of the distinctions that supported this system. However, even at this time of their heightened significance, these very distinctions came under attack. Darwinian evolutionary theory blurred the boundaries between human and animal in not one but two ways: by the famous argument that humans and apes had a common ancester, but also by the implied hierarchy at the end of The Descent of Man which leads from the ape-like ancestor through primitive peoples to civilized Europeans. The imputed inferiority of the lower races, as George Stocking points out, “although still in the first instance cultural, was now in most cases at least implicitly organic as well.”1 3 Thus the boundary between human and ape became a matter of scientific doctrine, but (as Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau pointed out) an ambiguous one: what was actually a philosophic and political debate was concealed under the language of science. Yet since “scientific” language could not hope to stabilize a fundamentally unscientific boundary, the issue continued unresolved. Nor was this boundary a matter of abstract speculation for civilized Europeans; for if humans could evolve, it was thought they could also devolve or degenerate, both as nations and as individuals. At what point in a downward slide did a human being cross over the line into animality? Lombroso addressed this question with his new “science” of criminal anthropology, which purported to demonstrate through elaborate measurements and charts of facial angles that habitual criminals were throwbacks to primitive ancestors, with more of the ape than the human about them. Fear of such national “degeneracy” was further highlighted for Britons by the Boer War of 1899-1902, first by the series of unprecedented defeats handed the greatest army in the world by a handful of Dutch farmers, and second by the recruiting campaign that discovered the physical inadequacies of the men from London’s East-End slums, who were alarmingly undersized,

frail, and sickly.1 4 Such concerns underlay the tremendous public anxiety at the end of the century about the condition of the British Empire and the warnings that, like its Roman predecessor, it could fall, and for what were popularly perceived as the same reasons—moral decadence leading to racial degeneration. Another crucial distinction under attack was that between male and female. By all the superficial criteria of appearance, behavior, and legal status, Victorian men and women must have seemed almost like two different, though symbiotically related, species. It has been argued that never in western society have gender roles been more rigid or more distinct (at least in the middle classes) than in the late nineteenth century. Victorian science, especially Victorian medicine, lent the weight of its prestige to the position that the physical distinctions between women and men were absolute, and absolutely determinate. In their very nature and essence, said the doctors, women were unlike men; and this difference explained their limitations—physical, moral, and intellectual—and justified their legal and social disabilities.1 5 It was woman’s special nature that fitted her for the task she had been assigned by Victorian society. In her guises of maiden, wife, and above all mother, Woman (with a capital) had been appointed the guardian of moral virtue; the home, Woman’s realm, became both a refuge from the hard necessities of the utilitarian business world and the temple of a new religion that served to supplement or substitute for the weakening Christian orthodoxy—the religion of romantic love as the source of salvation, and of the family as a haven for all the human warmth, grace and affection that had been banished from the father’s daily life in the world. Woman, as the Angel in the House, was to save Man from his own baser instincts and lead him toward heaven. Jenni Calder’s study of the Victorian home further clarifies the significance of this domestic religion. While Victorians genuinely desired to make the world a better place, Calder argues, the social problems facing them were so massive and so intractable that they usually had to settle for making the home, as the only part of the world responsive to their actions, a better place instead. Thus “the angel in the house was at the root of multitudes of Victorian assumptions and ideas, and Victorian rationalizations and ideals.”1 6 But this position did not go unchallenged. Throughout the century, women argued for re-

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fragile than in societies dominated by tradition and the meshings of kinship across space and time.”1 2

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forms of marriage and divorce laws, and in particular for the right of married women to own property in their own names. The kind of resistance they faced is revealed most potently in the comments of Lord St. Leonards, who argued against the passage of the Married Women’s Property Bill of 1857 on the grounds that it would “place the whole marriage law . . . on a different footing and give a wife all the distinct rights of citizenship,” an argument that indicates that for this distinguished jurist and former Lord Chancellor the categories of “wife” and “citizen” were mutually exclusive.1 7 A few men joined the fray on the distaff side, most notably John Stuart Mill, who argued against such logic in The Subjection of Women in 1869 and even tried to get women the vote, on the grounds that only if they could vote for their representatives would Parliament take their needs seriously; but considerable discussion produced little substantive action. The debate grew even more heated in the last few decades of the century when the New Woman arrived on the scene, wanting higher education, striving to enter the learned professions, and ever more frequently working outside the home for money (that is, middle-class women began to do so, for of course lower-class women had long been so employed). And some of the most radical New Women even argued that they were entitled to the same freedom of sexual expression as men. In short, more and more women insisted on leaving the house of which they had been appointed angel, the house that, if a refuge for men, became for many middle-class wives and daughters a more or less pleasant prison. But in the eyes of most Victorian men, for women to deny their traditional role was to deny their womanhood, to challenge the distinctions between women and men upon which the family—and therefore society— depended. Nor was the New Woman the only source of threat to gender categories. Homosexuality was brought into the consciousness of a horrified public, first by the Cleveland Street scandal in 1889, which revealed a homosexual brothel catering to the upper classes (including the Prince of Wales’s closest friend and, by rumor, the Prince’s eldest son as well).1 8 More dramatic still was the infamous Wilde trial in 1895, which made “homosexuality” both as an ontological state and as a chosen lifestyle available to ordinary middle-class imaginations for the first time.1 9 To late Victorians, if the New Woman’s desire to achieve higher status by “becoming” a man was at least understandable, though outrageous, what could be said

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about men who deliberately refused to be men? Such depravity challenged not just the distinction between male and female but that between natural and unnatural as well.2 0 The debates about sex and sex roles in the nineteenth century, argues Ludmilla Jordanova, “hinged precisely on the ways in which sexual boundaries might become blurred. It is as if the social order depended on clarity with respect to certain distinctions whose symbolic meanings spread far beyond their explicit context.”2 1 In this perception she is quite right: anthropologists tell us that social order depends precisely on the clarity of such distinctions. But anthropologists can tell us more: they can help us see the dynamics at work in late Victorian England in a larger social context—the context of a culture in crisis. Mary Douglas’s work on pollution fears and witchcraft societies is surprisingly appropriate here.2 2 All cultures that explain evil as a product of witchcraft—from certain African tribes to Salem Village in the seventeenth century—share certain characteristics, she notes. Most importantly, there is strong pressure on group members to conform, but the classification system of the society is somehow ineffective in structuring reality: it is too narrow and rigid to deal with the variety of actual experience, or it is inconsistent, or has gaps, or is in competition with another system of classification that weakens the effectiveness of both. In such a society, the universe is dualistic: what is inside is good, what is outside is bad. The group boundary is therefore both a source of magical danger and the main definer of rights: you are either a member or a stranger. Evil is a foreign danger introduced by foreign agents in disguise, but abetted by deviant members of the group who must be identified and expelled for allowing the outside evil to infiltrate. Since not only the society itself but the entire cosmos is endangered by the vile, irrational behavior of these human agents of evil, a witchcraft society is preoccupied with rituals of cleansing, the expulsion of spies or witches, and the redrawing of boundaries to mark the pure (inside) and the evil (outside). Though the late Victorians did not explicitly attribute evil to witches, they manifested the same fears of pollution from outsiders, the same suspicion of deviants as traitors, and the same exaggerated estimation of what was at stake—in short, the same social dynamics as more traditional witchcraft societies. The pressures on middle-class Victorians to conform were intense (and too well known to need documentation), while the model

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Douglas mentions one other key factor in a witchcraft society that the Victorians also shared: the leadership of the group is precarious or under dispute, and the roles within the group ambiguous or undefined. Because no one person or faction has sufficient authority to stabilize the situation, the struggle for leadership prompts what we might call “purity competitions”: who is most vigilant at ferreting out enemies, especially those disguised enemies lurking within the society itself? In other words, the struggle for power and stability under these social conditions leads inevitably to scapegoat rituals.2 3 The struggle for leadership of a divided and confused people also characterized late Victorian society. For the Victorians, neither traditionalist nor “rebel” forces could take complete command: the traditionalists had the numbers and most of the worldly power, but the rebels tended to be educated and articulate, many were influential, and all had ready access to a public forum in the wide-open periodical market of the 1880s and ’90s. As a result, they could make their voices heard in disproportion to their numbers and official positions. The battle produced numerous cries of “seize the witch!”—directed both at groups (Jews, Germans, Slavs, Orientals, birth control advocates, promiscuous women, decadent French authors [especially Zola], homosexuals) and at individuals—most spectacularly, though by no means solely, Oscar Wilde. And here is where we reconnect the social and the literary. The romance, I would argue, and in particular the Urban Gothic, not only in its characteristic subject matter but more importantly in its very form, is the perfect literary reflection of the cultural crisis Britain experienced between 1880 and 1914. In such an atmosphere, the

modern fantastic became a potent vehicle for social drama—potent because the images of the fantastic are always drawn from our dreams and nightmares. The fantastic as a genre is based on violations of reality, which means it is fundamentally concerned with defining reality; and the nature of reality is exactly the question at issue in late-nineteenth-century England. Finally, since at the end of a fantastic tale the violating element is characteristically expelled and the mimetic world, the status quo, is reestablished, the fantastic proved ideal for symbolically reaffirming the traditional model of reality. As Northrop Frye told us long ago, the romance is traditionally a psychomachia, a struggle between the forces of good and evil in which evil is defeated, and the modern romance (as Hope’s quotation suggests, with its emphasis on clarity and purity and “great emotions in their glory”) retains this pattern. The Urban Gothic extends the tradition in a peculiarly modern way by defining the enemy as not only evil but unnatural: she/ he/it has no right to exist at all. In the very form of both the romance and the Urban Gothic, then, we find repeated the contemporary drive to purify the inside and expel the foreign pollution: at the heart of both lies the scapegoat ritual. And this finally brings us to Dracula, a classic example of the conservative fantastic: in the end Dracula is killed, the alien element expelled and the ordinary world restored. But what exactly is being expelled? In particular, how would Stoker’s original audience have read this novel? In the cultural context of 1897, what threat did Dracula represent that needed so desperately and at such cost to be driven out? How was the culture being instructed to protect itself, and from what? Another way to put the question is this: who is the scapegoat in Dracula, and to what end is that scapegoat sacrificed?

IV: Ritual Victims in Dracula As René Girard tells us in Violence and the Sacred, what all sacrificial victims have in common is that they must recognizably belong to the community, but must at the same time be somehow marginal, incapable of fully participating in the social bond—slaves, criminals, the mad, the deformed. They are enough of the community to substitute for it, but between them and the community “a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail an act

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to which they were required to conform was losing its clarity. The old consensus on the central distinctions of their society—on which distinctions were indeed central, and on how those distinctions were to be defined and maintained— was breaking down. In the last twenty years of the century, an intense debate developed between those who sought to shore up the old crumbling distinctions and those demanding change— nontraditional women, homosexuals, socialists, some artists and intellectuals, a few scientists, working-class men who had acquired some education. One side strove to widen or redefine cultural boundaries, to let some of the “outside” in, while the other fought desperately to maintain the “purity” of the inside by expelling as traitors those who breached the boundaries.

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of vengeance.” As a result, sacrificing them will end communal violence rather than prolonging it.2 4 In Dracula, I argue, Lucy Westenra fills the category and the social function of the surrogate victim who is sacrificed to restore a lost order. On the surface, it would seem that Lucy belongs to the class Victorians would find least sacrificeable rather than most—a young, beautiful, virtuous girl—and that, in any case, she is a victim not of her own community but of a monstrous outsider. However, we are given numerous indications that Lucy, for all her sweetness, purity, and beauty, is a marginal figure. In the first place, her social connections are alarmingly tenuous: her father is dead, and she has no brothers or other family to protect her except her mother, who is herself very weak both psychologically and physically (and in fact predeceases her daughter). There is no one to protect Lucy from attack, or to revenge her death at the hands of her own community. More crucially, Lucy’s character is “flawed” in a way that makes her fatally vulnerable to the vampire. She is a woman whose sexuality is under very imperfect control. She is loved devotedly by three different young men, which in itself is not a fault, but her reaction to this situation reveals a problem. When she writes to Mina about her suitors, she can’t help gloating about “THREE proposals in one day.”2 5 Worse, although she says she is greatly in love with Arthur, she also feels very badly about turning down those two splendid fellows, John Seward and Quincey Morris, and bursts out, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” Immediately afterward she admits that “this is heresy, and I must not say it” (59); but even so, we sense that she means what she says: she really would like to marry all of them. And, according to the novel’s own semiotics, she gets her wish. At her funeral Arthur declares that, because he has given Lucy his blood, he feels that she is his true wife in the sight of God. Under the circumstances, his friends naturally refrain from telling him about the transfusions Lucy had received from her other two lovers and Dr. Van Helsing; but later, alone with Seward, Van Helsing bursts out in uncontrollable laughter thinking of it. True, as Seward observes, the thought is very comforting for Arthur. But if Arthur is right in his belief, Van Helsing points out, what about the other three donors? “Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist” (176).

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Nor is this desire to marry all three of her suitors the only sign of Lucy’s suspect character. She is a sleepwalker, a habit traditionally associated with sexual looseness. She is therefore doubly vulnerable to Dracula’s approach; in the symbolsystem of the novel, she has signaled her sexual receptivity. It cannot be an accident that on the night of the storm, when Dracula’s ship lands, Lucy indulges again in sleepwalking, leaving the house dressed only in her nightgown. Considering the armor-like characteristics of the ordinary Victorian woman’s daytime clothing—the heavilyboned corsets, the immense weight of petticoats, the endless layers of cloth—Lucy in her nightdress might as well be naked. Worse yet, she goes to the old cemetery, alone, and to the grave of a suicide (the only spot of unsanctified ground in the churchyard). The traditional equation of sexuality and death could hardly be clearer, nor her invitation of Dracula more explicit. What makes Lucy’s sexuality threatening to the community—sufficiently threatening that she becomes an appropriate surrogate victim—is that she will not limit herself to one man. While she does officially choose one of her three suitors, her choice is insufficiently absolute to control the competition among the three for her possession. Stoker downplays the competition by making the men such good friends and such decent, selfcontrolled characters that the threat of disorder is concealed, but nonetheless that competition remains as a source of potential violence. But in order to function as a surrogate victim who can purge the community of its universal violence, something further is required: Lucy has to take on the aspect of the monstrous. In one light, Lucy functions as the monstrous double of Mina, the virtuous wife; seen another way, she functions as her own monstrous double, for there are two aspects to her personality whose separation becomes increasingly marked throughout her transformation into a vampire. She is both the image of purity, sweetness, and beauty—the traditional blond angel in the house—and the creature of sexual appetites, the sleep-walker who accedes to violent penetration by the vampire. Her saving grace, according to Van Helsing, is that she yielded to Dracula only during a trance—that is, when her conscious personality was not in command—so her unconscious personality alone has become vampiric.2 6 During her last hours, she manifests both sides of her personality in alternation, sometimes the sweet pure Lucy they all love, and sometimes the wanton, voluptuous creature with cruel mouth and hard eyes. When she is

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the work of her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen her in life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity. (216)2 7

As a vampire she is even more beautiful than in life, but no longer the Lucy they had known. “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness. . . . Lucy’s eyes [have become] unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew”; they blaze with “unholy light” and she is as “callous as a devil” (211). Again and again, Seward uses the words “wanton” and “voluptuous” to describe Un-Dead Lucy’s smile, her tones “diabolically sweet”—until she is thwarted, at which point she becomes overtly monstrous, her eyes throwing out “sparks of hell-fire,” the brows “wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes” (212). These same images are repeated when the four men, Dr. Van Helsing and Lucy’s three suitors, return the next day to free Lucy’s soul, to save her by killing her. “She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth—which it made one shudder to see—the whole carnal and unspirited appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity” (214).

In death Lucy becomes again the angel she had been in life; she also becomes a bond between her three rivals, where in life she could only have been a source of division. Despite their personal grief, it is for them an ideal solution to the problem she represented. In sacrificing Lucy, the four men purge not only their fear of female sexuality generally, of which she is the monstrous expression, but also—and more importantly— their fear of their own sexuality and their capacity for sexually-prompted violence against each other.

But the rite of sacrifice, an act of terrible violence, restores both Lucy and the community she had threatened. As Stoker describes it, the final killing of Lucy is quite clearly both a religious act and a communal one. The setting is a solitary tomb lit only by candles. Arthur drives the stake through Lucy’s heart, as the one with the best right to so violate her offending body and release the innocent soul, and he is supported in his work by the priestly figure of Dr. Van Helsing and by his two closest friends, Lucy’s other lovers, who read the prayer for the dead as he strikes home. The thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, bloodcurdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault. . . . There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so dreaded and grown to hate that

The scene in the tomb exemplifies a key element of the sacrificial rite, “the atmosphere of terror and hallucination that accompanies the primordial religious experience.”2 8 The violent hysteria, the decisive act of violence perceived as religious experience, the succeeding calm and the atmosphere of holy mystery covering the participants, all function to fuse the men into a closed and harmonious community. Although Lucy is no longer available to any of the men as a bulwark of his personal identity, her death serves to reinforce their common bond, their dedication to each other and to a sense of shared interest, thus bolstering that other pole of Victorian identity that Giddens defines as nationalism. But Lucy is not the only scapegoat in the novel. Count Dracula himself is also sacrificed for the common good. Like all sacrificial victims, he must be both connected and marginal. His links to the community are literally blood ties—the blood of Jonathan, Lucy, and Mina. Further, he resembles his enemies in several important ways: he is (or was once) human, he is European, he is extremely intelligent and has a most powerful will. But his roots are in Eastern Europe—Slavic, Catholic, peasant, and superstitious where England is Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, industrial, and rationalist. Further, unlike Arthur, the bourgeois aristocrat, Dracula belongs to a much older, more feudal sort of aristocracy, one that was was going out of favor in England. 2 9 In fact, the most unmistakable sign of his allegiance to that older pattern may be his sexuality, which partakes of the ancient droit du seigneur. “Your girls that you all love are mine already,” he gloats (306), taunting his opponents; and throughout the novel he lets his appetites run rampant, voracious and (as Freud says of the child’s sexuality) polymorphously perverse—a most appropriate phrase,

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awake and thus “herself,” she clutches the garlic flowers to her; but in her sleep, she thrusts away that protection, embracing her monstrous fate. Since she dies in her sleep, her future as one of the Un-Dead is inescapable.

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since the narrative repeatedly emphasizes Dracula’s “child brain” (335), as opposed to the adult brains of his enemies. Even Mina has, we are told, a man’s brain to go with her woman’s heart (234). But we know that civilized adult men control their appetites; his failure to do so marks the crucial distinction between Dracula and his opponents: he is degenerate, “a criminal and of criminal type” according to the theories of Lombroso and Nordau, which means he has an “imperfectly formed mind” (342).3 0 Consequently he can only work on one project at a time, and in emergencies must fall back on habit—which is why, closely pursued, he can do nothing but flee to his castle, while his opponents are able to innovate strategies for his defeat. As criminal and degenerate, Dracula is by definition selfish, evil, solitary; despite his pride in his descent from Attila and in his people’s valiant struggles against the Turk, as a vampire he has no true “national” identity, no “community” to belong to. Even the three vampire women at the castle who could conceivably function as a family for him, if not a nation, do not appear to do so. By contrast the “band of brothers” is selfless, good, and unified into a community both by their shared sacrifice of Lucy and their shared devotion to Mina. It is, as Van Helsing tells them, one of their great advantages over Dracula—the “power of combination,” along with the “sources of science” and “devotion in a cause” (238). However, despite all these differences, the truth gradually emerges: the Count represents precisely those dark secret drives that the men most fear in themselves, which are most destructive to both poles of identity—the intimate self of the family man, threatened by unrestrained sexual appetites, and the communal self of the nation, undermined by violent internal competition more than by external invasion. Representing a real aspect of his enemies, but one that they consciously wish to reject, Dracula has both the necessary connections to the community and the necessary separation from it to fulfill the scapegoat’s purgative function. And like Lucy’s sacrifice, the scene of Dracula’s death contains all the elements of the primordial religious experience. The atmosphere is terrifying and hallucinatory: the two parties desperately racing the sun, each fighting for life— Dracula to reach his castle, the band of heroes to catch the vampire before sunset restores his deadly power; the Count’s glaring eyes and “horrible vindictive look” as he lies helpless in his coffin, and his triumphant expression as he sees the sun

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setting and anticipates his revenge. Like the earlier sacrifice, this act is communal: two of the young men together pry off the lid of the coffin with their knives and strike simultaneously, one slashing the Count’s throat, the other plunging a knife into his heart—all described in words that intensify the terror of the moment (“sweep,” “flash,” “shriek,” “shear,” “plunge” [377]). “It was like a miracle,” cries Mina in relief; but, as the Count’s body crumbles into dust before their eyes, she adds, “Even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there” (377). As at the moment of Lucy’s death, the sacrificial victim is pictured as at peace, almost grateful to die for the greater good of the community. And indeed, there may be a reason for both Lucy’s and Dracula’s curious passivity at the moment of death. Mary Douglas remarks in Purity and Danger that “if a person has no place in the social system and is therefore a marginal being, all precaution against danger must come from others. He cannot help his abnormal situation.” But to say that he cannot help his situation is to suggest that he would like to help it, that he does not want to be a danger to others. However we read this reaction, the atmosphere of the scene changes dramatically at the moment of the vampire’s death: Castle Dracula is suddenly seen standing out against the sunset sky as we have never seen it before, every stone blazing in the light. The violence and horror is succeeded by holy awe and peace, which is capped when Quincey Morris sees Mina’s forehead now clear of its shameful scar, and vows with his last breath that this outcome is worth dying for. It is the ultimate confirmation that the community has been saved.

V: What is Lost: What is Saved But it has been a near thing, and the cost high: Lucy is lost to them (though her soul was saved), Quincey is dead, and both Jonathan and Mina suffer severely before Dracula is defeated. Stoker’s novel, then, reveals two complementary perspectives on its subject. If Lucy and Dracula demonstrate the terrifying powers of degeneracy, so threatening that they must at all costs be expelled from the community and from life itself, Jonathan’s and Mina’s experiences exemplify the difficulties and the rewards of resistance. According to Victorian sexology, in Dracula’s castle Jonathan is a man at risk: he is engaged to Mina, but they are not yet married, so that his

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The girl went on her knees and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and seemed to fasten on my throat. . . . I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart. (38)

The erotic charge of the scene is quite remarkable, as is Jonathan’s fascinated passivity in surrendering to his sexual fantasies, even while admitting the wickedness of what he desires. What we see and he does not, at this moment, is that he is risking not the “little death” of orgasm, but the real thing. Ironically, Jonathan is saved from the women not by his own virtue, but by Count Dracula’s opportune arrival. However, he is rescued from the evils of feminine sexuality only to be plunged into the horrors of homosexual passions. “How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it?” Dracula furiously asks his handmaids. “This man belongs to me!” The women answer, with a laugh of “ribald coquetry,” “You yourself never loved; you never love!” The Count looks at Jonathan’s face “attentively,” and says in a soft whisper, “Yes, I too can love” (39). As Dracula approaches him, Jonathan conveniently sinks into unconsciousness—into the same state in which Lucy had yielded to the vampire’s blandishments. If we had had any doubts about the equation of violence and sex in the novel, this scene would dispel them: Dracula’s own language conflates erotic desire and feeding; the mouth

both kisses and consumes, the same organ gratifying two distinct hungers. The encounter seems to “cure” Jonathan of his sexual desires (desires he will later pay for in the brain fever which sends him to his wedding an invalid). The text attributes his reaction to the fact that he now understands who, or rather, what the fatally beautiful creatures are, and thus sees them with horror rather than his earlier guilty fascination. “I am alone in the castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is nought in common. They are devils of the Pit!” (53). His beloved, he insists, though a woman, has nothing in common with these creatures. He means, of course, that she does not have their evil capabilities—but neither, we notice, does she have their voluptuousness. He never records any erotic reaction to Mina at all, let alone one of this feverish intensity. In fact, since their marriage begins with her nursing him through his illness, Mina’s relationship to her husband always seems more maternal than wifely. But in late-Victorian theory, that is as it should be. Marriage is designed to tame the sexual impulses of husbands; and as for wives, as Krafft-Ebing remarks, “Woman, if physically and mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual desire. If it were otherwise, marriage and family life would be empty words.”3 2 Victorian sexual theory also helps us to understand the difference between Lucy and Mina, to explain why Mina takes longer to succumb to the vampire count, and why she is able to resist more effectively than her friend. In the first place, while Lucy satisfies her own unconscious desires in yielding to Dracula, Mina’s vulnerability results as much from the failures of others as her own weakness. It is no action of Mina’s that allows the count access to her bedroom, but Renfield’s betrayal in giving his master the necessary permission to enter the house. Further, her husband and her friends, who should be protecting her, instead become so obsessed with the fight against Dracula—a fight from which they deliberately, and with the best motives, exclude her—that they leave her too much alone. Solitude is a danger to her as it was to Jonathan; and while Mina has presumably had little personal experience of sexual desire, she has, we must remember, read Jonathan’s journal in the process of transcribing it. That means she has read his description of his adventure with the three female vampires. Her own husband, then, in another sort of betrayal, has exposed Mina to his sexual fantasies. Thus isolated and exposed, Mina’s experience of marital sex, such as it has been, gives her no

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sexual fantasies are inflamed but not yet lawfully satisfied. Further, he is far from home and isolated from other living human beings. For the Victorians, solitude greatly increased sexual danger: the solitude of privacy allowed one to indulge in masturbation, while the different solitude of anonymity left one free to indulge in the kinds of sexual experiences one would, as member of a family, have been ashamed to admit desiring.3 1 Jonathan is both alone and anonymous. Confronted with the three mysterious and beautiful women in the moonlit room, he admits, “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (37). The scene that follows, when he very nearly (and disastrously) gets his wish, is recorded with incandescent detail:

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protection against the count’s powers of sexual fascination. When she recognizes him in her bedroom, she is appalled but paralyzed, unable to respond or cry out as he bares her throat to refresh himself. Such paralysis is bad enough, but worse, to her bewilderment she discovers that, “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it is a part of the horrible curse that such is [sic], when his touch is on his victim” (287). Dracula has drained not only her blood, but also her will to resist. He is, in sexual terms, more seducer than rapist. For a modern reader, this might lessen the crime, but for Victorians seduction would have been infinitely worse. In Victorian theory, it is sexual desire rather than sexual activity that is the true source of danger; and as Mina herself makes clear, she experiences desire under Dracula’s attentions. This explains why Mina’s forehead is scarred by the Host, why she herself suffers such (to us disproportionate) agonies of guilt and selfrevulsion. But once she is no longer isolated, once she is included in the community of her husband and their friends, she is able to resist desire, to exert her will against Dracula to help defeat him. Thus when he dies, the shameful scar disappears from her forehead. With help, Mina has conquered temptation and the dangers of degeneracy. It is this effort of will, the effort to conquer her own sexual imagination, that makes her worthy of the sacrifices of the others—that makes her worthy, in the end, of salvation. What, then, has been achieved? By the end of the novel Lucy is dead, Quincey Morris is dead, Mina and Jonathan have both come close to death—or worse, to the death-in-life of the degeneracy which vampirism represents; but they have, after all, repented and are now stronger than ever. Dracula has been killed, and England and the world preserved. The fantastic element has been expelled, and we return to the safe, ordinary reality of the opening. In fact, the novel ends quite abruptly, barely a full page after Dracula’s death. In a brief note we are told that Mina and Jonathan have a son, that Seward and Gadalming are happily married (Lucy’s role filled by other women), and that Van Helsing is now incorporated into the extended family. We also learn that the story we have just been told is, despite its elaborate detail and fundamentally documentary nature, unsupported by any original documents—nothing exists but Mina’s typescript, which is hardly proof of the remarkable narrative we have just read. Thus we, the fictive audience, are left to accept or reject

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based purely on the internal evidence, and—since the danger is safely past—need not react at all if we choose.3 3

VI: Dracula and the Urban Gothic But if comparatively little has happened in the world of the fictive audience, in the world of the actual audience Stoker’s novel has accomplished a good deal. With Dracula’s death, the “natural” superiority of Englishmen over the “lesser” races has been once again convincingly portrayed. More importantly, a number of profoundly disruptive elements have been symbolically expelled from society and the crumbling boundaries between certain key categories reaffirmed: between life and death, civilization and degeneracy, human and non-human, desire and loathing—all of which boundaries Dracula had blurred or violated. The even more fundamental boundary between self and other, which Dracula’s ability to override his victims’ willpower so terrifyingly challenges, is seen once again triumphant in Mina’s recovered purity and self-control. In Sexuality and Its Discontents, Jeffrey Weeks connects the development of sociology with the simultaneous development of sexology. As these two new disciplines struggled to define the “laws” of behavior in their respective realms, he argues, a powerful interdependency sprang up between them. At the same time as sexuality was being constituted as a key area of social relations, where it helped to define personal identity, sex as what Freud would soon call a “drive” came to be perceived as “a force outside, and set against society,” as “part of the eternal battle of individual and society.”3 4 Thus sex is paradoxically seen as both social and anti-social; it helps to define individual identity while at the same time threatening the collective. No wonder, then, that sex is such an explosive issue for the late Victorians, for whom these two poles of identity had become so crucial and so fragile. (It may also help to explain why sex is still an explosive issue for us, their grandchildren, a hundred years later—apparently so different from them, but living in a society which, like theirs, balances precariously on the same two poles.) The sex/society formulation, Weeks continues, “evokes and replays all the other great distinctions which attempt to explain the boundaries of animality and humanity”—like nature/culture, freedom/regulation—the “two rival absolutes.”3 5 As we have already seen, these are some of the central categories at play in Dracula. The outcome of the novel suggests Stoker was arguing that the

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And it is the generic conventions of the fantastic that have made this resolution possible, by creating an imaginative way simultaneously to affirm and deny the reality of chosen cultural elements. The fantastic allows writers and readers to take those aspects of their own culture that are most emotionally charged, most disruptive, and identify them as monstrous—that is, as violations not just of human law but of the very nature of reality—so that society can be symbolically purged of its pollution. However, Dracula is not merely fantastic; it is an example of the Urban Gothic, that modern version of the fantastic marked by its dependence on empiricism and the discourse of science. The difference can be seen most clearly by comparing Dracula to its immediate predecessor and reputed inspiration, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871). Le Fanu’s story of a female (and lesbian) vampire is, in fact, quite powerful and subtle, but the tale is set in a remote country house in eighteenthcentury Transylvania, whereas Stoker goes out of his way repeatedly to emphasize the modernity of his setting. For example (more or less at random): Van Helsing observes, “A year ago which of us would have received [i.e., believed] such a possibility, in the midst of our scientific, sceptical, matter-of-fact nineteenth century?” (266); or again, in “this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be [Dracula’s] greatest strength” (321). In addition to such references, which could easily be multiplied, the band of heroes relies readily and matter-of-factly on modern technology like blood transfusions, typewriters, telegraphs, and Dr. Seward’s “phonograph diary” (219). But these are mere decorations on the surface of the text. More important, the approach of the characters to their tasks in each tale shows the same contrast. Carmilla is tracked to her lair and killed by reference to the past—her own history, and the traditional religious knowledge of the community, while Dracula is identified and defeated by painstaking investigation of his present actions. Dr. Van Helsing’s knowledge of vampire lore eventually becomes essential, but it is of no

use until Dracula can be conclusively identified as a vampire. Thus the most crucial event in Dracula occurs when Mina types up all the documents of the case (Jonathan’s diary, Seward’s records, her own correspondence with Lucy, newspaper clippings, even telegrams) and assembles them in chronological order—the order in which we read them. Only with chronology does narrative emerge; only then does a collection of data turn into a hypothesis. And, as in science, hypothesis is a necessary prelude to action. In other words, while Carmilla resembles a traditional ghost story, Dracula is constructed like that other form which comes into its own in the 1890s, the detective story.3 6 The implications of this difference are crucial. The ghost story, like the eighteenth-century Gothic to which it is closely related, usually finds its methods in the shared knowledge of the community, whether this means traditional religious approaches to the supernatural or the ancient remedies of the folk. In either case, the necessary knowledge is both implicit and communal. In the modern world, and therefore in the Urban Gothic, there is no implicit knowledge: everything must be tested and proved. A method for dealing with the supernatural must be created, drawing on the most powerful and prestigious tools at their disposal: the methods of science, shaped by a secular world view—paradoxically, the very world view that was initially overthrown by the fantastic intrusion.3 7 How are we to read this paradox, so central to the Urban Gothic? Is the primary effect to invalidate the supernatural, seeing it as an alien intruder in the modern world? Is it, on the contrary, to affirm the reality of the supernatural in the very act of expelling it? Or is it to demonstrate the efficacy of the scientific method in addressing any kind of crisis? I would argue instead that the central appeal of fantastic literature is that, like the violent scapegoat rituals it mimics, it allows its writers and readers simultaneously to acknowledge and deny those aspects of themselves and their world that they find most troubling—to see them both as part of the community and as available for sacrifice. Douglas observes that one of the sources of ritual pollution is “the interplay of form and formlessness. Pollution dangers strike when form has been attacked.”3 8 Dracula is a perfect example of the “formless” attacking form (he is, after all, a shape-changer); but at the same time, our cultural experience of the novel suggests that, in creating

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solution to the late Victorian crisis lay in privileging society over sex, that in order to preserve the nation it was necessary to sacrifice some degree of personal freedom. That would explain the novel’s insistent pattern of the many against the one, the community against the scapegoat; it might also help explain the novel’s popularity at a time of imperialist fervor concealing deep anxieties about the future of the empire.

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his vampire count, Stoker has given to formlessness itself a form of continuing potency.

Notes Some of the research for this essay was done during an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers on “British Literature and Culture 18401900” given at Brown University in 1989. I am grateful to the NEH, to the seminar’s directors, Profs. Roger Henkle (English) and L. Perry Curtis (History), and to my colleagues in the seminar for their advice and support. 1. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 4. 2. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 178. 3. The most common positions are that Dracula is either about male sexuality threatening passive female innocence, or about the need to control rampant female sexuality. But it has also been argued that the novel is about covert homoerotic desire displaced onto women, and even that all the sex in the book is sadomasochistic. For a convenient collection of the best recent criticism of Dracula, see Margaret L. Carter, The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988). For some non-psychological readings of the novel, see Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990). 4. For example: Rosa Campbell Praed, Affinities: A Romance of Today (1885); Rider Haggard, She (1887); Arthur Conan Doyle, The Parasite (1894); Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897); Somerset Maugham, The Magician (1907); Algernon Blackwood, “The Camp of the Dog” in John Silence, Physician Extraordinaire (1908); Sax Rohmer, The Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918); Jessie Kerruish, The Undying Monster (1922). 5. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975); Andrzej Zgorzelski, “Is Science Fiction a Genre of Fantastic Literature?” Science-Fiction Studies 6 (1979): 289 (emphasis in original). Todorov defines the fantastic in relation to two other genres, the “uncanny” and the “marvellous.” In a realistic world—that is, a textual world modeled on the world we inhabit—an event occurs that appears to violate the laws of this world. The character who experiences this seemingly abnormal event (and, more importantly, the reader of the text) must choose between two explanations: either the event is a product of illusion, or imagination, or deliberate deception—in which case the familiar laws remain intact (and the text is an example of the uncanny); or else the event has genuinely occurred, is a part of reality, in which case the laws must be modified to allow for the existence of, say, ghosts or the Devil. In that case, the text belongs to the category of the marvellous. If, on the other hand, it is impossible for character or reader to decide whether or not the event is genuine, the text is, by Todorov’s definition, fantastic. “The fantastic is

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that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25; emphasis added). The problem with Todorov’s definition is that most texts do actually commit themselves about the event; thus very few texts that we normally think of as fantastic end up qualifying as such by Todorov’s definition. For a more extended discussion of Zgorzelski’s definition and its implications, see Kathleen L. Spencer, “Naturalizing the Fantastic: Narrative Technique in the Novels of Charles Williams,” Extrapolation 28 (1987): 62-74. 6. Henry James, “Miss Braddon,” The Nation, 9 Nov. 1865, 593-94; reprinted in Notes and Reviews (Cambridge: Dunster House, 1921), 110. Jane Austen makes a similar point in Northanger Abbey, contrasting the imaginary horrors in the Gothic novels her heroine is so fond of reading with the more mundane but very real cruelties she finds practiced in her own modern, ordinary England. 7. For a fuller discussion of this material, see George Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel 1865-1900 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 51-109. For a more traditional (that is, judgmental) treatment of the romancerealism debate see Lionel Stevenson, The English Novel: A Panorama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) and John Halperin, “The Theory of the Novel: A Critical Introduction” in The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halperin (London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), 3-22. For the patriotic argument for rejecting naturalism, see William C. Frierson, “The English Controversy Over Realism in Fiction 18851895,” PMLA 43 (1928): 533-50. 8. Cited in Sir Charles Mallett, Anthony Hope and His Books (London: Hutchinson, 1935), 114. 9. See, for example: R. L. Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance,” Longman’s Magazine 1 (November 1882): 69-79; Stevenson, “A Humble Remonstrance,” Longman’s Magazine 5 (December 1884): 139-47; H. Rider Haggard, “About Fiction,” Contemporary Review 51 (February 1887): 172-80; Andrew Lang, “Realism and Romance,” Contemporary Review 52 (1887): 683-93; George Saintsbury, “The Present State of the Novel.I,” Fornightly Review, n.s., 48 (September 1887): 410-17; “The Present State of the Novel.II,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 49 (January 1888): 112-23; and Hall Caine, “The New Watchwords of Fiction,” Contemporary Review 57 (April 1890): 479-88. 10. For example, Marie Corelli, George Griffith, Guy Boothby, William Le Queux, Sax Rohmer. 11. For a fuller discussion of the late Victorian fascination with the far reaches of empire, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 18391914 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988). Though the futuristic plot settings of some of these novels may make them sound very much like science fiction, they do not as a rule qualify as such by any reasonably rigorous criteria, not even the novels set on other planets. Their generic affiliations are rather with the imaginary voyage and the utopia, which are quite different traditions. For a survey of these texts and an alternate view of their genre, see Darko Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and Power (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). For a brief description of the occult revival, see Kathleen L. Spencer, “The Urban Gothic In British Fantastic Fiction 1880-1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1987), 34-98. For more detail, see John J.

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12. Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. I: Power, Property, and the State (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 194. 13. George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (London: CollierMacmillan, 1968), 121. 14. For a discussion of the East End and degeneracy, see Gareth Steadman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationships Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 149. 15. For discussions of this point, see (for example) Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 18301980, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1987). While the female role as constituted in theory was quite rigid, in practice both working-class and aristocratic women experienced some relaxation of its rigors, especially in economic and (therefore?) in sexual activities: aristocrats, because of the traditional privileges of their class and the sense that their lives are not bound by the same rules as everyone else; and working-class women, because they were needed in the paid work force by both their families and their employers. 16. Jenni Calder, The Victorian and Edwardian Home (London: Batsford, 1977), 132. 17. 3 Hansard, CXLV, 800. Quoted by Lee Holcombe, “Victorian Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law, 1857-1882” in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), 12. Holcombe’s article as a whole (3-28) is an illuminating and scholarly discussion of the struggle of Victorian wives to reform property laws. 18. For detailed discussions of the Cleveland Street brothel, see H. Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghagan, 1976), and Colin Simpson et al., The Cleveland Street Affair (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976). 19. For a discussion of the way the Wilde trial helped turn “homosexual” from an adjective describing certain kinds of behaviors into a noun indicating a kind of person and the significance of this change for the subsequent history of homosexuality, see Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981). To give one small example of the trial’s effect on the general cultural atmosphere (beyond the terror it struck in the hearts of homosexuals): in the late 1880s and early ’90s, there had been an explosion of novels treating sympathetically such previously untouchable subjects as female sexuality, free love, and fallen women. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), for example, was received not without controversy, certainly, but with a good bit of support for Hardy’s

sympathetic treatment of Tess. But Jude the Obscure, published in 1896 after Wilde’s public disgrace, was greeted with such a firestorm of disapproval that Hardy swore off writing fiction forever (for this argument, see Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalenes: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes, [London: Heinemann, 1976]). Dracula, published in 1897, reached the public at the height of this antisexual hysteria; it should not surprise us to find reflections of this mood in such a popular text—meaning both one that was addressed to a less sophisticated audience and one that was very widely read at the time. 20. In this same decade, the “unnaturalness” of homosexuality was also being challenged by Havelock Ellis, along with several prominent apologists like Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds who in the 1890s published books arguing that homosexuals were not “failed” or “unnatural” men or women but were instead members of a third or “intermediate” sex (Ellis, who was married to a lesbian, was the first to write sympathetically about lesbianism). In the early editions of Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing argued that all homosexual behavior was degenerate, but after the turn of the century he softens this judgment, concluding that some homosexuals indeed seemed to be “born” not “made,”—in his words, “congenital.” See, for example, the lengthy discussion of “Homosexual Feeling as an Abnormal Congenital Manifestation” (356-90). He explores the available explanations of “sexual inversion” from the traditional “vice” to the more “scientific” cause, excessive and/or early masturbation, and finally concludes that in some cases an explanation based on physiological factors— something in the structure of the brain, something therefore not subject to the will of the “invert”—rather than the old medico-moral explanation of “willful indulgence in depravity,” is the only logical conclusion. He does not altogether abandon degeneracy as an explanation even in these cases, arguing that “In fact, in all cases of sexual inversion, a taint of a hereditary character may be established”; but he admits that “What causes produce this factor of taint and its activity is a question which cannot be well answered by science in its present stage” (370; emphasis added). By allowing for the possibility of inherited tendencies to degeneracy, Krafft-Ebing simultaneously takes back and lets stand his uneasy conclusion that some homosexuals do not seem to be morally responsible for their sexual orientation. (Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study, Latin trans. Harry E. Wedeck [New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965]. This edition, with an introduction by Ernest Van Den Haag, is described as “The first unexpurgated edition, with the Latin texts translated into English for the first time” by Dr. Wedeck, but does not specify who translated the German parts of the text. I suspect this edition is based on the translation of the 12th German edition by F. J. Rebman published in 1934 by the Physicians and Surgeons Book Company, but cannot verify my suspicion at this time.) 21. Ludmilla Jordanova, “Natural Facts: An Historical Perspective on Science and Reality” in Nature, Culture, and Gender, ed. Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 44.

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Cerullo, The Secularization of the Soul: Psychical Research in Modern Britain (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982); Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974); Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (New York: Schocken Books, 1968); and Ellic Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

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22. The following discussion is drawn primarily from Mary Douglas’s Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Random House, 1972). 23. For other examples of modern “witchcraft” societies, consider Nazi Germany and McCarthy-era America. Indeed, the current struggle between social liberals and religious fundamentalists over issues like abortion and pornography manifests many of the same dynamics. 24. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), 13. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that in many cultures women are not afforded full status, they are seldom chosen as surrogate victims. Girard speculates that because a married woman retains ties with her parents’ social group as well as her husband’s, to sacrifice her would be to run the risk of one group or the other interpreting the sacrifice as “an act of murder committing it to a reciprocal act of revenge,” and so not ending the communal violence, but increasing it (13). 25. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), 59. All further citations will be to this text. Showalter in Sexual Anarchy (note 3), which I did not see until after this essay was submitted, makes the same essential point about Lucy. 26. Simon Williams, analyzing Charles Nodier’s play, Vampire (1820), part of the response to Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), finds a very similar pattern. “Sexual desire is exhibited as supernatural possession that causes the heroine to wander deliriously in caverns and shady places in search of her demon lover. But once she returns to consciousness, she is totally unaware of the dark forces that have briefly taken over her body” (“Theatre and Degeneration: Subversion and Sexuality,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985], 246). The terms “conscious” and “unconscious” may seem anachronistic, but the English had casually accepted the idea of an unconscious mind by the latter part of the nineteenth century; the idea is expounded in a number of different places in the last two decades. It was not the concept of the unconscious that made Freud so shocking, but his notion of what kinds of material the unconscious contained. As Nina Auerbach (note 3) points out, Stoker might well have known of Freud by the time he wrote Dracula, since F. W. Myers had presented a lecture to the Society for Psychical Research on Freud and Breuer’s work with hysterics in 1893; and in the novel itself Dr. Seward mentions Charcot, Freud’s teacher (22-23). 27. Most critics discuss this scene as symbolic of sexual intercourse and orgasm, even going so far in one case as to liken it to the “painful deflowering of a virgin, which Lucy still is” (C. F. Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Literature and Psychology 22 [1972]: 31). While I recognize the elements of the scene that make it possible to draw the parallel, what most strikes me in the description (and, I suspect, most women readers) is the violence—which is, because of the religious overtones of the scene, weirdly impersonal. Indeed, it is rather alarming to me to think that this scene can

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be read so easily, and apparently without qualms or qualifiers, as an image of sexual intercourse. What does such a reading suggest about our culture’s confusion of sex and violence? 28. Girard (note 24), 161. 29. This popular disapproval of the aristocracy became particularly apparent after the publication of Sir Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius in 1869, which attacked both inherited wealth and the titled nobility. 30. For a detailed discussion of Dracula as Lombroso’s “criminal man,” see Ernest Fontana, “Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Stoker’s Dracula,” in Carter (note 3), 159-66. For a more thorough examination of the place of degeneracy theory in late Victorian thinking, see Chamberlin and Gilman (note 26). 31. Douglas (note 1), 97. Richard Sennett and Michael Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” in Humanities in Review 1, ed. Sennett et al. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 4. 32. Krafft-Ebing (note 20), 42. Not all Victorian doctors agreed with this, but it does seem to have been a majority opinion, expressed categorically, publically, and often. Poovey in Uneven Developments (note 15) offers the clearest explanation of the thinking behind what now seems a ludicrous position. Victorian doctors knew so little about female physiology, she observes, that the only model they had for sexual response was the familiar male tumescence/ejaculation sequence. Failing to find this sequence in women, they concluded that women normally did not experience orgasm. Of course, this does not explain KrafftEbing’s value judgment about the incompatibility of female sexual desire with marriage and family life; that, after all, is a matter of culture, not science. Nonetheless, Poovey’s observation does give us a welcome alternative to the reductive explanation of “sexism” as to how otherwise intelligent men could arrive at such absurd conclusions. 33. This detail is characteristic of fantastic texts, that finally we are left with just the testament itself, and no “external” proofs. 34. Weeks (note 2), 81. 35. Weeks, 97. 36. Rather than pointing to Carmilla, I think that Stoker’s most important literary source is Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), or more likely (since Stoker was a theatrical man) one of its many dramatic redactions. Polidori’s text creates a modern fantastic effect, deriving its potency from the device of bringing his nobleman/vampire into the city of London—seventyfive years before Stoker does the same thing. 37. One way to distinguish between the traditional ghost story and the Urban Gothic is that the ghost story, although genuinely fantastic, is much closer in tone to the original Gothic. In addition, ghosts generally have quite a limited repertory of objects, motives, and behaviors: to get revenge, to make restitution, to finish an important task left incomplete at death, to warn the living (generally family members or descendants),

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38. Douglas (note 1), 104.

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-1894)

Poet Rossetti was the niece of John Polidori, author of The Vampyre (1819), a tale that is believed to have influenced Rossetti’s wellknown Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Rossetti had plans to write a biography of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, whom she greatly admired, but was forced to abandon the project due to a lack of available information. “Goblin Market” relates the adventures of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie. The two are taunted by goblin merchants to buy luscious and tantalizing fruits. Though Lizzie is able to resist their coaxing, Laura succumbs. The narrator details Laura’s increasing apathy and Lizzie’s efforts to save her sister. The poem has been variously interpreted as a moral fable for children, an erotic lesbian fantasy, an experiment in meter and rhyme, and a feminist reinterpretation of Christian mythology. Two other well-known poems in the same volume, “After Death” and “Remember,” meditations on death and the afterlife, have also been interpreted by some feminists as subversive texts despite their seemingly complaisant surfaces. Much contemporary criticism has focused on “Goblin Market,” especially its eroticism and the exploration of the relationship between the two sisters in the story. Critics have noted the supernatural and macabre elements and presence of such creatures as goblins, serpents, and lizards in Rossetti’s poetry, and have asserted that the imagery and language of economics and commerce in “Goblin Market” comments on the role of women and their literature within the Victorian economy.

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or to reenact endlessly the crucial event of their lives (as in Yeats’ “Purgatory”). In the Urban Gothic, the supernatural powers have a much broader scope for action.

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Edmund Burke, 1749-1797.

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DAVID PUNTER (ESSAY DATE 1996) SOURCE: Punter, David. “Gothic and Decadence: Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen.” In The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Vol. 2, pp. 1-26. Essex, England: Longman, 1996. In the following essay, Punter illustrates how works of Gothic literature by Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Machen exemplify Decadence, and asserts that each of these works question the extent to which a civilization can change, or “decline,” and still retain its national and cultural identity.

What is remarkable about the ‘decadent Gothic’ of the 1890s is that out of a cross-genre with only doubtfully auspicious antecedents should have proceeded, in the space of eleven years, four of the most potent of modern literary myths, those articulated in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Here again we have a burst of symbolic energy as powerful as that of the original Gothic: alongside Frankenstein’s monster, the Wandering Jew and the Byronic vampire we can set the Doppelganger, the mask of innocence, the maker of human beings and the new, improved vampire of Dracula. As we look at these books, we shall see certain interconnections—at any rate in terms of theme, even where authorial stances may be quite different—but one thing can be said at the outset which underlines the meaning of decadence in connection with these texts, and that is that they are all concerned in one way or another with the problem of degeneration, and thus of the essence of the human. They each pose, from very different angles, the same question, which can readily be seen as a question appropriate to an age of imperial decline: how much, they ask, can one lose—individually, socially, nationally—and still remain a ‘man’? One could put the question much more brutally: to what extent can one be ‘infected’ and still remain British? The text in which these questions are least on the surface is also the earliest of them, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which needs no introduction as the best-known Doppelganger story of them all. It follows on from an easily identifiable Gothic tradition, including James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ (1839), both of which influenced Stevenson, yet it has captured the popular imagination more strongly than any of the others, feasibly partly because of its ‘contemporary’, metropolitan setting and detective-story trappings, but feasibly

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also because of a stranger phenomenon, its obvious connection with actual late Victorian fears about similarly untraceable murders, centred on the archetype of Jack the Ripper. It is interesting in passing to note that, while Jekyll and Hyde itself is not in any overt way concerned with the Gothic problem of the aristocracy, popular imagination nevertheless has had its way by tying the text in with this body of semi-legendary history which unmistakably is aristocracy-oriented: the one thing nobody ever seems to have thought about Jack the Ripper was that, when unmasked, he might be someone working class or unknown. Jekyll and Hyde is, from one aspect, the record of a split personality, and the nature of the split is in its general outline one now familiar to a postFreudian age, although one which Stevenson outlines with particular sensitivity: ‘the worst of my faults’, says Jekyll, describing his youth, was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me, and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations, than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.1

This is a very rich passage. One must, of course, be careful not to interpret it as the narrative voice, since it is part of Jekyll’s own statement, and Jekyll is certainly remarkably pompous and possibly a self-deceiver. However, Jekyll’s view seems to be that the split in his being has derived much less from the presence within his psyche of an uncontrollable, passionate self than from the force with which that self has been repressed according to the dictates of social convention. The original tendency of Jekyll’s alter ego, so he claims, was by no means towards the vicious, but rather towards the ‘loose’, a neutral desire for certain kinds of personal freedom which has been repressed by the ‘imperious’ need not only to conform to, but also to stand as a public example of, strict virtue. Jekyll’s problem, surely, is largely put as a social one, and one can interpret it in two connected ways: literally, as the problem of a

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But Jekyll’s aspirations are of two kinds: they are moral and social aspirations, but they are also scientific aspirations, as in the case of Frankenstein. The great strength of Jekyll and Hyde lies in its attempt to connect the two more clearly even than Mary Shelley had done, and to show that Jekyll’s familiar desire to ‘make another man’ stems from problems in the organisation of his own personality. Like Frankenstein (1818) and The Island of Dr Moreau, Jekyll and Hyde relies upon and even exploits public anxieties about scientific progress and about the direction of this progress if undertaken in the absence of moral guidance, but this aspect seems to be largely metaphorical. The scientific emphasis is very perfunctory; Jekyll himself slides over it, suggesting that details would only bore. What he does not slide over is his series of attempts to comprehend the precise nature of the relation between himself and Hyde, which Stevenson carefully avoids describing merely as a

relation of opposites. Hyde is not Jekyll’s opposite, but something within him: the fact that he is smaller than the doctor, a ‘dwarf’, demonstrates that he is only a part whereas Jekyll is a complex whole, and this is underlined in one of Stevenson’s more startling insights: ‘Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference’ (Works, IV, 75). This, of course, was precisely the aspect of relationship which Mary Shelley suppressed in connection with Frankenstein and his monster, probably because such ‘unnatural’ creativity seemed too close to a parody of the divine. Stevenson admits to Hyde’s status as a parodic ‘son of God’, but only at the expense of certain other authorial repressions, principally sexual. Not only does the relation between Jekyll and Hyde exclude women, the whole tale moves—like Dorian Gray and Dr Moreau—in a world substantially composed of leisured bachelors, and even when Stevenson ostensibly tries to portray Hyde’s tendency towards sexual excess and deviance, which could hardly not be at the root of Jekyll’s fastidious disgust, he can get almost nothing on paper. Most of Hyde’s nastiness is withheld: Stevenson deals with it merely in generalities, and whether this is because of Jekyll’s revulsion or of a poverty in Stevenson’s ability to imagine the sexually criminal remains obscure: ‘into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now I can scarce grant that I committed it)’, Jekyll says, ‘I have no design of entering; I mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with which my chastisement approached’ (Works, IV, 72). He does then proceed, however, to allude to one incident, which we have already been told about, when Hyde has been seen to meet a child at a street corner, and to have ‘trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground’. ‘It sounds nothing to hear’, says Enfield, who is telling Utterson the story, ‘but it was hellish to see’ (Works, IV, 6). He is right: it does sound nothing to hear, and it is not even very easy to imagine. It lingers in the memory, but only because of its strangeness, which may have been Stevenson’s purpose. It is, of course, symbolic: it is designed to show the inhumanity of Hyde where a more purposive crime would not. Hyde is described here as a kind of Juggernaut, and it is his ‘thing-ness’ which finally appals Jekyll: ‘this was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life’ (Works, IV, 83).

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member of a ‘respectable’, professional upper middle class, who is supposed to ‘body forth’ social virtue in his person and to eschew any behaviour, however harmless, which might tend to degrade that stance, and also metaphorically as the problem of a member of a ‘master-race’. Jekyll’s difficulties are those of the benevolent imperialist: they are not at all to do with the political problem of sanctioning brute force, but with the maintenance of dignity under adverse circumstances. It is strongly suggested that Hyde’s behaviour is an urban version of ‘going native’. The particular difficulties encountered by English imperialism in its decline were conditioned by the nature of the supremacy which had been asserted: not a simple racial supremacy, but one constantly seen as founded on moral superiority. If an empire based on a morality declines, what are the implications for the particular morality concerned? It is precisely Jekyll’s ‘high views’ which produce morbidity in his relations with his own desires. Thus, of course, the name of his alter ego: it is the degree to which the doctor takes seriously his public responsibilities which determines the ‘hidden-ness’ of his desire for pleasure. Since the public man must be seen to be blameless, he must ‘hide’ his private nature, even to the extent of denying it be any part of himself. And although this is in one sense a problem locatable within a particular historical development, we can also sense in it echoes of older Gothic problems: it is, Jekyll claims, his ‘aspirations’ which render him particularly liable to psychic fragmentation, just as the younger Wringhim’s aspirations towards total purity caused his breakdown.

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Again, there is a problem here, a further reticulation of the Doppelganger structure, about the relation between Stevenson and Jekyll. It is reasonable that Jekyll should not want, or be able, to acknowledge Hyde as in any way human, and indeed that onlookers like Enfield should hold whatever opinion they please, but Stevenson himself appears to stop short of certain realisations. If it is indeed repression which has produced the Hyde personality, further denial of Hyde’s claims can only result in an ascending scale of violence. And this, of course, is exactly what happens, but Stevenson shows no clear signs of knowing why. Jekyll’s later attempts at repression compound Hyde’s fury: ‘my devil had been long caged, he came out roaring’ (Works, IV, 76). There is an underlying pessimism in the book which results from Stevenson’s difficulty in seeing any alternative structure for the psyche: once the beast is loose, it can resolve itself only in death. Jekyll rather feebly suggests at one point that, if he had been in a different frame of mind when he first took the drug, the second self thus released might have been very different: the prospect of an alternative Hyde, constructed of sweetness and light, is attractive but perhaps somewhat unrealistic. Julia Briggs’s work suggests that the issue of the relations between the human and the bestial which occurs in Stevenson, Wells, Stoker and later in such writers as Forster and Lawrence springs largely from the attempt to deal with Darwinian revelations about the nature of evolution.2 Thus Jekyll’s transformation is a change of state of the most extreme kind: when he takes the drug, ‘the most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death’ (Works, IV, 68). This is the reversion of the species, the ever-present threat that, if evolution is a ladder, it may be possible to start moving down it. Not surprisingly, this threat cannot be named in the text: Jekyll says that he has brought on himself ‘a punishment and a danger that I cannot name’ (Works, IV, 37), and Hyde is constantly spoken of as possessing unexpressed deformities. As in much Gothic, there is a dialectical interplay here between the unspeakable and the methods of verification evidenced in the complexity of narrative structure, but post-Darwinian fears have given a new twist to the concept of degeneration. Early in the story, Utterson suggests that something unspoken from the past may be coming to claim Jekyll:

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He was wild when he was young; a long while ago, to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ah, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace; punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault. (Works, IV, 19)

But in the context of the tale, Utterson is, despite the encouraging pun in his name, an oldfashioned moralist, and his attempt to impose a conventional ‘sins of the fathers’ explanation fails. If Hyde represents a ‘ghost’ and a ‘cancer’, it is a general one: the absence of just limitations goes farther than Utterson cares to think. The human being may be the product of a primal miscegenation, a fundamentally unstable blending, which scientific or psychological accident may be able to part. And this problem of the double self is, of course, also central to The Picture of Dorian Gray, the record, as Wilde puts it in Radcliffean terms, of the ‘terrible pleasure’ of ‘a double life’. The gilded Dorian used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.3

A casual wish on Dorian’s part severs the links, and he becomes free to live a life of vice and selfindulgence without losing his looks or his youth, while his portrait records his depravity in terms of physical decay. The problem of distinguishing narrator from character is very great in Wilde, particularly because of his aphoristic habits: it is not easy to know what to make of the multiple resonances of Dorian’s opinion that It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannised most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves. (Dorian, p. 59)

Here, as elsewhere, Dorian Gray incorporates the problems of the 1890s in a jewelled nutshell. We have a burgeoning awareness of the existence of the unconscious, of that fountain from which spring desires and needs a thousand times stronger than those to which we can admit; a sense of the dire situations which result from the liberation of

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Artifice is perhaps the key term: how much, if at all, do scientific and psychological discoveries help us to mould ourselves, and are the possible shapes into which they can project human life necessarily at all desirable. It is characteristic of Wilde’s late romanticism that the means of moulding should be not science but the art of painting, but the tenor of the metaphor is the same: is there anything we can do with this knowledge, on the one hand of our myriad-mindedness and on the other of our proximity to the beasts, which will be other than harmful? The answer of the 1890s was unanimous: No. This is more surprising in Wilde than in the other writers, because it places limits of a severe kind on his apparent decadence: Dorian Gray encourages no faith in artifice, either artifice on others or the self-artifice which is supposed to be the crux of decadence. Wilde’s fear of decay is even more vividly expressed than those of Stevenson or Wells: Dorian throws a pall over his picture, to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself— something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. They would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian, p. 119)

Wilde has no doubt that Dorian’s repressed desires are as horrible as Jekyll’s, not only morally horrible but also inelegant; the much-vaunted divorce between moral and aesthetic categories is simply not there in Dorian Gray, which is structurally a simple morality tale, more so even than Jekyll and Hyde, and certainly more so than Dracula. Like Stevenson, Wilde is locked in the realisation that repression gets you both ways: Sir Henry advocates liberation, claiming that if we repress our desires ‘we degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to’ (Dorian, p. 23). Dorian does his slightly insipid best to avoid this

fate, but ends up in exactly the same state. Sir Henry’s anthropological speculations have a lot to be said for them: The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. . . . The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. (Dorian, p. 18)

So far so good: ‘sooner’, perhaps, ‘murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’.4 But Dorian cannot escape doom that way, and possibly Wilde’s reasoning is similar to Stevenson’s: both Dorian and Hyde ‘go native’, they both renounce the repressive morality of the dominant culture, but all they achieve is an assimilation to the apparently even worse ‘morality’ of the lower classes. Wilde’s version of the London environment is again Stevenson’s, and again lifted out of Dickens but shorn of even the severely truncated sympathy we find in Oliver Twist (1838): Dorian remembers wandering through dimly-lit streets, past gaunt black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses. Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him. Drunkards had reeled by cursing, and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque children huddled upon doorsteps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts. (Dorian, p. 88)

There are two possible but contradictory conclusions one might draw from this nexus of urban visions: on the one hand, that Dickens, Stevenson, Wilde were themselves too deeply imbued with middle-class morality to grant any validity to alternative kinds of life, on the other that they had seen too clearly the depredations which that morality had wrought upon its underdogs to grant any credence to the survival of lower-class integrity. It has been said that decadence is fundamentally a middle-class attitude, and this is borne out by Dorian Gray. There is, says Basil Hallward, the artist, ‘a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings’ (Dorian, p. 3). But, elegant though this thought may be, it does not support the conclusions of the story: Schedoni, in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), could indeed claim kudos from such a fatality, as could any Byronic hero, but Dorian is not of the same stature at all. His crimes and his feelings are alike petty and

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those passions; and the complicated metaphor of experimentation, which runs through all four of these texts. In Dorian Gray, it is perfectly clear that one cannot restrict the concept of experimentation to science: Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau experiment on malleable flesh, Sir Henry Wotton and Dorian—in different ways, but there are Doppelganger complexities here too—artificially mould the mind.

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dilettante, and his doom evokes neither compassion nor the more elevated sympathies of tragedy. Again, Wilde tries to fuse psychological speculation with characteristics taken from the older Gothic, but does not convince us of the grandeur of necessity:

pole that ‘he liked Gothic architecture, not because he thought it beautiful, but because he found it queer’,5 the sensibility sounds very much like Wilde’s, and the embarrassment one feels at Castle of Otranto (1764) is similar to that in Dorian Gray. Who is being made fun of in a passage like this:

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. (Dorian, p. 190)

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. (Dorian, p. 1)

This reminds us less of the fate of the tragic hero than of the indulgent self-assessment of Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), but Fosco has a saving irony absent from Dorian Gray: he is also considerably more effective, in almost any terms, than any of Wilde’s characters. As the core Gothic theme of Jekyll and Hyde is the Doppelganger, the core theme of Dorian Gray is the quest for immortality, accompanied with appropriate speculations on the relations between art and life and between beauty and vice. A significant twist in Wilde’s dealings with these themes, however, is that his protagonist is hardly a hero but rather a hero-worshipper, whose own hero, Sir Henry, is really rather unconnected with the doom which afflicts Dorian. The vitality, the fire, the primitive barbaric energy of the Gothic hero are absent. Wilde himself talks about the continuing power of Gothic images to affect the psyche: There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. (Dorian, p. 131)

But his attempts to reinvoke this condition are tired, perhaps with the natural fatigue of accomplished paradox, perhaps because of the lack of bite in the social fears on which he plays. Dorian chooses to ape an aristocratic life-style, but he is not an aristocrat, at least not in any of the more worrying senses. It is, finally, unclear how much seriousness Wilde invests in this matter of style. When Lytton Strachey says of Horace Wal-

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Most probably the target is the reader: in any case, the primary effect of Dorian Gray is surely, unlike that of Jekyll and Hyde, cathartic. Where Jekyll and Hyde raises issues and does not resolve them, thus remaining to haunt the mind, Dorian Gray wraps up issues in a way that purges them of real importance. Dorian is not at root a figure whose fate affects the rest of us. In terms of this schema, Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau is definitely more closely related to Jekyll and Hyde, and of course even more so to Frankenstein, another text which owes a large part of its continuing popularity precisely to its failure to establish a coherent pattern out of its intellectual elements. Since it is perhaps rather less well known than Jekyll and Hyde or Dorian Gray, it may be as well to give a brief account of the plot. It is the first-person narrative of Edward Prendick, introduced by his nephew, who confirms the minimal points that his uncle has been shipwrecked and rescued, with an interval of almost a year between, but states that his uncle’s version of the intervening time has never been accepted. Prendick’s own account, thus introduced, tells how he was rescued from a ship’s boat by a strange craft equipped with a drunken captain, a collection of animals, and a man named Montgomery, an outcast ex-medical student who appears to be in charge. Due to an altercation with the captain, Prendick is put off with the others at their island destination, and there encounters Moreau himself. He is surprised by many features of the island, which, he is assured, is a kind of biological research station, but particularly by its other inhabitants, some of whom appear to be men,

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Poster advertising the 1977 film adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

although of no race he has ever encountered, others to be somehow between men and animals. He is also disturbed by screams of pain heard during the nights, and eventually forms the conclusion that Moreau, whose name he has now remembered as that of an exiled vivisectionist, is reducing men to an animal state by surgery, for dire purposes of his own. An explanation follows, in which Prendick is humiliated to find that Moreau is doing exactly the reverse and trying to form a man from the beasts, with varying success. The mixed crop of failures which inevitably accures lives in a village of hovels on the island, restrained from violence by laws which Moreau has implanted in them, but these start to become ineffective and the beast-men return to the beast, killing Moreau and Montgomery on the way. Prendick manages to survive amid the wreckage of the island society, and is eventually rescued. On the surface, this is another fable about the dangers of scientific progress unrestrained by moral compunction: we are clearly meant to be

appalled both by the pain caused to the animals and by the condition to which many of them are reduced. Had Moreau had any intelligible object I could have sympathised at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even had his motive been hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless.6

But Prendick’s attitude is by no means consistent, which renders many of the scientific points ambiguous. Writing, we must remember, after his return to civilisation, he comments on the moment when he remembers where he had previously heard Moreau’s name, and adds that when his experiments became known the doctor was simply howled out of the country. It may be he deserved to be, but I still [sic] think the tepid support of his fellow investigators, and his desertion by the great body of scientific workers, was a shameful thing. (Moreau, p. 38)

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The principal problem, however, concerns the status of pain in the story. At one level, Moreau appears to be practising an extreme form of surgery with variable results, but at another he seems to be performing a less clearly scientific kind of operation, in which the important feature of the ‘humanising’ process is the actual experience of pain for its own sake. ‘Each time I dip a living creature into a bath of burning pain’, says Moreau, ‘I say, This time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own’ (Moreau, p. 84). Human rationality, for Moreau, seems to be largely dependent on transcending pain: ‘the store men and women set on pleasure and pain . . . is the mark of the beast upon them, the mark of the beast from which they came. Pain! Pain and pleasure—they are for us, only so long as we wriggle in the dust . . .’ (Moreau, p. 81). Yet it is by the threat of further pain that Moreau keeps control over the beastmen: presumably this is supposed to be a mark of their inadequacy, yet Moreau implants fear of pain in them as a substitute for a moral law.

spite and fear on the puritanical Prendick: ‘You logic-chopping, chalky-faced saint of an atheist, drink’, he shouts, ‘you’re the beast. He takes his liquor like a Christian’ (Moreau, p. 116). Certainly we are left feeling that there is a genuine vision at the root of Moreau’s behaviour, even if through rejection it has turned obsessional, and it is also very difficult to answer the questions which the text raises about the happiness of the beast-men in the way Wells appears to want them answered: how does one determine whether a half-man is more or less happy or pained than the beast from which he came? But Moreau is not only a Faustian seeker: he is also a more contemporary symbol. At one point Moreau, Montgomery and Prendick go forth to reassert their control over the beast-men, who come out of the jungle towards them: As soon as they had approached within a distance of perhaps thirty yards they halted, and bowing on knees and elbows, began flinging the white dust upon their heads. Imagine the scene if you can. We three blue-clad men, with our misshapen black-faced attendant, standing in a wide expanse of sunlit yellow dust under the blazing blue sky, and surrounded by this circle of crouching and gesticulating monstrosities, some almost human, save in their subtle expression and gestures, some like cripples, some so strangely distorted as to resemble nothing but the denizens of our wildest dreams. (Moreau, p. 98)

The purely scientific point is thus confused with a set of moral arguments about the difference between man and beast, as it is in Frankenstein; and similarly Prendick’s objections to Moreau’s procedures are considerably vitiated by his admiration for Moreau himself, grudging as it is. In the discussion where Moreau reveals his true aims, Prendick says that he found himself ‘hot with shame at our mutual positions’ (Moreau, p. 76). Like previous hero/villains, Moreau exercises an enormous power over his fellow men. When Prendick first ventures on a journey to discover the island’s secrets, Moreau catches him: ‘he lifted me as though I was a little child’ (Moreau, p. 56), says Prendick, and when Moreau dies, Montgomery collapses completely and returns to drink: ‘he had been strangely under the influence of Moreau’s personality. I do not think it had ever occurred to him that Moreau could die’ (Moreau, p. 115). Moreau is described, oddly, as having an exceptional, perhaps god-like, serenity, evidenced precisely in the absence of motive by which Prendick is fascinated: ‘you cannot imagine’, says Moreau to Prendick, rightly, ‘the strange colourless delight of these intellectual desires’ (Moreau, p. 81).

This is the Gothic vision of empire on which the book is founded. The ‘black-faced’ attendant is, of course, literally black-faced because he is himself a beast-man, but the play on black and white is nonetheless sustained throughout. Moreau himself is both white-haired and whitefaced; Prendick, as we have seen, is ‘chalky’; it is ‘white dust’ with which the dark-skinned beastmen cover themselves as a sign of submission. Moreau, whose island is, significantly, marked on maps as ‘Noble’s Isle’, is the white ‘aristocrat’ who presides over a colonial society in which the fears of reversion which we have already seen in Jekyll and Hyde and in Dorian Gray are ever-present, both in the beast-men and in the ‘white trash’ Montgomery. His attempts to prevent this reversion are unsuccessful but ultimately heroic, for he dies, surely, in the attempt to purify the race.

Thus far, the ambiguity of the text is a common Gothic ambiguity, in which the seeker after forbidden knowledge is condemned while being simultaneously surrounded by a halo of admiration. With very pleasing irony Wells portrays Montgomery after Moreau’s death venting his

None of this, of course, is to think of Wells as a racist: far from it. The point is that The Island of Dr Moreau represents a confluence of, first, old Gothic themes of aspiration and dominance; second, the fears about human status and dignity generated by Darwin; and third, as a natural

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they had certain Fixed Ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds, which absolutely bounded their imaginations. They were really hypnotised, had been told certain things were impossible, and certain things were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the texture of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute. (Moreau, pp. 87-8)

As Frankensteinian creator, Moreau wants to form a free being, free from the natural constraints of pain and pleasure; as imperialist, he wants to form a slave, and the best kind of slave, of course, does not know that he or she is one. The arguments are partly difficult to sort out because Moreau is not himself particularly concerned with the little society of rejects which he is producing; as far as he is concerned they are merely signs of failure. It is Montgomery who takes an interest in them. The society which thus accidentally emerges is one which repeats many features of ordinary human societies: an interesting and resonant one is that ‘the females were less numerous than the males, and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the monogamy which the Law enjoined’ (Moreau, p. 89). More important, their ‘human-ness’ does not stick: they retain ‘the unmistakable mark of the beast’; ‘the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back again’ (Moreau, pp. 46, 83). At a very basic level, the message is a simple and conservative one: do not interfere in the natural order. What is left doubtful, however, is whether such interference is wrong on moral grounds, or merely impossible to

achieve fully, and also to what extent the experience of pain is an essential part of Moreau’s process. Answers to the two hypothetical questions which one would like to ask—what Prendick or Wells would think if Moreau were successful, and what the situation would be given the benefits of anaesthesia—cannot be extrapolated from the text. If this makes for a somewhat confused work, it also makes for a rich one. The story has strong elements in it of Defoe and more particularly Swift. The language used by and to the beast-men is oddly biblical, which reinforces the image of a perverted island paradise, and the ending, with Prendick returning to civilisation only to find that he keeps regarding his fellow men as themselves bearing the mark of the beast, is identical to the ending of Gulliver’s Travels. The Island of Dr Moreau brings the reader face to face with a problem which had accompanied Gothic visions since the time of William Godwin and Mary Shelley, but which had been given an extra twist by Darwin: where do we locate the blame for terrors which are the effect of social conditioning? It could simply be said that Moreau’s ends do not justify his means, but Prendick at least seems to feel rather doubtful about this, and there are strong hints that the kinds of pressure under which the beast-men live are not really all that different from ordinary social pressures. Moreau’s island is partly a microcosm, partly a polemical distortion: its terrifying effect derives partly from Wells’s handling of conventional adventure-story techniques, but more from the sense of vertigo with which we apprehend the relation between the beast-men and ourselves. Fundamentally, all three of these works are concerned with the problem of the liberation of repressed desires. The discoveries of Darwin combined with psychological developments to produce, first, a revelation that the personality contains depths which do not appear on the surface of everyday intercourse, and second, a fear that the Other thus postulated may relate to the bestial level which evidences human continuity with the animal world. In the light of this double supposition, experiments of the kind made deliberately by Jekyll and Moreau and accidentally by Dorian Gray become fraught with more terror than a similar experiment implied in Frankenstein, because experimentation is coming to be seen as tinkering with the self. Thus the ‘double self’ which had been hypothesised by Hogg and others received a basis in scientific speculation, and the whole question of man’s relations to the beasts

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metaphorical accompaniment, images of white imperialism in its decline. But just as in Dorian Gray, the strands do not hold together: like Sir Henry Wotton, Moreau has considerable insight into the operations of repressive ideology, but his advocacy of alternatives is condemned by the text. ‘Very much’, says Moreau, ‘of what we call moral education is . . . an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion’ (Moreau, p. 79). But Wells fails to keep this suggestion, with its Freudian and Darwinian connotations, firmly in mind, and describes Moreau’s process of humanisation in two rather different ways. The first beast-man Moreau makes is said to have begun his new life ‘with a clean sheet, mentally; had no memories left in his mind of what he had been’ (Moreau, p. 82). Yet Moreau is also said not to be experimenting with freedom from conditioning, but rather to be forming beast-men who will be obedient to his own moral and social ideas:

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came to be examined—and mythologised—anew. But a myth supposes two moments in time: the moment of origin, creation, differentiation which needs explanation, and the contemporary moment in terms of which communicable myth must be cast. Thus Stevenson, Wilde and Wells found themselves necessarily assimilating the intellectual problems of their age to the actual social structures within and about which they wrote. In the case of Stevenson, the problem of the beast within becomes cast in terms of the difficulties of professional, public, respectable life: the doctor, of course, is the symbol of the union between scientific exploration and respectability. In the case of Wilde, the whole issue is cast archaically in the old Gothic categories of aristocratic life-style and its relation to primal cruelty. In The Island of Dr Moreau, as befits the work of a writer more politically concerned than Stevenson or Wilde, the question of reversion is linked to a series of agonising speculations on the inner significance of empire, with its attendant insistence on the preservation of both class and racial integrity. The whole complex of problems received by far its most significant treatment, however, in Bram Stoker’s greatly underrated Dracula, which is not only a well-written and formally inventive sensation novel but also one of the most important expressions of the social and psychological dilemmas of the late nineteenth century. For obvious reasons, the intellectual content of Dracula has not been taken seriously; yet it deserves to be, less because of any distinction in Stoker’s own attitudes and perceptions than as a powerful record of social pressures and anxieties. It has always been a difficult book to place, largely because if one accepts the conventional view of the expiry of Gothic before the middle of the nineteenth century Dracula becomes a kind of sport; but in fact it belongs securely with Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray and The Island of Dr Moreau, while transcending all of them in its development of a symbolic structure in which to carry and deal with contradictions. The use of the term ‘myth’ to describe a work of written literature is open to abuse, but if there is any modern work which fits the term adequately, it is Dracula, if on the grounds of reception alone. At the heart of Dracula (if the pun may be forgiven) is blood. The vampire thrives on the blood of others, and the whole effort of Van Helsing and his colleagues is to fight this one-way flow of blood, by transfusion and any other possible means. ‘The vampire live on’, says Van Helsing in

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his broken English, ‘and cannot die by mere passing of the time; he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seem as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty. But he cannot flourish without this diet; he eat not as others.’7 Here, as elsewhere in Dracula, is a religious inversion, brought out the more strongly by the biblical tone of Van Helsing’s discourse: the blood is the life. Stoker is well aware of the rich possibilities for ambiguity and bitter humour in this central motif. When Van Helsing recounts the ship’s captain’s response to his vampire passenger, there is a vertiginous interplay of conventional swear-words and deeper ironic significance: Dracula give much talk to captain as to how and where his box is to be place; but the captain like it not and swear at him in many tongues, and tell him that if he like he can come and see where it shall be. But he say ‘no’; that he come not yet, for that he have much to do. Whereupon the captain tell him that he had better be quick [sic]—with blood—for that his ship will leave the place—of blood—before the turn of the tide—with blood. (Dracula, pp. 322-3)

But the blood which gives Dracula his life is, as usual in vampire legendry, not merely literal. Dracula the individual needs blood, but Dracula is not merely an individual; he is, as he tells Harker, a dynasty, a ‘house’, the proud descendant and bearer of a long aristocratic tradition. He recites to Harker a catalogue of the gallant feats of his ancestors, ending thus: when, after the battle of Mohács, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys—and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords—can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told. (Dracula, pp. 38-9)

The long historical progression of the bourgeoisie’s attempts to understand the significance of noble ‘blood’ reaches a point of apotheosis in Dracula, for Dracula is the final aristocrat; he has rarefied his needs, and the needs of his house and line, to the point where he has no longer any need of any exchange-system or life-support except blood. All other material connections with the ‘dishonourable’ bourgeois world have been severed: the aristocrat has paid the tragic price of

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In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards explained by saying that to a ‘boyar’ the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said, ‘we’, and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking. (Dracula, p. 37)

It is impossible to tell whether what is at stake is Dracula’s personal longevity or his total identification with his line. And if one looks again at the old legends themselves, what emerges as very obvious is that they were partly invented to explain the problem of the connection between aristocracy and immortality. To the peasantry of central Europe, it may well have seemed that the feudal lord was immortal: the actual inhabitant of the castle upon the mountain might change, but that might not even be known. What would have been known was that there was always a lord; that by some possibly miraculous means life and title persisted, at the expense, of course, of peasant blood, in the literal sense of blood shed in battle and in cruelty. Dracula can no longer survive on blood of this kind; he needs alternative sources of nourishment to suit his socially attenuated existence. The dominion of the sword is replaced by the more naked yet more subtle dominion of the tooth; as the nobleman’s real powers disappear, he becomes invested with semi-supernatural abilities, exercised by night rather than in the broad day of legendary feudal conflict. But thus far Dracula is merely another variant on the vampire legendry which we have already seen in John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1819), another modification of pre-bourgeois fears of tyrannical violence imaged in terms of the primal fear of blood-sucking. What makes Dracula distinctive is Stoker’s location of this set of symbols within late Victorian society. Over against the ‘house’ which Dracula represents Stoker places the bourgeois family, seen around the moment of maximum bonding, on the eve of marriage. Dracula is a dramatised conflict of social forces and attitudes: opposite the strength of the vampire

we are shown the strength of bourgeois marital relations and sentimental love, as in Mina’s letter to Lucy after her marriage to Harker. Well, my dear, what could I say? I could only tell him that I was the happiest woman in all the wide world, and that I had nothing to give him except myself, my life, and my trust, and that with these went my love and duty for all the days of my life. And, my dear, when he kissed me, and drew me to him with his poor weak hands, it was like a very solemn pledge between us . . . Lucy dear, do you know why I tell you all this? It is not only because it is all sweet to me, but because you have been, and are, very dear to me. It was my privilege to be your friend and guide when you came from the schoolroom to prepare for the world of life. I want you to see now, and with the eyes of a very happy wife, whither duty has led me; so that in your own married life you too may be all happy as I am. (Dracula, p. 115)

The list of structural oppositions is long. Dracula stands for lineage, the principal group of characters for family; Dracula for the wildness of night, they for the security of day; Dracula for unintelligible and bitter passion, they for the sweet and reasonable emotions; Dracula for the physical and erotic, they for repressed and etherealised love. And at the kernel of this structure is embedded the further opposition between Dracula and his arch-enemy Van Helsing, who is imported to put a stiffening of science and reason into the ‘team’: He is seemingly arbitrary man, but this because he knows what he is talking about better than any one else. He is a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind. This, with an iron nerve, a temper of the ice-brook, an indomitable resolution, selfcommand, and toleration exalted from virtues to blessings, and the kindliest and truest heart that beats—these form his equipment for the noble work that he is doing for mankind—work both in theory and practice, for his views are as wide as his all-embracing sympathy. (Dracula, p. 121)

Van Helsing is a superman, and therefore combines in himself a number of contradictory qualities, but the emphasis in his character is on order, neatness, reserve, in Freudian terms on those aspects of the ego which serve the purpose of quashing the tendency towards chaos and libidinal fulfilment which would otherwise disrupt social and psychological organisation. Dracula’s is the passion which never dies, the endless desire of the unconscious for gratification, which has to be repressed—particularly on the eve of marriage, of

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social supersession, yet his doom perforce involves others. Cheated of his right of actual dominion, his power is exerted in mere survival: his relationship to the world is the culmination of tyranny, yet it is justified in that it is not his own survival that he seeks but the survival of the house, and thus, of course, the survival of the dead. Stoker brings out the ambiguity in the legends very well when Dracula tells Harker his history:

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course—in order to maintain stable ideology. He is ‘undead’ because desire never dies; gratification merely moves desire on to further objects. There is, for Dracula as for the unconscious, no final satisfaction, for his very nature is desire. Towards these structures the text manifests a socially revealing ambivalence. One of the aspects of decadence was the supremacy of the moment of attraction in the continual dialectic of attraction and repulsion which characterised the relation between the dominant middle class and its ‘un-dead’ predecessor. From the bourgeois point of view, Dracula is, like Schedoni, Frankenstein and Dorian Gray, a manic individualist; from his own point of view, which is not absent in the text, he is the bearer of the promise of true union, union which transcends death. From the bourgeois point of view, Dracula stands for sexual perversion and sadism; but we also know that what his victims experience at the moment of consummation is joy, unhealthy perhaps but of a power unknown in conventional relationships. Dracula exists and exerts power through right immemorial; Van Helsing and his associates defeat him in the appropriate fashion, through hard work and diligent application, the weapons of a class which derives its existence from labour. Lest some of this seem fanciful, we can cite some of Stoker’s dream symbolism: I didn’t quite dream; but it all seemed to be real. I only wanted to be here in this spot—I don’t know why, for I was afraid of something—I don’t know what. I remember, though I suppose I was asleep, passing through the streets and over the bridge. A fish leaped as I went by, and I leaned over to look at it, and I heard a lot of dogs howling—the whole town seemed as if it must be full of dogs all howling at once—as I went up the steps. Then I had a vague memory of something long and dark with red eyes, just as we saw in the sunset, and something very sweet and very bitter all around me at once; and then I seemed sinking into deep green water, and there was a singing in my ears, as I have heard there is to drowning men; and then everything seemed passing away from me; my soul seemed to go out from my body and float about the air. I seem to remember that once the West Lighthouse was right under me, and then there was a sort of agonising feeling, as if I were in an earthquake, and I came back and found you shaking my body. I saw you do it before I felt you. (Dracula, p. 108)

This reads almost like a case study in emotional ambivalence. Beginning by establishing that there is a difficulty in assessing Dracula’s reality vis-à-vis the world’s, Lucy then goes on to demonstrate that Dracula represents the ‘un-

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known’, that which is not available to consciousness, and to illustrate this with a succession of images of the unconscious: the leaping fish, emerging from psychic depths like Coleridge’s fountain, the howling dogs, symbol of yearning and wordless need, and the ‘something long and dark with red eyes’, which is Dracula but also prefigures the phallic connotations of the lighthouse. She sinks into the primal fluid of the unconscious, assailed by sensations which she can only describe as contradictory, ‘sweet’ and ‘bitter’, and her soul and body separate as she abandons responsibility for her situation. Dracula, the unconscious, takes the sins of the world on his shoulders because his existence, and the acquiescence of his victims, demonstrate the limitations of the moral will. Lucy, of course, can only experience the consummation of the lighthouse and the earthquake while in this trance-like state, and then translates her experience back into ‘safe’ terms, ‘you shaking my body’. She sees Mina before she feels her because she is sinking into the liberation which her conventional self denies: every time Dracula strikes it becomes harder for his victim to return to normality. The myth in Dracula, more clearly even than in other versions of the vampire legends, is an inversion of Christianity, and particularly of Pauline Christianity, in that Dracula promises— and gives—the real resurrection of the body, but disunited from soul. Stoker’s attitude to this is of course shocked, but then Stoker appears from the text to be almost traumatised by a specific sexual fear, a fear of the so-called ‘New Woman’ and the reversal of sexual roles which her emergence implies. Mina is afraid that ‘some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s some consolation in that’ (Dracula, p. 100). Behind the smugness lies disturbance; it is ironic, but with an irony familiar in the Gothic from Radcliffe on, that precisely the authorial conservatism of Dracula makes its rendition of the threats to comfortable Victorian sexual and familial life pointed and perceptive. A crucial scene occurs when Arthur visits Lucy, who is failing fast. When he first sees her, she ‘looked her best, with all the soft lines matching the angelic beauty of her eyes’. But as she sinks into sleep, this model of femininity and passivity begins to change:

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‘Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!’ (Dracula pp. 167-8)

Upon which Van Helsing, whose role is to protect against this kind of overt passion and reversal of roles, comes between them. And this scene is prefigured by the ‘key-note’ scene where Harker is menaced in Dracula’s castle by the three female vampires: All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down; lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth. (Dracula, p. 46)

It is hard to summarise Dracula, for it is such a wide-ranging book, but in general it is fair to say that its power derives from its dealings with taboo. Where taboo sets up certain bounding lines and divisions which enable society to function without disruption, Dracula blurs those lines. He blurs the line between man and beast, thus echoing the fears of degeneracy in Stevenson, Wilde and Wells; he blurs the line between man and God by daring to partake of immortal life and by practising a corrupt but superhuman form of love; and he blurs the line between man and woman by demonstrating the existence of female passion. In his figure are delineated so many primitive fears: he is a shape-changer, a merger of species, the harbinger of ethnic collapse. His ‘disciple’ Renfield regards him as a god; and his satanic aspects are all the more interesting if we remember that his real-life ancestor gained his reputation for cruelty because of his assiduity in defending the Christian faith against the marauding Turk. Where Moreau constitutes an ambiguous and accidental threat to empire from without, destroying genetic and racial barriers which are essential to smooth government, Dracula threatens it from within, attacking the whole concept of morality by preying upon and liberating aspects of the personality which are not under moral control, and colonising on his own behalf by infection in a savage and quite unintentional parody of impe-

rialism. The ironic refrain of Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), the perception that you always kill the thing you love, that only love allows the proximity which can lead to real damage, is given a savage new twist by Stoker, in whose text one can see the traces of the illimitable desire which turns love into possession and demands incorporation of the love-object. Dracula is the logical culmination of the Victorian and Gothic hero, the hero in whom power and attraction are bent to the service of Thanatos, and for whom the price of immortality is the death of the soul. Before turning from the problematic of decadence to other forms of Gothic which continued to exist in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century fiction, there is one other writer whose work, beginning in the 1890s and continuing through to the 1920s, merits some comment: Arthur Machen. Machen’s books have never received much attention, a fact about which he grew increasingly bitter, yet they are the best in the rather sickly field of genre work which took up Darwinian anxieties as a basis for terror. In 1894, Machen published a novella called The Great God Pan, in which yet another doctor performs on a young girl an operation which is designed to open her ‘inner eye’ to the continuing diabolical existence of the Great God; the operation drives her mad, after which her child, born of her union with Pan, proceeds to confront a series of other people with visions of the horror which underlies the quiet surface of life. It is, as Machen says, ‘an old story, an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens’.8 The old story is the story of Moreau and Dracula, the story of the breaking of taboo boundaries and the dreadful consequences which result: Pan is a ‘presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form’ (Pan, p. 20), and when the hell-child finally dies she goes through the stages of the reversion of the species to the ‘primal slime’: I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. (Pan, p. 109)

The paradox of The Great God Pan is that the visitation which liberates the human being from the repression of false assumptions also destroys the barriers which retain human individuation:

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Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale gums, drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever. In a sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips:

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the liberation of desire returns man to a primal association with the beast and destroys the soul: I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul . . . the man’s outward form remained, but all hell was within it. Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope, and horror that seemed to shriek aloud in the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair. (Pan, p. 91)

This is a lurid version of the process which converted Jekyll into Hyde; and it happens, as one might expect, almost exclusively to aristocrats. The Three Impostors (1895) is a rather more complex book and an interesting example of a text composed of a series of interlocking stories, all of which are lies. It is indebted to Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882), and moves through a range of settings which bear comparison with Conan Doyle’s. The stories vary in terms of the order of interpretation which they advance, but the most significant of them are committed, like The Great God Pan, to asseting a pseudo-‘natural’ explanation for apparently supernatural events. Professor Gregg, another unfortunate seeker after forbidden knowledge, is convinced that the horror stories of folk legendry mask facts which are amenable to scientific discovery: he rejects ‘the supernatural hypothesis of the Middle Ages’, saying that ‘invention, no doubt, and the Gothic fancy of old days, had done much in the way of exaggeration and distortion’, and advances a different hypothesis: ‘what if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still remained haunting wild places and barren hills, and now and then repeating the evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and unchangeable as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain?’9 Here Machen’s Celtic sensibility verges on a theory of history according to racial conspiracy; it is perhaps not surprising that he felt attracted towards Fascism.1 0 In one sense at least, The Three Impostors might be described as a truly decadent book, in that its content turns back upon itself and is used as the excuse for a series of ironic arguments about the nature of fiction. Its protagonists are involved in pondering the strangeness of the real, while continually being subjected to unsolicited stories which do nothing whatever to help the problem, since their tellers cannot be trusted. Machen’s continual theme is ‘the awful transmutation of the hills’ (Impostors, p. 119): the possibility that the merest sideslip of vision might offer us a world which is wholly other, and show us the real and awful faces of the demons who manipulate evolution to serve their own ends.

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This transmutation is also the theme of Machen’s most impressive work, The Hill of Dreams (1907), which has been described as the most decadent book in the English language. Its decadence is not formal but thematic, the closest connection being to Swinburne. The hero, Lucian Taylor, finds the world resistant both to his desires and to his attempts to write a novel, and enters into a dark bath of pain and sacrifice in which he revolves an endless obsession with the single moment of dubious love which he has experienced; but what is distinctive is that Machen manages to describe algolagnic indulgence without losing his sense of the irony which results from Lucian’s conflict with the real world: Never did he fail to wake at the appointed hour, a strong effort of will broke through all the heaviness of sleep, and he would rise up, joyful though weeping, and reverently set his thorny bed upon the floor, offering his pain with his praise. When he had whispered the last word, and had risen from the ground, his body would be all freckled with drops of blood; he used to view the marks with pride. Here and there a spine would be left deep in the flesh, and he would pull these out roughly, tearing through the skin, On some nights when he had pressed with more fervour on the thorns his thighs would stream with blood, red beads standing out on the flesh, and trickling down to his feet. He had some difficulty in washing away the bloodstains so as not to leave any traces to attract the attention of the servant; and after a time he returned no more to his bed when his duty had been accomplished. For a coverlet he had a dark rug, a good deal worn, and in this he would wrap his naked bleeding body, and lie down on the hard floor, well content to add an aching rest to the account of his pleasures. He was covered with scars, and those that healed during the day were torn open afresh at night; the pale olive skin was red with the angry marks of blood, and the graceful form of the young man appeared like the body of a tortured martyr. He grew thinner and thinner every day, for he ate but little; the skin was stretched on the bones of his face, and the black eyes burnt in dark purple hollows. His relations noticed that he was not looking well.1 1

The Hill of Dreams is an over-lush book, and the baroque quality of Machen’s prose sometimes becomes absurd, yet it has a power which is partly derived from his refusal to sever Lucian completely from reality: where a Keatsian hero might be able to retreat to a world of beauty, or a Swinburnian one to a permanent semi-mystical indulgence in pain, Lucian remains in contact with his environment, albeit transmuted by his special vision. His apocalyptic view of London is comparable with Baudelaire’s urban nightmares in intensity if not in execution:

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Machen takes to an extreme point tendencies already existing within decadent Gothic: like Dracula’s, Lucian’s is the desire which tends towards death, but unlike Dracula Lucian does not have the supernatural privilege of attaining gratification, except in his final dream: And presently the woman fled away from him, and he pursued her. She fled away before him through midnight country, and he followed after her, chasing her from thicket to thicket, from valley to valley. And at last he captured her and won her with horrible caresses, and they went up to celebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath. They were within the matted thicket, and they writhed in flames, insatiable, forever. They were tortured, and tortured one another, in the sight of thousands who gathered thick about them; and their desire rose up like a black smoke. (Hill of Dreams, p. 266)

Machen provides an epilogue to English decadence, in which beauty and death are represented as inextricably fused at the root of the moment of passion.

Notes 1. Robert Louis Stevenson, Works, ed. L. Osbourne and Mrs R. L. Stevenson (30 vols, London, 1924-6), IV, 65. 2. See Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London, 1977), pp. 20-1, 79-81. 3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (London, 1974), p. 143. 4. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (17903), in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York, 1965), p. 37. 5. Lytton Strachey, Characters and Commentaries (London, 1933), p. 40.

6. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London, 1973), p. 104. 7. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York, 1965), p. 245. 8. Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (London, 1913), p. 101. 9. Machen, The Three Impostors, introd. Julian Symons (London, 1964), pp. 110-12. 10. This is, of course, only one of many examples in the Gothic—as in literature in general—of an oblique relation between a writer’s political tendency and the political content of his writings; a simple point, but one so far largely ignored in criticism of the genre. 11. Machen, The Hill of Dreams (New York, 1923), pp. 101-2.

RAPHAEL INGELBIEN (ESSAY DATE WINTER 2003) SOURCE: Ingelbien, Raphael. “Gothic Genealogies: Dracula, Bowen’s Court, and Anglo-Irish Psychology.” ELH 70, no. 4 (winter 2003): 1089-105. In the following essay, Ingelbien offers a psychological approach to a comparison of gothicism and Anglo-Irish identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the works of Elizabeth Bowen.

Like all enduring literary myths, Dracula has been amenable to many interpretations. Although the aesthetic merits of Bram Stoker’s novel are still contested, its popularity with critics of all persuasions has been rising steadily, as is confirmed by the publication of two case studies editions in recent years.1 But the reception of Dracula is certainly not an object lesson in critical pluralism. Not only can a variety of approaches lead to conflicting readings; controversy also rages within some of the critical paradigms that have been applied to Stoker’s text. Nowhere has this been as obvious as in the attempts at locating Dracula in its historical and national contexts. The novel has long been a favorite of other kinds of criticism (mostly psychoanalytic); interest in Stoker’s relation to Irish cultural politics is comparatively recent. But any hopes that firm insights may be gained from the long overdue historicist placing of Dracula in its Irish context were soon dispelled, as the ideological controversies inherent in Irish studies were quickly imported into the novel’s interpretation. Who was Dracula? Besides being a Freudian projection of sexual anxieties, a perverted archetype, or a fin-de-siècle fantasy, where might the monster fit in what is also taken to be an allegory of Ireland’s social, political, and cultural upheavals at the end of the nineteenth century? The answers proposed so far look clearly incompatible. For some, Count Dracula represents the Protestant

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Voices, raucous, clamant, abominable, were belched out of the blazing public-houses as the doors swung to and fro, and above these doors were hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging in a violent blast of air, so that they might have been infernal thuribles, censing the people. Some man was calling his wares in one long continuous shriek that never stopped or paused, and, as a respond, a deeper, louder voice roared to him from across the road. An Italian whirled the handle of his piano-organ in a fury, and a ring of imps danced mad figures around him, danced and flung up their legs till the rags dropped from some of them, and they still danced on. A flare of naphtha, burning with a rushing noise, threw a light on one point of the circle, and Lucian watched a lank girl of fifteen as she came round and round to the flash. She was quite drunk, and had kicked her petticoats away, and the crowd howled laughter and applause at her. Her black hair poured down and leapt on her scarlet bodice; she sprang and leapt round the ring, laughing in Bacchic frenzy, and led the orgy to triumph. (Hill of Dreams, pp. 203-4)

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ RAY BRADBURY (1920-)

Known primarily for his science fiction novels and short stories, Bradbury often uses a sense of enchantment to weave traditional Gothic horrors into the fabric of ordinary life and to invest the most mundane situations with eerie potential. Supernatural occurrences in his stories are often matched by the experiences of characters whose emotional responses lead them into the realm of the uncanny. “The Lake” and “Reunion,” for example, are both centered on the endurance of love after death. In the former, a dead playmate reawakens the affections of the man who once loved her by leaving a sand castle for him on the beach where she drowned decades before. In the latter, an orphaned boy achieves a similar rapport with his dead family by recreating them in his imagination from the smell and feel of their clothing and other personal articles they used in life. In his stories “The Jar” and “The Next in Line” Bradbury depicts deteriorating marriages escalating toward disaster, conveying an eerie menace as events culminate around symbols—a jar containing a freak-show attraction in the former story and a catacomb filled with mummies in the latter—that crystallize the sense of dread. “Homecoming,” “Uncle Einar,” “The Traveller,” and “The April Witch” are all tales in which Bradbury features an extended family of vampires, werewolves and other supernatural beings who live unobtrusively among humans and who express emotional needs not unlike those of their mortal neighbors. The children in Bradbury’s stories are often genuine naïfs who access the supernatural unself-consciously using their as-yet unspoiled imaginations. In “The Emissary” their wishes resurrect the dead and games of make-believe defeat death altogether in “Bang! You’re Dead” and “The Ducker.” The lost innocence of Bradbury’s adult characters, however, renders them vulnerable to evil, death, and destruction. In “The Screaming Woman” the loss of youthful romance leads to death, and in Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) jaded, sinful men and women are lured into bargains with Satan by the promise of everlasting youth.

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Ascendancy in terminal decline; he is a bloodthirsty caricature of the aristocratic landlord, clinging to feudal power in the face of reform and about to be engulfed by the forces of modernity and nationalist agitation. Stoker’s novel must then be read as the indictment of a class incapable of adapting to new realities. This interpretation has chiefly been favored by critics whose sympathies are recognizably (though not crudely) nationalist, like Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane. Their reading tactics have been impugned by Bruce Stewart, who considers alternative and supposedly closer analyses of Dracula that put the monster in the nationalist and/or Catholic middle-class camp: Dracula and his faithful Szgany are cast as radical Land Leaguers intent on political violence, or exploitative Catholic entrepreneurs known as gombeen men. Those revisionist views of the novel are complemented by Michael Valdez Moses’s interpretation, which draws attention to similarities between Dracula and the ill-fated leader of the Home Rule movement Charles Stewart Parnell.2 Stewart himself backs away from those neat inversions of nationalist readings and ecumenically warns against “privileging one side against the other,” apparently setting the interests of cultural peace above those of critical accuracy.3 Stoker’s own political sympathies, divided as they were between his own Protestant background and his alienation from its more conservative elements, do not allow biography to settle the dispute. Even his background is somehow disputed: although Stoker’s Protestant education took him to the Anglo-Irish stronghold of Trinity College, Dublin, some have speculated that his mother’s Gaelic ancestry rather made him “AngloCeltic,” and thus fundamentally ambivalent.4 Politically, Stoker seems to have developed from early imperialist sympathies to the position of a “philosophical Home Ruler,” while his journalism reveals a political thinking dominated by a “complex and fraught dialectic . . . between a frantic endorsement of progress as a natural law of social development, and its dark alternative, atavism, barbarism, chaos.”5 The role of that dialectic in his most famous novel is still open to conjecture. Meanwhile, readings proliferate, the battle lines are sharply drawn, and Dracula’s political identity remains at stake. This situation owes much to conflicts within Irish studies, but it also results from an almost exclusive—and, I suggest, deficient—focus on the figure of Dracula as a monstrous, protean body. Critical awareness of Dracula’s Irish contexts developed simultancously with the growing influ-

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Yet Stoker’s vampire is not simply a monstrous body. Given the current emphasis on the body in literature, one may easily forget that Dracula is also a psychological subject, and that, although he does not belong to the cast of primary narrators, he also speaks at length. Jonathan Harker devotes several pages of his journal to careful and revealing descriptions of his host’s dwelling and habits; he also gives the reader long, verbatim accounts of Dracula’s garrulous conversation. Could the Count’s personal effects, gestures, and words, so often neglected in favour of his spectacular monstrosity, contain clues about his identity?

More specifically, could the psychology they betray also help us locate Dracula in recognizable Irish cultural formations? An answer to those questions first suggested itself to me by a reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s family memoir Bowen’s Court, entitled after the Bowens’ Big House in County Cork, and first published in 1942.9 A classic example of Ascendancy (auto)biography, written by a key figure of modern Anglo-Irish literature, Bowen’s Court will here be used as a text against which Harker’s portrayal of Dracula in his journal can be read in illuminating ways. My aim is not to suggest a firm intertextual link between Dracula and Bowen’s Court. Bowen was certainly attuned to the finer nuances of Anglo-Irish Gothic, as her perceptive introduction to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas demonstrates. She would most probably have been familiar with Stoker’s fiction, although it apparently failed to captivate her as did Le Fanu’s work. This can be explained by her preferences among the different strains that compete within the Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition: Bowen’s own sense of the Gothic was always closer to the psychological terror and the neuroses that Le Fanu exploited than to the more sensational paraphernalia on display in Dracula.1 0 This is partly because Bowen’s Gothic was only one of the strategies that she used when exploring Ascendancy anxieties from the inside of her own society: in her writing, Gothic undertones often coexist quite naturally with a quasi-Jamesian observation of Anglo-Irish manners. This muted, subtle form of the Gothic not only informs supernatural elements in some of Bowen’s Irish fictions but also pervades many a page of Bowen’s Court. A comparison between Dracula and Bowen’s Court will, therefore, bring out those elements of psychological Gothic in Stoker’s novel that most definitely call for an interpretation within an Anglo-Irish cultural context—so far, those elements have received scant attention. This comparison should also be seen as a step towards refining our understanding of what can be meant by Anglo-Irish Gothic. Reading Dracula (1897) in the light of Bowen’s Court (1942) may seem anachronistic. But Bowen’s text is not only a mid-twentieth-century record of Anglo-Irish tradition; it stands as one of the most consummate expressions of that tradition. The themes and strategies she uses in her chronicle belong to that tradition as well. Bowen also makes extensive use of documents produced throughout her family’s history and manages to integrate them smoothly into her own narrative. Furthermore, Bowen’s Court can be used as a gateway into

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ence of New Historicism and its Foucauldian interest in the body as a site of meaning. This means that in many readings, Dracula is essentially a bundle of somatic properties.6 He is largely defined by his abnormal features, his bloodsucking, and the various guises he assumes through his supernatural transformations. To a certain extent, Stoker’s Gothic sensationalism invites precisely such a reading. Dracula can easily be made to stand for the return of a repressed, forbidden sensuality that threatens the bourgeois subjectivities of his victims. This is reinforced by the novel’s narrative organization. Dracula is famously made up of texts spoken or written by the vampire’s victims and/or pursuers; its eponymous central figure is denied an equal measure of narratorial authority, which apparently relegates him beyond the bounds of articulate subjectivity. An elusive, fascinating cipher, Dracula then becomes a mere body onto which various anxieties can be projected—whether it be by Freudian, New Historicist, or other readers. Recent contextualizations draw extensively on contemporary pictorial sources, reminding us that Dracula appeared in a fin-desiècle context where caricatures reflected dominant views on racial differences. Interesting though they undeniably are, those visual documents clearly offer no way out of critical controversy. John Paul Riquelme’s edition of Dracula includes caricatures from nineteenth-century periodicals, in which vampiric bats and other monsters were made to represent the Land League, British rule, or Parnell.7 Finally, the critical rhetoric that is applied to the novel often underscores the centrality of Dracula’s body and the wealth of interpretations it encourages: in the words of a recent commentator, Dracula is “an overdetermined figure onto whom are cathected many of the most formidable political and social issues of nineteenth-century Ireland.”8 Our Dracula is a walking infusion set; Stoker criticism is largely a form of surgery on Gothic bodies.

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a certain kind of Ascendancy biographical writing: in what follows, references to Bowen’s memoir will be accompanied by considerations of other representative texts written by key Anglo-Irish figures, like Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, in the decades that separate Dracula from Bowen’s Court. The continuities between Harker’s journal and those different texts are often striking, and they suggest that Stoker was tapping into the same psychological vein that Bowen later exploited in her turn. The heuristic value of my comparison is also based on a recognition of this fact: Bowen speaks not only of her family and class; she speaks also as a family and class. Moreover, as we will see, she does so by using accents that uncannily echo the rhetoric of Stoker’s Count. It is clear that this comparison will lend support to analyses that identify Dracula as an Ascendancy figure, and that it can, therefore, be seen as a way of taking sides in the critical debate sketched out above. Bringing Bowen into the equation, however, will show that such a reading need not be motivated by a contemporary nationalist agenda, or by a desire to play up Ascendancy guilt through simplistic allegories (the fallacious strategies of which Stewart accuses Eagleton and Deane). If the characterization of Dracula can be fruitfully compared to a family chronicle by one of the Ascendancy’s most distinguished writers, it would seem that both Stoker and Bowen were indeed describing the same subject. Their attitudes towards that subject obviously differed: as I will argue, Stoker’s and Bowen’s portrayals were, respectively, intended as a critique and an apology. But their political differences do not detract from the troubling resemblance between their texts. Another possible objection should be considered before we proceed with the comparison proper. Can a reading that mainly focuses on Harker’s early account of Dracula offer representative evidence about the Irish dimension of Dracula? I would here counter that there is no reason to assume that the novel as a whole possesses a single, comprehensive allegorical intent. Allegories, whether political or psychological, certainly seem to abound in the novel, but it is far from certain that Dracula can function as one extended, coherent allegory (whatever the nature of that allegory is). In that sense, conflicting readings may also result from a failure to recognize that Stoker was ultimately after things other than allegorical consistency—a desire for commercial success played at least as large a part in the making of the novel. Some parts of Dracula can thus

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resist historicist readings in terms of Irish politics.1 1 But the early parts of Harker’s journal are definitely a goldmine for critics who adopt that approach. For one thing, Harker’s accounts of Transylvania draw on a source which provides an explicit link with Ireland: Stoker found inspiration in Major E. C. Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent, where Transylvanian peasants were repeatedly likened to Irish ones. Harker’s insistence on the peasants’ superstition and devotional fervor clearly reminds one of a Protestant’s attitude towards Irish Catholics—this is a link on which most critics agree.1 2 Other elements of the setting can also point to Ireland, although one should be wary of reading Irish references into every detail that lends itself to this strategy. Admittedly, Dracula’s current status has much to do with “critical plurality, a discursive pattern of multiple signification and resignification that presents in itself a marked parallel to the psychoanalytical trope of overdetermination.”1 3 But overdetermination remains a cop-out if it allows different interpretations to be juxtaposed without any examination of the conflicts they generate. What can be an Irish reference in Dracula can also be part and parcel of the conventions of vampire literature: to what extent can such an element then be used in a historicist reading? To take but one example: how justified is a critic in speculating that Dracula’s powers of seduction may be a reference to Parnell, given that Dracula was hardly the first womanizing vampire in literature?1 4 Harker’s journal can confront the critic with similar problems. On the other hand, Stoker may have chosen to stress or adapt specific conventions of vampiric writing, because they could then function within an Irish allegory. Stoker’s own additions to those conventions (sometimes based on his research into Transylvanian folklore) are even more likely to constitute references to Irish politics, although generalizations are clearly unwise. It is mostly with such emphases, adaptations, or additions that my comparison with Bowen’s Court and other Ascendancy texts will be concerned. On one level, Stoker’s view of Transylvania as a land of superstition reflects what he found in his reading of local sources, but those sources were important to him partly because they facilitated a parallel with Ireland. Among the superstitions to which Stoker alludes are legends concerning hidden treasures. After his ceric coach journey to the castle, Harker asks the Count “why the coachman went to the places where we had seen the blue flames. Was it indeed true that they showed where gold was hidden?” (46). Stoker was here drawing

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I often heard that long ago in the garden at Coole, at the cross, a man that was digging found a pot of gold. But just as he had the cover took off, he saw old Richard Gregory coming, and he covered it up, and was never able again to find the spot where it was.1 6

In Dracula, the Count grants that some peasant might be bold enough to go treasure hunting after the blue flames, but he then tells his guest: “[E]ven if he did he would not know what to do. . . . You would not, I dare be sworn, be able to find these places again?” (47). Stoker’s adaptation of Transylvanian folklore, here, seems meant to bring out Dracula’s resemblance to an Ascendancy landlord. The association of Dracula with Ascendancy habits, obsessions, and values is also invited by descriptions of his castle. His deserted and draughty dwelling calls to mind the condition of an aristocracy which had already fallen on hard

times by the 1890s, when Ascendancy land ownership and the income landlords could derive from rents were being reduced by legal reforms.1 7 A closer look at Dracula’s behavior in and towards his house will only reinforce this parallel. “Welcome to my house!”: Dracula’s twice repeated words of greeting to Harker are remarkable for their insistence on hospitality (41). Although impoverished, this aristocrat still cultivates a hospitality on which many Ascendancy families (including the Bowens) continued to pride themselves. Harker is immediately asked to make himself at home. This is a tall order in such gaunt surroundings, but his task is made somewhat casier by the Count’s library, filled as it is with English books. Dracula himself is observed reading “of all things, an English Bradshaw’s Guide” (47), while his atlas lies “opened naturally at England, as if that map had been used much” (48-49). According to Eagleton, this exposes Dracula as an Anglophile Ascendancy aristocrat, “given to poring over maps of the metropolis,” and about to become a long-term absentce through his move to London.1 8 But Dracula’s library is also worth exploring in more detail. Indeed, family libraries often occupy a prominent place in Ascendancy memoirs. Lady Gregory devotes the first twenty pages of her short book Coole to “The Library.” Books were almost human presences to her: “I shall feel sorry to leave all these volumes among which I have lived. They have felt the pressure of my fingers. They have been my friends.”1 9 Dracula uses similar terms when he refers to his library: “‘These friends’—and he laid his hands on some of the books—‘have been good friends to me’” (45). Given the isolation of the Anglo-Irish Big Houses, such intimacy is hardly surprising. The contents of Dracula’s shelves are also telling, as is the very fact that Harker devotes a whole paragraph to an enumeration of his host’s books. These include a vast number of English books, whole shelves full of them, and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers. A table in the centre was littered with English magazines and newspapers, though none of them of very recent date. The books were of the most varied kind—history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law—all relating to England and English life and customs and manners. There were even such books of reference as the London directory, the “Red” and “Blue” books, Whitaker’s Almanack, the Army and Navy Lists, and—it somehow gladdened my heart to see it—the Law List. (44)

Dracula’s interest in England is understandable enough, given his plan for a prolonged stay

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on an account of Transylvanian superstitions, according to which “in the night preceding Easter Sunday . . . hidden treasures are said to betray their site by a glowing flame.”1 5 Dracula’s confirmation is almost a quotation from Stoker’s source; the Count goes on to explain that the treasures were buried during the numerous invasions to which the region was subjected. Stoker was probably struck by the similarity between his source and Irish tales of riches hurriedly hidden underground in time of trouble. Bowen’s Court includes such an episode: one of Bowen’s ancestors was made privy to the whereabouts of gold and silver buried near Kilbolane during the 1689 rebellion, but failed to disclose the location before his death (96-97). Buried treasures were part of Irish as well as Transylvanian folklore; what makes Stoker’s version interesting here is that only the Count (disguised as a coachman) ventured near the blue flames, in order to mark the place with a few stones (38). Dracula here asserts his ownership, secure in the knowledge that the peasants will never dare to come near the place: “[Y]our average peasant is at heart a coward and a fool”; “[O]n that night no man of this land will, if he can help it, stir without his doors” (46, 47). On the whole, Stoker sticks closely to his source (according to which the night in question was eminently dangerous), but his one transformation explicitly sets Dracula apart from the local peasantry by giving him the knowledge possessed by dead Ascendancy patriarchs. In Lady Gregory’s memoir Coole (1931), a local legend also makes it clear that the ghosts of the Ascendancy protect their buried treasures:

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in London. But the diversity of the books is quite remarkable in itself, and it clearly strikes Harker as much as the fact that all the items are about England. The celectic bric-à-brac on the Count’s shelves appears more familiar when compared with the somewhat frantic universalism of some Big House libraries. These reflected their owners’ aspiration to a Classical ideal of humanist knowledge as well as an attachment to English culture. The library at Bowen’s Court was less exclusively English and more literary than Dracula’s, but it was equally varied. Bowen’s list of its contents is a tribute to a certain cultural ideal, although one suspects some tongue in check irony at the range of interests represented: The (now) more or less complete works of Pope, Gay, Dryden, an eight-volume set of The Spectator, The Guardian, Addison’s Poems, Young’s Works (the Young of the Night Thoughts) dedicated to Mr. Voltaire, The Faerie Queene, written by Edmund Spenser, with a Glossary explaining Old and Obscure Words, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son, translations of Madame de Sévigné’s Letters and of Sully’s Memoirs, Johnson’s Dictionary, A Description of England (in eight volumes with plates of religious ruins and notable country seats), A Tour Through France (Anon.), Goldsmith’s Animated Nature, a Nouveau Traité de Vénerie, Smollett’s History of England, Robertson’s History of Scotland, six volumes of Dodsley’s Collections (Poems by Several Hands), Manners in Portugal, Vertot’s Revolution in Sweden, Crevier’s Roman Emperors, Memoirs of the Portuguese Inquisition, with Reflections on Ancient and Modern Popery, Essex’s Letters (from Ireland), Observations on the Turks, Tissot on Health, a Life of Gustavus Adolphus, Arthur Young’s Tour Through the North of England, Collins’s Peerage (eight volumes, 1779), and a Peerage of Ireland (1768). (BC, 192)

What is also typical of the Ascendancy is the place of this humanist taste, within a cultural ideal that included soldierly virtues as well as intellectual ones. Over time, Bowen’s Court became a repository of both. The library was an addition to a family history that had started out with more Philistine figures: the first Irish Bowens were “temperamental fighters, malcontents, firebrands, actuated by love of movement,” but with little time for other pursuits (BC, 39); the synthesis was achieved by later Bowens and, ultimately, through Bowen’s all-embracing chronicle. That synthesis is probably best known through Yeats’s poetic eulogies of an Ascendancy of soldiers, scholars, and horsemen—a retrospectively idealized mixture of elements that may have coexisted in only a few individuals. This appetite for fighting was, of course, all the more remarkable in that it seemed to transcend specific political interests or allegiances. Yeats’s ancestors, though not aristo-

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cratic, were “soldiers that gave, whatever die was cast”: Yeats himself was not always too sure about whose side his forefathers fought on, but that uncertainty was no obstacle to a celebration of their military virtue. In Yeats’s version, the Ascendancy, “Bound neither to Cause nor to State,” was admirable in and for itself.2 0 Bowen’s ancestors also belonged to the kind of “men of whom it is hard to say whether their ideas breed their passions or their passions breed their ideas.” Henry Bowen I thus switched sides during the Civil War as a matter of course: “I doubt whether Henry Bowen ever cared much for either King or Parliament: he may have hardly distinguished between the two” (BC, 39). Both Yeats’s and Bowen’s writings give concrete shape to this Anglo-Irish ideal of humanist culture, military prowess, and political versatility by collapsing several individuals into a collective, transgenerational subject. To Stoker’s readers, there is little new here. The strategy was already evident in the long, trance-like monologues where Dracula entertained Harker with a confused but passionate account of his family’s history: “for in our veins flows the blood of many races who fought as the lion fights: for lordship” (52). It is worth noting here that, by drawing on the bellicose figure of Vlad the Impaler, Stoker was adding a new feature to the make-up of the vampire of literary tradition.2 1 One reason for Stoker’s interest in Vlad is that his qualities as a military leader made him an appropriate source for the portrayal of a certain type of Anglo-Irish aristocrat. The crash course in Transylvanian history that Harker receives from Dracula gives pride of place to his ancestors’ heroism on the battlefield, but it also leaves one with an extremely confused picture of political changes. What is more, the Count’s lengthy tale, filled though it is with the distant sound of old battles, does not really make riveting reading; nor does it prepare for subsequent developments in the plot of Dracula. If it actually detracts from the narrative economy of this novel of sensation, one may surmise that Stoker included it because of the allegorical clues it gave about Dracula’s identity. Dracula presents his tribe (the Szekelys) as an independent minded race of natural warriors, whose allegiances were as shifting as those of Bowen’s or Yeats’s ancestors. The Szekelys were eminently adaptable to circumstance: “When the Hungarian flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars” (53); later though, “when after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were

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The Count’s tales about his family’s past are also remarkable for their narrative quirks. Harker’s comments on the strange quality of those tales deserve our attention here: In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards explained by saying that to a boyar the pride of his house and name are his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said “we,” like a king speaking. (52)

Dracula is not being overly rhetorical here, of course: as an almost timeless creature, he actually is a collective, transhistorical subject, the living (or undead) embodiment of several generations. His systematic use of “we” eerily prefigures Bowen’s own lapses into plural pronouns in Bowen’s Court. Bowen’s family chronicle shows such a degree of empathy that her identity as a narrator repeatedly blends with that of her subjects. Like Dracula, she can speak of “we” as if she and her family were one timeless subject. This can happen even when Bowen herself was clearly not involved in the episodes that she is recounting. Bowen’s use of the plural “we” becomes even more striking when one remembers that Bowen’s Court was written in the early 1940s, when Bowen was already the last, childless representative of her line. Here are some examples (all emphases are mine): We north-east County Cork gentry began rather roughly, as settlers. (BC, 17) The story [runs that] King William III . . . paid a visit to the Bowens at Kilbolane . . . and presented them with a communion set. The only com-

munion plate now in our possession is, however, Victorian style. But King William’s portrait, framed to match Oliver Cromwell’s, hangs beside Cromwell’s at the top of Bowen’s Court stairs. If he never did stay with us, he no doubt wished that he could. (BC, 104-5) I think the loss of the law suit—for we did lose it in the end—determined and hardened [Henry III’s] nature in many ways. (BC, 152) He did, it is true, lose our part of a mountain (Quitrent) at cards . . . but it was his father, dear Henry III, who bequeathed us our lasting embarrassments. (BC, 205)

At other times, Bowen’s “we” seems to encompass both her family and the class to which it belonged. Her identification with the Ascendancy is perhaps at its strongest and most eloquent in passages that record periods of trouble or decay. Her portrayal of George Bowen in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion is a case in point: [Big George] epitomizes that rule by force of sheer fantasy that had, in great or small ways, become for his class the only possible one. From the big lord to the small country gentleman we were, about this time, being edged back upon a tract of clouds and obsessions that could each, from its nature, be only solitary. (BC, 258, my emphasis)

In the following example, Bowen’s parenthetical remark suggests that a sense of decline could sometimes be almost too close for comfort: Such a society had its roughnesses, but it had not that vulgarity of assertion only necessary when there is decline (that is why to detect a vulgarity, in ourselves, in a friend or associate, worries us: it is the morbid symptom we recognize). (BC, 131, my emphasis)

In both Dracula and Bowen’s Court, the plural “we” is used by a consciously aristocratic voice that traces and identifies with a lineage which is now under threat. If that “we” sounds assertive or royal to Harker, as he listens to his host, it is perhaps also—and ironically enough, for Bowen—an elegiac symptom of decline. By letting us hear Count Dracula’s tales of past glory, Stoker well may have caught the essential tone of the declining society of the Big House. The very word “house” is used repeatedly (and sometimes almost ambiguously) in the conversations between Dracula and Harker; its meaning oscillates between “dwelling” and “family.” Dracula insistently welcomes the young lawyer to his “house” (twice on 41) and tells him that “to a

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among their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free” (54). Like the early Bowens, the Szekelys were essentially lone operators, who laid themselves open to charges of pure egoism and opportunism.2 2 Dracula’s rebuttal justifies their attitude by stressing its strategic value in Transylvanian society. Of an earlier Dracula, he observes: “They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! what good are peasants without a leader?” (54). While the idea that peasants need a leader may provide a connection with the Land League in the eyes of some, the fact that these words are spoken by a nostalgic aristocrat means rather that Dracula is trying to justify aristocratic leadership in a society that was both rural and unstable. This justification, however, is coupled with an admission that the old aristocratic power and the virtues that sustained it have passed: “[T]he warlike days are over . . . the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told” (54).

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boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride” (52, my emphasis); the “we” that intrigues Harker is used when Dracula speaks “of his house” (52). After hearing Harker’s description of the house that the young clerk has bought for him in London, Dracula expresses his satisfaction thus: I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in one day; and after all, how few days go to make up a century . . . the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may. (48)

Although Bowen’s Court was not as dilapidated or melancholy, Bowen would certainly have recognized this state of mind where individual, family, and house merge into a composite, atemporal being. Bowen’s Court itself, in her memoir, becomes precisely such an entity; her writing is pervaded by an almost mystical sense of dwelling, increased by the awareness that she is the last Bowen to inherit the house. The personal and cultural mystique that surrounded Big Houses only intensified with the decline of the society that owned them. W. J. McCormack has argued that, although the Big House as a reality is as old as the Ascendancy itself, the concept and name of “Big House” emerged in Anglo-Irish literature only when its referent was already in decline.2 3 The date of that semantic shift remains to be investigated, but one suspects that Dracula’s delight at the prospect of staying in a “house” which is “old and big” is a revealing choice of words. In that respect, as in many others, Harker’s diary can be read as a portrait of Big House society.2 4 If Stoker managed to convey the tone and moods of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy in decline, his association of that class with vampirism is, of course, eminently critical; it is the gesture of a modern, forward-looking Dublin Protestant, who had little patience with the more conservative sections of Anglo-Ireland. By comparison, Bowen’s family chronicle definitely reads like an apology, although she does, at times, infuse her record with admissions of failure and of historical injustice.2 5 Bowen can also pass a benign form of criticism on the foibles and obsessions of her ancestors; when this occurs, her portrayals tend to assume more obviously Gothic features that would not have been out of place in Dracula. Towards the end of his life, John Bowen I thus withdrew into the kind of isolation and behavior that befits the undead:

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He took up his quarters in the small semi-ruinous castle just across the Fahary stream. . . . Into this dark doorway he turned at the close of the long dusks. In these chambers he muttered and walked at nights. (BC, 75)

The daughter of a Catholic landlord who was expropriated in favor of the Bowens is also described in terms that could be applied to some of Dracula’s victims, although Bowen’s descriptions perhaps recall the ghost of Catherine Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights more than the undead Lucy Westenra roaming her Whitby churchyard: Was Elizabeth Cushin, child of the dispossessed Garrett, as lovely as she was unfortunate? Did she walk like a living ghost the lands her father had owned, and was John—in the wood, up the stream, on the side of the mountain—constantly meeting her? (BC, 77)

These hints of a more sensational Gothic of walking ghosts and crumbling castles remain few and far between in Bowen’s Court. Stoker, on the other hand, liberally uses such ingredients alongside the more psychological Gothic that pervades the characterization of Dracula in Harker’s journal. The proliferation of Gothic horrors in Dracula partly answers Stoker’s wish to debunk a class that he could also portray with subtlety. Some of the Gothic atrocities that Dracula’s castle conceals are not just stage properties borrowed from European horror fiction. Closed doors and lascivious female vampires belong to that tradition, but one element also points back to a famous, earlier critique of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy written by a Dublin Protestant. After his narrow escape from the bites of Dracula’s women, Harker realizes with horror that Dracula has stolen a child and fed him to his aggressors. Later on, he observes a peasant woman walking round the castle in her distress, looking for her child. Childbiting vampires may not have been a novelty in literature, but Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” surely looms large behind this savage Gothic caricature of an aristocracy literally feeding on the infants of a helpless peasantry. Stoker gave Count Dracula enough of a psychology to paint him as an Anglo-Irish aristocrat pining for the heyday of the Ascendancy and expressing its values, moods, and isolation with the subtle touches that one finds in Ascendancy memoirs like Bowen’s. But his use of vampirism constitutes a damning assessment that remains closer to Swift’s sarcasm than to Bowen’s painstaking and defensive introspection. In that sense, the Gothic excess of Dracula both continues and sup-

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Notes 1. See the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York: Norton, 1997), and Dracula, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002). Riquelme’s edition hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 2. For analyses of Dracula as an Ascendancy landlord, see Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 89-90, and Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995), 215-16. Bruce Stewart takes issue with them in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Possessed by the Spirit of the Nation?,” Irish University Review 29.2 (1999): 238-55. Stewart regrets that “in Irish critical commentary on Dracula there are current signs of more than an element of political animus against the erstwhile ascendancy class in Ireland” (255). The alternative, revisionist readings he considers present Dracula as a Fenian leader, while the Szganys are “patently his Land League henchmen” (242-43). Like Stewart, Cannon Schmitt also aligns Dracula with nationalist elements in “Mother Dracula: Orientalism, Degeneration, and Anglo-Irish National Subjectivity at the Fin de Siècle,” in Irishness and (Post)modernism, ed. John S. Rickard (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1994), 25-43, esp. 34. Michael Valdez Moses’s essay “Dracula, Parnell and the Troubled Dreams of Nationhood,” appeared in Journal X: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 2 (1997): 66-112. 3. Stewart, 243. 4. See Joseph Valente, “‘Double Born’: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic,” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (2000): 632. 5. See Chris Morash, “‘Even Under Some Unnatural Condition’: Bram Stoker and the Colonial Fantastic,” in Literature and the Supernatural, ed. Brian Cosgrove (Dublin: The Columba Press, 1995), 112, 100. 6. This is perhaps more true of American readings than of Irish ones. The difference may reflect the closer links between Irish literary criticism and traditional history, or the fact that postcolonial theory has had a bigger impact in Ireland than has New Historicism. The latter has been more dominant among American critics. Nevertheless, the tendency to rash allegorizing that Stewart detects in Irish commentary on Stoker can also derive from a narrow focus on Dracula’s physical features. 7. See Dracula, ed. Riquelme, 370-71, 376-79. 8. Moses, “Dracula,” 69, my emphasis.

9. Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 1999). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated BC. 10. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas is ostensibly set in Derbyshire, but Bowen observed that its focus on physical isolation, inheritance, and supernatural oppression was very much the product of Le Fanu’s Anglo-Irish concerns. See “Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu,” in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Lee (London: Vintage, 1999), 100-13. The concept of an Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition that includes both Le Fanu and Stoker is still disputed. Alison Millbank likens Stoker to Le Fanu and other Irish Protestant writers in “‘Powers Old and New’: Stoker’s Alliances with Anglo-Irish Gothic,” in Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (London: Macmillan, 1998), 12-28. W. J. McCormack has tried to wrest Le Fanu from what he regards as a “doubtful tradition” (Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen [Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993], 3). If Charles Maturin, Le Fanu, and Stoker are regularly “invoked in the name of a more substantial Irish gothic tradition,” McCormack argues that “the description ‘gothic’ can be applied to [Le Fanu’s] work only in a general and unsatisfactory way.” McCormack’s championing of Le Fanu goes together with an overt irritation at the Stoker’s “unrelenting narration of supernatural and horrific agencies” and Dracula’s tendency to “overkill.” See his introductory essay, “Irish Gothic and After,” in vol. 2 of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Deane (Derry, Ireland: Field Day Publications, 1992), 832 (“the description”), 842 (“unrelenting”; “overkill”). 11. Joseph Valente’s recent Dracula’s Crypt. Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002), is an often brilliant and thoughtprovoking attempt at reading the whole novel in the light of Stoker’s complex position as an “Anglo-Celtic” writer. To engage with all of Valente’s points would be beyond the scope of the present essay. Valente sees Dracula as both landlord and nationalist agitator (5559)—in fact, he argues that Dracula’s fundamental ambivalence stems from the fact that he is nothing but a hallucinatory projection of the other characters’ racial anxieties. Tantalizing though it is, Valente’s emphasis on Dracula’s ambivalence is not always justified (see note 22, below). 12. A relevant section from Major Johnson’s book is reprinted in Riquelme’s edition, 383-85. See also Christopher Frayling’s Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber, 1991). Frayling notes Johnson’s “many comparisons between Wallachian peasants and ‘our friend Paddy’” (335). For a summing up of the current critical view of Stoker’s use of Johnson, see Gregory Castle’s essay “Ambivalence and Ascendancy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Riquelme’s edition, 527. 13. See Hughes’s and Smith’s introduction to Bram Stoker, 4. 14. Morash, 110. 15. See Frayling, 321. 16. Lady Gregory, Coole (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1931), 41. 17. “His decrepit castle, the lack of servants, the mingling of fear and respect accorded to him by Catholic peasants who seem to stand to him in a relation of

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plants the muted, psychological Gothic that Stoker’s characterization shares with Bowen’s chronicle of Ascendancy life. However, political differences between both authors should not obscure their common use of tropes and rhetorical strategies that belong to this second, recognizable Anglo-Irish form of Gothic. I hope to have shown that a proper understanding of that Gothic vein, and of its links to Ascendancy psychology, as well as an awareness of its presence in Stoker’s novel, are essential to the placing of Dracula in the mined context of Irish history.

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subservience—all of this suggests the social milieu of the Ascendancy Big House.” See Castle, 529. The decline of the Ascendancy’s political and economic power accelerated during the second half of the nineteenth century; its landmarks were the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869) and the Land Acts passed in the 1880s. See R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), 396, 412-15. 18. Eagleton, 215. 19. Lady Gregory, 21. 20. W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990), 148, 244. The lines from “Responsibilities,” about the ancestors who “withstood . . . James and Irish when the Dutchman crossed” (148), are the eventual result of a long revision: “[T]his passage had to be rewritten, for Yeats once thought mistakenly that his Butler ancestors had fought on the side of the Englishman James II, not the Dutchman William of Orange” (519). 21. “Dracula differs from the previous vampire Counts of literature [in that] he is a military figure as well, who periodically reminisces about his military successes in the distant past, in campaigns to drive the Turks out of his territory” (Frayling, 76). 22. Valente reads those shifting alliances as yet another sign of Dracula’s fundamental ambivalence: “Just as the Draculas seem to have allied themselves with all manner of opposing parties in the Balkan wars, so Dracula’s own subject position aligns him with various constituencies in the debate and struggle over Ireland” (59). However, the Szekelys’s political mutability can also bring to mind the confused allegiances of Ascendancy families, and the tone of Dracula’s tale is definitely closer to Ascendancy nostalgia than to nationalist rhetoric. 23. “The establishment of the Big House as a central trope in modern Irish writing is closely linked to its elegiac and compensatory qualities.” See McCormack, “Setting and Ideology: with Reference to the Fiction of Maria Edgeworth,” in Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. Otto Rauchbauer (Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 1992), 51. 24. Big House society was not exclusively Protestant; some old Catholic families also owned Big Houses. Although they were long technically excluded from the Ascendancy on religious grounds, the distinction between those families and their Protestant counterparts became increasingly blurred after Catholic emancipation and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. By the time Dracula was written, Big House Catholics were in many ways closer to the Protestant aristocracy than to urban middle-class Protestants like Stoker. This means that Dracula’s long-debated religious identity does not affect his status as a Big House aristocrat. In the controversies surrounding the novel, Dracula has been variously painted as a Catholic (see, for instance, Schmitt, 34), and as an Irish Protestant dabbling in the occult and drawn to the sacramental side of Catholicism (see Castle, 533-34). The classic account of the Protestant Ascendancy’s fascination with the occult is Foster’s “Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History,” in Yeats’s Political Identities, ed. Jonathan Allison (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996), 83-105. Foster makes suggestive remarks on Stoker but does not discuss Dracula at length.

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25. Bowen wrote in her afterword: “[M]y family . . . drew their power from a situation that shows an inherent wrong (BC, 453).

RACE AND THE GOTHIC TERESA A. GODDU (ESSAY DATE 1997) SOURCE: Goddu, Teresa A. “Haunting Back: Harriet Jacobs, African-American Narrative, and the Gothic.” In Gothic America: Narrative, History, and the Nation, pp. 131-52. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. In the following essay, Goddu explores how the Gothic is used in literature by African Americans—and by white writers who write about the African American experience—to express the horrors of slavery and racism. Early American writers, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne, complained bitterly about the bleakness and flatness of the American scene. But I think that if they were alive, they’d feel at home in modern America. True, we have no great church in America; our national traditions are still of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them . . . we have no rich symbols, no colorful rituals. But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we do have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him. —Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born,” Native Son

In this ending to the introduction to Native Son, Richard Wright makes a powerful connection between the African-American experience and the gothic.1 The horror that Poe or Hawthorne had to invent, Wright argues, is already embodied in African-American history—in the haunting legacy of slavery and in the heavy shadow of oppression. For Wright, African-American history is not only material for the gothic writer, but is also itself coded in gothic terms.2 As Wright’s novel, Native Son, shows, the African-American experience, written as a realist text, resembles a gothic narrative. Arguing that the gothic, as exemplified by an author like Poe, does not invent horror but is invented by it, Wright unveils the gothic as a complex historical mode: history invents the gothic, and in turn the gothic reinvents history. By exploring Wright’s connection between historical horror and the gothic, this chapter uses the African-American gothic to revise readings of the American gothic that have positioned the genre—and, more broadly, the American literary

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With this final chapter, then, Gothic America comes full circle, returning to its founding image: the caged slave in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. Instead of focusing on Farmer James, who is struck mute by this encounter, or on the stylistic evasions Crèvecoeur’s text performs to contain and silence this horror, this chapter focuses on the voices that emanate from within stereotypes of the gothic and on how to begin articulating the horror. No longer simply the metaphor for dread, the “conveniently bound and violently silenced” black bodies of the gothic return in this chapter to reclaim and revise the gothic mode (Morrison 1992:38). By locating the strategies involved in unveiling slavery’s horrors, this chapter listens to how the unspeakable is spoken.

Spectacles of Horror: The Scene of Slavery Negro writing has instinctively adopted the Gothic tradition of American literature and given its more supernatural and surrealistic characteristics a realistic basis, founded on actual lives often

lived in the Gothic manner, that is indeed terrifying: the nightmare world of Poe or Hawthorne has become the Monday morning of the Negro author. . . . —Theodore Gross, The Heroic Ideal in American Literature

The scene of slavery was often represented as gothic during the antebellum period in America. From newspaper accounts of Nat Turner’s insurrection and antislavery writings to slave narratives and literary works such as Lydia Maria Child’s “Stand from Under!” (1829) and Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), the horrible reality of slavery was depicted through gothic images and a romantic rhetoric. Theodore Weld exemplifies how slavery was easily read as a sensationalized spectacle during the antebellum period when he states, “facts and testimony as to the actual condition of the Slaves” would “thrill the land with Horror” (Barnes and Dumond 2:717). The gothic’s focus on the terror of possession, the iconography of imprisonment, the fear of retribution, and the weight of sin provided a useful vocabulary and register of images by which to represent the scene of America’s greatest guilt: slavery. According to Kari Winter, the gothic’s structural alliance with slavery is not coincidental.4 Many of the eighteenthcentury British male gothicists—such as Monk Lewis and William Beckford—were either slaveowners or proslavery; moreover, the rise of the gothic novel in England at the end of the eighteenth century occurred during the heightened debate about abolition, a debate in which William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, both authors of gothic novels, actively participated (Winter 3). Like revolution—as Ronald Paulson has shown in his study of the gothic and the French Revolution—and the new capitalistic structures that emerged in the eighteenth century—as Andrea Henderson argues—slavery was a significant part of the historical context that produced the gothic and against which it responded.5 For instance, slave uprisings in St. Domingue at the end of the eighteenth century and in America during the antebellum period, as epitomized by the figure of Nat Turner, were turned into tales of gothic terror.6 Nat Turner and his band were demonized by The Richmond Enquirer (August 30, 1831) as “banditti” and “horrible . . . monsters” (Tragle 43).7 Turning the event into an ominous warning, The Liberator (September 3, 1831) states, “for ourselves, we are horror-struck at the late tidings” and argues that “what was poetry—imagination—in January, is now a bloody reality” (Tragle 64, 63). Turner’s insurrection

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canon—as exempt from the forces of history. A focus on slavery, America’s most glaring cultural contradiction, shows how it produced gothic narratives during the antebellum period and how these narratives reproduced the scene of slavery.3 The chapter examines two strategies by which the gothic represents the unspeakable event of slavery. First, by signifying the event of slavery through narrative effects, the gothic both registers actual events and turns them into fiction. Its conventions can both rematerialize and dematerialize history: some gothic narratives insist upon the actuality of slavery by refusing to collapse the referent of the narrative with its effects; others displace the event of slavery into fictional form in order to contain its horrors. However, as this book has shown, even in the act of displacement, traces of the material remain to be read by those invested in remembering the horrors of history. AfricanAmerican writers—particularly Harriet Jacobs, who works within and against an antebellum discourse that gothicizes slavery—recognize the uses and dangers of the gothic as a mode that can remember and combat, but can also erase, the horrors of a racial history. In looking at how particular gothic fictions are produced in relation to the historical institution of slavery and how the gothic mode represents slavery’s unspeakable history, this chapter explores the extent to which the gothic is able to rematerialize the ghosts of America’s racial history and enable African-American writers to haunt back.

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actualized the imagined terror of slave rebellion: its bloody reality both fulfilled and generated a gothic narrative of dread and retribution. Recounting Turner’s reign of terror, The Constitutional Whig (September 26, 1831) demonstrates how the historical event of Turner’s uprising was represented through gothic conventions: In retracing on Tuesday morning the route pursued by the banditti, consisting of a distance of 20 miles, my imagination was struck with more horror, than the most dreadful carnage in a field of battle could have produced. The massacre before me, being principally of helpless women and children. . . . In future years, the bloody road, will give rise to many a sorrowful legend; and the trampling of hoofs, in fancy, visit many an excited imagination. (Tragle 96-97)

Sarah Grimké’s account of her departure from the South and slavery underscores the way white abolitionists used the gothic’s narrative power to subordinate the slave’s horror to the white viewer’s response:

The bloody scene produces a gothic effect when it strikes the viewer’s imagination; the event “gives rise to” a narrative of terror and horror. However, the event is also reinterpreted by that gothic narrative. As symbolized by the bloody road, it will be turned into a legend: Nat Turner will haunt the imagination of future travelers much like the Headless Horseman of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Translating the event into a gothic symbol, turning it into a legend, the passage reveals how the gothic can dematerialize and displace the source of its effect even while representing it. The present event is constructed as both more “real” and “unreal” as it is imaginatively experienced: the narrator’s imagination is struck by the full horror of the scene even as the scene is displaced into the future and translated into a legend to excite the future viewer’s fancy. The gothic’s conventions, then, gave whites responding to Turner’s rebellion a discourse to symbolize and contain their terror. Once subsumed into symbols, imagined instead of experienced, the event could be read as an effect rather than as a reality. This displacement of event by effect also tends to relocate the horror of slavery from the slave’s experience to the white viewer’s response. Antislavery and proslavery sympathizers alike deployed the gothicized scene of slavery, the event, as the conduit for a particular effect. In American Slavery as It Is (1839), Theodore Weld uses the gothic conventions of clanking chains and swooning maidens to emphasize the horror of slavery. “We repeat it, every man knows that slavery is a curse,” he writes. “Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart. Try him; clank the chains in his ears, and tell him they are for him. . . . then look at his pale lips and trembling knees, and you have na-

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ture’s testimony against slavery” (7). Asking the viewer to imagine himself enslaved, responding to this imagined scene, Weld turns slavery into an effect. The clanking chains sound the warning of retribution more than they symbolize actual imprisonment. Nature’s testimony against slavery is not the scene itself but the white viewer’s response to it: pale lips and trembling knees. Paradoxically, the gothic effect subsumes the gothic event even as it testifies to its horrors.

As I left my native state on account of slavery, and deserted the home of my fathers to escape the sound of the lash and the shrieks of tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollection of those scenes with which I have been familiar; but this may not, cannot be; they come over my memory like gory spectres, and implore me with resistless power, in the name of a God of mercy, in the name of a crucified Savior, in the name of humanity; for the sake of the slaveholder, as well as the slave, to bear witness to the horrors of the southern prison house. (Weld 22)

Grimké depicts herself as the innocent maiden fleeing the scene of horror. She, not the slave, is the tortured victim of the slavery system, a displaced wanderer, haunted by bloody specters. In identifying herself as the victim, Grimké abstracts and co-opts the slave’s horror.8 By equating witnessing these scenes with experiencing them, Grimké makes the effect coextensive with the event, thereby establishing her authority. The gory scenes implore her to speak; the shrieks of the tortured victims are articulated through her. Bearing witness to the horrors of the southern prison house in the name of all its victims, slaveholders as well as slaves, Grimké generalizes the horror to everyone involved. In the hands of antebellum white writers, then, the gothic often enabled the representation of slavery only to departicularize it. As Eric Sundquist argues, “the antislavery imagination, no less than the proslavery, tended to collapse history into timeless images of terror and damnation” (1993:147). The gothic might offer useful metaphors for depicting the historical event of slavery, but its narrative construction could also empty slavery of history by turning it into a gothic trope. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s preface to Dred (1856) articulates how easily literary discourse could fictionalize the historical reality of slavery.

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in a merely artistic point of view, there is no ground, ancient or modern, whose vivid lights, gloomy shadows and grotesque groupings, afford to the novelist so wide a scope for the exercise of his powers. In the near vicinity of modern civilization of the most matter-of-fact kind, exist institutions which carry us back to the twilight of the feudal ages, with all their exciting possibilities of incident. (29)

Stowe locates slavery as a feudal institution, displaced in time and space and hence offering the romance writer wider scope for her fictional powers. For Stowe, who can see it from a merely artistic point of view, slavery is already a fictionalized scene, full of “exciting possibilities of incident.” Its actuality is once again imaginatively subsumed by gothic conventions. The problem of how literary narrative could displace historical reality was especially troubling for the author of the slave narrative. While slave narratives use many fictional forms to structure their events, the difficulty of negotiating the line between fact and fiction is especially apparent in their use of the gothic.9 The slave narrative’s generic conventions seem to be in direct opposition to the gothic’s: its documentary form and adherence to veracity announce a refusal of any imaginative rendering. Although the slave narrative might not incorporate the gothic’s typical supernatural elements, it does, however, contain— even in its factual form—many gothic characteristics. With descriptions of slavery as a feudal institution, horrifying scenes of torture and entrapment, lascivious masters and innocent slave girls, and curses on many generations, the slave narrative reads like a gothic romance with a single, crucial difference: the scenery is not staged but real. The slave narrative’s representations have historical referents that embody horror; however, though recording a horror beyond the pale of most gothic romances, the slave narrative could be read within the gothic’s fictional conventions. As Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner stated of slave narratives, “Romance has no stories of more thrilling interest than theirs” (qtd. in The Liberator [October 22, 1852], 169). Or, as Angelina Grimké wrote in a letter to Theodore Weld in 1838, “Many and many a tale of romantic horror can the slaves tell” (Barnes and Dumond 2:523). The realization that their factual narratives could read like fiction caused many authors to insist on the veracity of their tales. In My Bondage and My

Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass writes, “The reader is, therefore, assured, with all due promptitude, that his attention is not invited to a work of ART, but to a work of FACTS—Facts, terrible and almost incredible, it may be—yet FACTS, nevertheless” (3).1 0 In her “authentic narrative describing the Horrors of slavery,” Harriet Jacobs, for example, feels compelled to assure her readers that her narrative is not fiction: “I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible,” she writes, “but they are, nevertheless, strictly true” (1). 1 1 Jacobs’s opening disclaimer marks the complex relationship between the romance and the real in her text. Paradoxically, the horrifying facts seem, as Lydia Maria Child states, “more romantic than fiction” (3); overflowing the boundaries of the real, Jacobs’s factual narrative can read like a gothic fiction. It is important to note the slave narrative’s double bind: the difficulty of representing a gothic history through gothic conventions without collapsing the distinctions between fact and fiction, event and effect. The slave narrative must rewrite the conventions of gothic fiction for its own factual ends. Frederick Douglass’s gothic scene of slavery in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Aunt Hester’s whipping, is one example of this rewriting. Placed at the end of the Narrative’s first chapter, the gothic scene serves as both the reader’s and Douglass’s entrance through the “blood-stained gate” of slavery (51). Douglass gives northern antebellum readers a familiar scene: the southern gothic spectacle of slavery.1 2 With its gothic villain, the slavemaster, and its innocent maiden, his Aunt Hester, who “stood fair for his infernal purpose,” the scene plays up but also resists its gothic effects (52). It offers the reader the villain and the maiden but transposes their conventional associations: the black villain is white and the virginal, innocent maiden is a black slave. As the viewer of, rather than a participant in, this infernal scene, Douglass signifies against white narratives of gothic spectatorship. Framing the scene with his response to it, Douglass both plays to northern readers’ sympathy and critiques their voyeurism. Situated in Douglass’s position as witness to this scene of brutality, the reader is asked to identify with Douglass’s horror and against the iron-hearted slavemaster. Douglass hopes that the scene will strike the reader with the same “awful force” as it struck him (51). By drawing a parallel between the way the scene “strikes” the viewer and the blows Aunt Hester experiences from the slavemaster, the narrative suggests the power of the gothic scene to relay the

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Explaining why she has chosen as a subject “the scenes and incidents of the slaveholding states,” Stowe writes:

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experience of horror. However, in identifying the viewer with the victim and in depicting the viewer as a passive and safely distant observer (the young Douglass hiding in the closet), the scene also reveals how the gothic spectacle can enable identification without initiating a corresponding action. The scene exposes not only the victimization inherent in the white reader’s relationship to slavery but also the voyeurism. Like the young boy peeping out of the closet to witness the sexualized spectacle of slavery, the white reader is both repulsed and fascinated with its horrors. In this way, Douglass also identifies the viewer with the slavemaster and his “great pleasure” (51). The scene, then, offers a typical gothic scenario only to critique the white reader’s role in viewing it. The scene further exposes the slave narrative’s use and revision of the gothic by employing the gothic to rematerialize history while resisting its possible dematerializing effects. Following a general description of his Aunt Hester’s whippings, Douglass pauses to reflect upon the scene before he describes the first time he witnessed this event: “I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. . . . It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it” (51). Here, Douglass captures the difficulty of speaking the unspeakable: slavery is at once unforgettable and indescribable. The performative quality of Douglass’s simultaneous insistence that he cannot capture his response to the scene and attempts to do so shows that the gothic provides tropes by which the unspoken can be represented, if not fully spoken. In its pseudodocumentary and excessively mediated form (a manuscript that has been translated and passed to the narrator through a number of sources), the gothic claims historical veracity even as it points to the limits of historical representation. Similarly, Douglass recounts the scene of Aunt Hester’s whipping while insisting that the scene of slavery is ultimately unrepresentable. Douglass repeats it two times, first as a general occurrence and then as a particular event, the first time he witnessed it. His twice-told tale, however, like his performative gesture, signals the unrepresentability of the scene: its excessiveness implies that it cannot be fully captured. By insisting on the gothic’s resistance to representation, Douglass negotiates the uneasy relationship between his gothic tale and his gothic history: he both represents his history and insists that it defies narrative reconstruction.

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Douglass’s resistance to turning the event of slavery into a narrative effect is also evident in the way he represents Aunt Hester’s whipping. The focus in the scene is as much on the “it,” the spectacle of the whipping, as on the “I,” the narrator who responds to it. Douglass’s insistence that he cannot commit his feelings to paper is as much an articulation of slavery’s unrepresentability as a refusal to focus more on the response to the event than on the event itself. Douglass uses the gothic to translate Aunt Hester’s whippings into a symbol of slavery—“a terrible spectacle”—but he also refuses to abstract the horror by turning it into a timeless trope of terror. Not only does he generalize his account of the whipping between two versions, but he also goes to great lengths in the second recounting to particularize the scene, giving the context of the whipping and describing it in a matter-of-fact tone. The frame, more than the narrative, sensationalizes the scene. This tension between the depiction of the actual event and the gothicized effect of its narrative frame is also evident in Douglass’s first description: “I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he [the slavemaster] used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood” (51). In this statement, Douglass deploys the gothic with a twist: instead of waking from the nightmare, he wakes to it. Unveiling reality as the nightmare and emphasizing that Aunt Hester is “literally” covered with blood, Douglass rewrites the gothic as actual horror instead of stage effect. Moreover, by describing the event as occurring in the continuous present—“I have often been awakened”—he reexperiences the scene in the act of reimagining it, making the event hauntingly present. When he ends, “I had therefore been, until now, out of the way of the bloody scenes that often occurred on the plantation,” he suggests that the reader, like himself, is awake to the nightmare of slavery: the gothic effect does not dematerialize the event but makes it ever-present (52, emphasis added). By redeploying the gothic, Douglass is able to materialize the scene and resist its representation as mere effect. Douglass’s use of the gothic, then, acknowledges that the scene of slavery is conventionally constructed but rewrites those conventions to his own ends. By making the reader enter his narrative of slavery through the conventions of the gothic, Douglass discloses how the spectacle of slavery is mediated and structured generically. The event is accessible only as a narrated scene,

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Douglass’s redeployment of the gothic exposes it as a mode intimately connected to history.1 4 The gothic’s typical association with the “unreal” and the sensational, however, has created a resistance to examining African-American narratives in relation to the gothic. Alice Walker, for instance, dislikes the categorization of her work as gothic since it “conjures up the supernatural” and since she “feels what she writes has ‘something to do with real life’” (263). Similarly, Toni Morrison is reluctant to have her writing described as gothic. She dislikes the term black magic used in conjunction with her work since the “implication [is] that there [is] no intelligence there” (C. Davis 145).1 5 The gothic’s apparent lack of connection to reality and intellectual purpose has made it troubling to use in conjunction with AfricanAmerican writers.1 6 However, instead of accepting traditional readings of the gothic as unrealistic and frivolous, thereby excluding African-American narratives from this genre, we should use the African-American gothic to revise our understanding of the gothic as an historical mode. Re-viewing the gothic through the lens of African-American transpositions and recognizing that the gothic itself is a dynamic and contradictory mode whose tropes and conventions can be used for a variety of ends makes visible the American gothic’s relationship to history. In order to examine how the African-American gothic revises standard notions of the American gothic tradition, I now examine the dialogue that occurs between two texts: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The relationship of influence and resistance between these texts reveals how the African-American gothic is working within and against a broader American gothic tradition. My aim is not to subsume African-American narratives under some reified concept of the American tradition, but rather to

show how the African-American gothic highlights the historicity of the American gothic.1 7

Loopholes of Influence: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs Signifyin(g) functions as a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the AfroAmerican literary tradition. —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl exemplifies the slave narrative’s connection to the gothic romance through its use of fictional conventions. As late as the 1970s, Incidents’s authenticity remained in doubt because of its perceived similarity to the novel of seduction. In The Slave Community, for instance, John Blassingame discusses Incidents as a fictional story, arguing that Jacobs’s tale was too melodramatic to be considered an authentic slave narrative. The debate over whether Incidents was fact or fiction was not fully resolved until Jean Fagan Yellin verified the narrative’s authenticity in 1981.1 8 However, it is precisely Jacobs’s use of fictional tropes to represent authentic fact that fueled this confusion. On the one hand she claims, “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction”; on the other hand, in the act of claiming her narrative’s authenticity she uses a trope from the novel (1). While Incidents’s relationship to the conventions of the sentimental novel has been extensively explored, it has rarely been discussed in terms of the gothic.1 9 Whether this is because the gothic continues to be viewed as opposed to the realist conventions of the slave narrative or because the sentimental has become canonized as the nineteenth-century woman’s genre is hard to say; however, Jacobs’s refashioning of the gothic mode calls for further examination. The history of Jacobs’s relationship to Harriet Beecher Stowe foregrounds Incidents’s connection to the conventions of the gothic. Instead of writing her own story, Jacobs initially planned to dictate her narrative to Stowe, who wanted to use it for her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). Outraged by Stowe’s subsequent treatment of her and her daughter, Jacobs decided to write her story herself, claiming that “it needed no romance” (Yellin 1985:266).2 0 Despite Jacobs’s claim, her story was the perfect factual source for Stowe’s gothic romance. Jacobs’s factual account of her sevenyear imprisonment in her grandmother’s garret, written almost a decade after Key, echoes Stowe’s fictional tale about Cassy haunting Legree’s attic. This uncanny connection—fact mirroring fiction—exemplifies the complex intersection between the romance and the real in both texts. If

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1constructed for the viewer.1 3 However, in using gothic conventions, Douglass marks the differences as well as the similarities between gothic narrative and gothic history. Gothic conventions might usefully reproduce the scene of slavery, but they also might dematerialize it. By allying the gothic with reality and yet insisting that its effects cannot fully capture the event, Douglass utilizes the gothic’s narrative power to represent slavery and to create a strong effect while insisting on the difference between event and effect. Like other African-American authors who employ the gothic mode, Douglass must negotiate between its power and its danger.

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Stowe desired Jacobs’s factual history to authenticate her fictional tale, Jacobs also revised Stowe’s fictional story in her own factual account. Since Jacobs refers in her penultimate chapter to Stowe’s treatment of the Fugitive Slave Law in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is evident that Jacobs was familiar with Stowe’s novel (194). Moreover, Jacobs’s borrowing of Cassy’s “loophole in the garret” to name her own “loophole of retreat” suggests connections between the two stories that have yet to be fully explored (Stowe 597; Jacobs 114). 2 1 In both instances, the gothic is the fictional mode by which the factual horrors of slavery can be represented. However, understanding how Jacobs revises Stowe’s loophole along with other gothic conventions makes apparent the power and the limitations of the gothic mode for AfricanAmerican authors.

is would be a work which could not be read; and all works which ever mean to give pleasure must draw a veil somewhere, or they cannot succeed. (Key, I)

The scene of slavery exceeds the representation of art. By passing over what is too dreadful, fiction makes the unreadable readable, paradoxically unveiling slavery yet concealing its worst aspects. It is precisely this paradox—the need for narrative to represent historical reality yet the danger that fiction will be equated with fact—that troubles Jacobs’s narrative. Stowe, who has different goals, negotiates this paradox more easily. For her, narrative effects can both be grounded in reality and evade it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a fiction that claims the status of fact. Her subtitle to The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin argues that her fictional effects are grounded in actual events: “Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded. Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work.” Moreover, Stowe claims that the novel “more, perhaps, than any other work of fiction that ever was written, has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents, of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered, grouped together with reference to a general result” (1). However, in defending Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a true story, Stowe reveals a complicated relationship between fictional effect and factual event. Events may authenticate her effects, but they remain subordinate. Uncle Tom’s Cabin achieves its realist status primarily through its impression on the reader and only secondarily through its factual authentication. Stowe writes, “the book had a purpose entirely transcending the artistic one, and accordingly encounters at the hands of the public demands not usually made on fictitious works. It is treated as a reality—sifted, tried and tested, as a reality; and therefore as a reality it may be proper that it should be defended” (1). Once treated as reality, the novel can then be defended as such. The narrative effect not only claims the status of event but supersedes it. However, even as Stowe subsumes fact into fiction, she recognizes the difference between the two:

Stowe’s use of the gothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin exemplifies this complicated relationship between the event of slavery and its narrative effects. Stowe employs the gothic to represent the southern spectacle of slavery.2 2 In the last third of the novel, as Tom travels down the blood-red river to Legree’s decaying mansion in a chapter titled “The Middle Passage,” the gothic intrudes into the sentimental in order to register the full horror of slavery: Legree’s ruined plantation unveils what lies just behind the seemingly enlightened edifice of St. Clare’s home. On another level, Stowe’s description shows just how easily slavery is transcribed into gothic terms. Hell and the Inquisition serve as apt metaphors for the horror chamber of slavery where one can be “burned alive . . . scalded, cut into inch-pieces, set up for the dogs to tear, or hung up and whipped to death” (512). Indeed, as Cassy tells Tom, slavery’s everyday occurrences make a fine gothic tale: “I could make any one’s hair rise, and their teeth chatter, if I should only tell what I’ve seen and been knowing to, here” (512). This section of the novel shows how the event of slavery is structured in gothic terms, and also demonstrates how gothic stories are produced by history. The scene of actual terror—a female slave imprisoned in the garret and beaten to death—is turned into a ghost story that then terrifies Legree: “it was said that oaths and cursings, and the sound of violent blows, used to ring through that old garret, and mingle with wailings and groans of despair” (565). As the transformation of event into legend makes clear, gothic devices terrify because of their relation to actuality. Legree’s superstition is not illusory; his fright is grounded in reality.

The writer acknowledges that the book is a very inadequate representation of slavery; and it is so, necessarily, for this reason—that slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes of art. A work which should represent it strictly as it

The inclusion of Cassy’s gothic tale within the novel’s already gothicized plot shows the gothic operating on yet another level: it allows the objects of torture and terror to haunt back. In

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However, although Cassy’s ghost story shows that gothic effects are grounded in historical events, Stowe’s narrative tends to dematerialize those effects. Not only does her gothic tale demonize Cassy, turning her into a stock character, partly insane, with a supernatural laugh, but it also reminds the reader that the horror is not true, only a play. “At the time when all was matured for action,” the narrator interrupts, “our readers may, perhaps, like to look behind the scenes, and see the final coup d’etat” (571). By introducing Cassy’s machinations with this address to the reader, the narrative unveils itself as a fiction. We are not asked to identify with Legree and read Cassy’s effects as true; rather, we are shown behind the scenes to see the effect as merely that—an effect. Instead of being frightened by the ghost, we are made privy to Cassy’s plan to “play ghost for them” (574). Whereas Legree is terrified by Cassy’s effects, the reader is amused. By parodying the gothic, Stowe’s narrative undercuts its relation to actual incidents: “Authorities were somewhat divided,” Stowe writes at the beginning of chapter XLII, “as to the outward form of the spirit, owing to a custom quite prevalent among negroes,—and, for aught we know, among whites, too,—of invariably shutting the eyes, and covering up heads under blankets, petticoats, or whatever else might come in use for a shelter, on these occasions” (594). Here, Stowe spoofs the gothic to play the scene for laughs rather than fear. Blacks, and perhaps whites, are made to appear stupidly superstitious, a position the reader is implicitly instructed to avoid. Asked not to take the white

sheet too seriously, the reader is exempted from the horrors of history. Cassy’s effects have power over Legree, who sees them as true, but not over the reader, who is reminded that they are a fiction. Stowe’s deployment of the gothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrates how the gothic can resurrect or dematerialize history by turning it into a fiction; the gothic might allow the objects of terror to haunt back, but it also offers its viewer an avenue of escape. This double-edged nature of the gothic is precisely what Jacobs negotiates in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. At the outset of her narrative, Jacobs articulates the problem of writing her life story: it is at once incredible and indescribable. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall far short of the facts. I have concealed the names of places, and given persons fictitious names. I had no motive for secrecy on my own account, but I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to pursue this course. (1)

This opening address to the reader signals the intricate connections between fact and fiction in Jacobs’s narrative. The facts of Jacobs’s history are unspeakable, but once represented, even partially, they resemble fiction. Paradoxically, her narrative of slavery appears to be an effect even as it falls short of capturing slavery’s grim reality. Caught between exaggerated effect and unspeakable fact, Jacobs’s narrative must negotiate the two poles without collapsing them; her history must not be subsumed by the fictional conventions she uses to represent it. The canny revelation that she concealed the true names of places and people in her narrative suggests the narrative’s dual function: like the author’s pseudonym, Linda Brent, her narrative veils her history while appearing to unveil it. By highlighting her narrative’s fictionality and inadequacy as well as its truth, Jacobs signals the way it both reveals and conceals her unspeakable history.2 3 Lydia Maria Child seemingly disregards the difficulty of Jacobs’s narrative position when she writes: “This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn. I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them” (4). Child assumes not only that

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order to escape the horrors of Legree’s house, Cassy directs her own ghost story, reviving the legend of the garret to enable her escape. Adding some special effects—she inserts the neck of an old bottle into the garret window to ensure the proper shrieks, leaves ghost stories around for Legree to read, and finally turns herself into a ghost with the requisite white sheet—Cassy uses the gothic’s terror effects to free herself from the imprisoning plot of slavery. The author of her own “Authentic Ghost Story,” as Stowe’s chapter heading informs us, Cassy appropriates the place of terror and imprisonment, the “weird and ghostly” garret—and turns it into a safe haven and the site of her liberation (564). As the haunter, Cassy may first roam the house freely and then escape it altogether. The gothic serves as a means of resistance in Cassy’s hands: by turning the horror of her own history into the source of her power, Cassy finds liberation in the very terror that has imprisoned her.

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withdrawing the veil is her responsibility but also that it is simple, however indelicate. Yet her metaphor of slavery as a monster reveals the veil to be multilayered. Beneath it is another veil: a metaphor of slavery rather than slavery itself. Even uncovered, the event is transcribed as another effect. In arguing that slavery’s wrongs are too foul for listeners’ delicate ears, Child echoes Stowe’s sentiments that slavery in all its dreadfulness is unreadable, or in this case unhearable. Child’s paradoxical point—that slavery’s horrors must be unveiled, yet once unveiled they might be too foul to be heard—suggests the difficult space within which Jacobs had to negotiate her narrative. Incidents, then, has to perform a play of veils. Jacobs’s manipulation of the gothic’s conventions is central to this performance. Like Stowe and Douglass, Jacobs understands and exploits the gothic’s conventionalized relationship to the scene of slavery in the antebellum period; she gothicizes slavery from the outset of her narrative by describing it as a “deep, and dark, and foul . . . pit of abominations” peopled by “fiends who bear the shape of men” (2, 27). However, like Douglass, she also resists the gothic’s romantic effects. In chapter 9, “Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders,” Jacobs recounts a series of horrifying punishments to reveal the “abominations of slavery”: slaves are bludgeoned, flogged, and burned to death (52). Like Stowe, she suggests how these actual events produce gothic narratives. The slavemaster’s fear of retribution prompts his belief in ghosts: “Murder was so common on his plantation that he feared to be alone after nightfall,” she says of Mr. Litch. “He might have believed in ghosts” (47). However, Jacobs insists, unlike Stowe, that the gothic’s effects are real: the bloodhounds “literally tore the flesh from his bones,” she states of one slave (47). The compilation of narratives in this chapter, which resembles the narrative techniques of antislavery tracts like Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, produces a factual basis for these incredible horrors. Piling narrative upon narrative, Jacobs marshals a multitude of cases as evidence of slavery’s real terrors, proving the punishments to be a “general rule” rather than an exaggerated exception (50). Repetition rather than progression marks her narrative mode in this chapter, and indeed, her entire narrative. For instance, in comparing her easy fate in slavery to that of others, she writes: I was never cruelly over-worked; I was never lacerated with the whip from head to foot; I was never so beaten and bruised that I could not turn from one side to the other; I never had my heel-strings

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cut to prevent my running away; I was never chained to a log and forced to drag it about, while I toiled in the fields from morning till night; I was never branded with hot iron, or torn by bloodhounds. (115)

The parallel construction of her sentences as well as the proliferation of examples marks the way repetition functions to substantiate a single fact: slavery’s torture. However, Jacobs’s use of repetition also points to the inadequacy of narrative in reconstructing reality. No matter how many examples she recounts, she says, “I could tell of more slaveholders as cruel as those I have described” (49). Moreover, at the end of her list of examples Jacobs writes, “No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery” (51). Claiming the factual nature of slavery’s gothic horror even as she argues that an excess of examples still falls short of the fact, Jacobs at once narratively constructs the gothic event as actual and insists that it exceeds such representation. The narrative excess that the gothic event produces (in this case, the repetition) allows it to remain uncontained. While Child edits the chapter in order to contain its horrors and shield its reader—“I put the savage cruelties into one chapter, entitled ‘Neighboring Planters,’ in order that those who shrink from ‘supping upon horrors’ might omit them, without interrupting the thread of the story” (qtd. in Yellin 1987:xxii)—Jacobs refuses to quarantine the gothic to this chapter or to the South. Her use of repetition not only weaves this thread of her story throughout her narrative but also refuses her reader any escape from history’s horrors. Stowe allows readers to separate themselves from the frightening effects of the gothic by showing them behind the scenes, but Jacobs blocks the avenues of escape for her northern reader. From the title-page epigraph indicting the North for lack of effort in overthrowing slavery and her imaginative projection of the northern reader as a negro trader at the end of chapter 9, to her conditional freedom at the end of the narrative, Jacobs implicates the North in the horrors that she presents and curtails her readers’ ability to read her history as a romantic tale. Although Jacobs licenses her reader to view her narrative within certain gothic conventions— she recounts a typical female gothic plot when she portrays herself as an innocent maiden pursued by a lascivious villain, the “vile monster” Doctor Flint (27)—she also rewrites them, especially the gothic’s demonization and victimiza-

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While Jacobs exploits her position as the victim of a gothic plot, she also insists on her ability to haunt back. She portrays herself as both the victim of Dr. Flint’s deceptions and his competitor in cunning: “Being surrounded by mysteries, deceptions, and dangers,” Jacobs writes, slaves “early learn to be suspicious and watchful, and prematurely cautious and cunning” (155). Jacobs might represent herself as the unsuspecting maiden who, when Dr. Flint begins to people her “young mind with unclean images,” lets his signs “pass, as if [she] did not understand what he meant,” but she is actually out-manipulating him (27, 31). Refusing to react to his words, she evades the actual terror in which those verbal deceptions are meant to result—rape. By cloaking her strong reading of events as a seeming nonreading, Jacobs plays both helpless heroine and active combatant.2 5 By emphasizing her role as the victim of slavery’s imprisoning gothic plot even as she manipulates that plot, Jacobs appeals to and resists her readers’ conventional view of the slave as victim of monstrous evils. For instance, when she describes Dr. Flint’s plan to give her a home of her own and “make a lady” of her, she rewrites his sentimental story as a gothic plot: she “shudders” as she listens to his plan, realizing that the “secluded place” would imprison her in a “dreaded fate,” a “living death” (53). By revealing the gothic terror behind Dr. Flint’s sentimental smoke screen, Jacobs justifies her sexual fall. Her gothic scene not only underscores her role as helpless victim

but also sets the stage for her resistance: “I was determined that the master . . . should not . . . succeed at last in trampling his victim under his feet. I would do any thing, every thing, for the sake of defeating him,” she writes (53). As the innocent maiden unwillingly initiated into evil, the victim “struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery,” Jacobs mounts her defense (54). If the gothic monster has her in his grasp, then her manipulations of slavery’s evil plots are justified. Asking the reader to pity her and pardon her for taking Mr. Sands as a lover, she argues that she saw no other “way of escaping the doom [she] so much dreaded” (55). Jacobs’s ultimate escape plan highlights her revision of and resistance to the gothic’s conventions. Over the “living death” that awaits her in Dr. Flint’s secluded cottage, she chooses her own place of live burial when she imprisons herself in her grandmother’s garret (53). She describes her garret in gothic terms: it is a “dungeon,” a torture chamber, a prison, a grave (127). Indeed, her “dismal hole” resembles the “deep, and dark, and foul” pit of slavery (113, 2). Jacobs’s description symbolizes slavery’s extreme entrapment: “The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air” (114). Jacobs’s refusal to sensationalize her garret—she describes it in a factual tone—reflects her general resistance to the gothic’s dematerializing effects. She might exploit gothic metaphors (for instance, she describes herself as a “poor captive in her dungeon” [133]), but she insists that they be taken as truth. Her address to the reader about her seven years of imprisonment in the garret emphasizes the truthfulness of her tale: I hardly expect that the reader will credit me, when I affirm that I lived in that little dismal hole, almost deprived of light and air, and with no space to move my limbs, for nearly seven years. But it is a fact; and to me a sad one, even now; for my body still suffers from the effects of that long imprisonment, to say nothing of my soul. Members of my family, now living in New York and Boston, can testify to the truth of what I say. (148)

The incredibleness of her revelation makes her assume her reader’s disbelief, so Jacobs authenticates her description of the extreme physical and psychological conditions of her imprisonment with the continued effects on her body and soul, to which her family can bear witness. By presenting herself and her family as factual evidence, Jacobs asserts her own materiality: she asks the

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tion of blacks.2 4 She might use Dr. Flint’s persecutions to emphasize her extreme vulnerability, but she also refuses to be imprisoned in the role of victim: “My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there” (28). By locating the gothic’s evil blackness in Dr. Flint’s dark shadow, Jacobs both emphasizes her persecution and reverses the gothic’s usual demonization: the master, not the black slave, is the source of horror and dread. Unlike Stowe’s Cassy, who embodies the demons of slavery—she tells Legree, “I’ve got the devil in me” (525)—Jacobs refuses to become a projection of the slavemaster’s villainy. By presenting herself as the innocent maiden attempting to flee the corruptions of slavery, Jacobs both gains the sympathy of her reader and resists being demonized.

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reader to credit her story by crediting her as a person rather than as a character. Moreover, in insisting that her staged death is not a performance from which she can walk away unscathed, Jacobs points to the costs of her conjuring. Cassy says to Tom, “I know no way but through the grave,” but Jacobs signifies against Stowe by actualizing that escape (562). Thus, Jacobs refuses to dematerialize the gothic event of slavery. Unlike Cassy, who can walk away from slavery dressed in a white sheet, Jacobs reminds the reader of the physical costs of her disappearing act. After her first live burial under the floorboards, she remarks, “the fright I had undergone, the constrained posture, and the dampness of the ground, made me ill for several days” (110); later, in her garret, she describes being tortured by dripping turpentine, excessive temperatures, and insects until her body becomes so crippled that it makes escape impossible. Jacobs also argues that the gothic’s ghostly effects are the result of actual events. When she reappears in the realm of the living, her friend Fanny declares, “Linda, can this be you? or is it your ghost?” (156). Figured as a specter returned from the dead, she resembles a gothic effect. However, as Jacobs’s earlier discussion of her brother’s figure suggests, a ghostly appearance is one of the physical effects of slavery: “long confinement had made his face too pale, his form too thin”; he looks “like a ghost” (23, 24). In Fanny and Brent’s exchange of their tales of terror and suffering, Jacobs underscores the events behind all gothic effects. When her son imagines her as the victim in a gothic story, “O mother! you ain’t dead, are you? They didn’t cut off your head at the plantation, did they,” Jacobs demonstrates how the supernatural is based in institutionalized threats of power (88). Benny has not made up this terrifying story but has learned it from his master’s threats: Dr. Flint says to him, “Get out of the way, you little damned rascal! If you don’t, I’ll cut off your head” (116). Jacobs refuses to spoof the gothic or undermine the reality behind its effects, and thus she mounts an implicit critique of Stowe’s gothic episode. Her garret stands in marked contrast to Cassy’s “great, desolate space” (564). Cassy’s attic serves as a new home, not a prison (she can roam the house at night and walk around the attic during the day, and she also reclaims the role of “true womanhood” there, becoming mother to Emmeline and making a home for them), but Jacobs’s garret is both a safe haven and a grave. Cassy is in “no danger” and can make any noise that she

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pleases since “it will only add to the effect,” but Jacobs states that she had to remain still and quiet for fear of being caught (576). Jacobs might depict herself as using her gothic location to combat slavery’s terrors—with “spying eyes and ventriloquist voice” she is able to out-manipulate Dr. Flint by disappearing and by projecting herself, through her letter-writing, up North—but she constantly reminds the reader what this costs her (Andrews 1986:259). She remains the object of terror and torture even as she haunts back. Jacobs’s refusal to exploit Stowe’s story overtly in this scene emphasizes her resistance to the gothic’s fictionalizing conventions. Jacobs authenticates her own incredible imprisonment with a narrative of horrifying fact rather than a fictional tale. Her description of her garret directly echoes her previous tale of a runaway slave who is punished by being whipped and then screwed into a cotton gin: “He was then put into the cotton gin, which was screwed down, only allowing him room to turn on his side when he could not lie on his back. . . . When the press was unscrewed, the dead body was found partly eaten by rats and vermin” (49). The cotton gin is like Jacobs’s dark hole, where she can only sleep on one side and has to endure rats and mice running over her bed; both the gin and Jacobs’s grave represent the torture chamber of slavery.2 6 Indeed, Jacobs’s use of repetition places her garret in a long line of imprisoning places—the cotton gin, the attic storeroom in her friend’s house, the shallow grave under the floorboards in her friend’s kitchen, the Snaky Swamp—enabling her to verify and generalize her scene of suffering. The garret is not an exceptional example of slavery’s horror but its typical representative. As Deborah Garfield argues, instead of letting Stowe narrow Jacobs’s experience to a single romantic event in Key, Jacobs insists on a broader context for the gothic horrors of slavery (284). Just as Jacobs refuses to restrict the gothic horrors of slavery to a single event or a single chapter (as Child would do), so too does she argue that they exceed the borders of the South. Through repetition, Jacobs demonstrates that her life in the North replicates her imprisonment and persecution in the gothic South.2 7 Instead of being a place of freedom, the North “aped the customs of slavery” (163).2 8 She describes it as a place of reimprisonment and persecution: not only is she pursued by her “Old Enemy Again” but she portrays herself as entrapped in another “reign of terror,” this time in the form of the Fugitive Slave Law (191). Upon arriving in the North, she claims

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Portraying herself as a victim of the terrors of the North, Jacobs exposes the North’s complicity in the South’s gothic plots. The North obeys southern laws when it buys people their freedom and returns runaways: “when victims make their escape from this wild beast of Slavery, northerners consent to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into his den” (35-36). Moreover, she specifically indicts northern readers for their voyeuristic pleasure in and appropriation of the slave’s suffering. Jacobs might end the book by presenting a portrait of the sympathetic northern reader in the form of Mrs. Bruce, but she begins the book by critiquing the voyeuristic reader in the person of Mrs. Flint, whose “nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped, till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash” (12). Her opening also insists that reading about gothic horror is different from experiencing it: “Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations,” she states (2). When at the end of her narrative Jacobs argues that she is only as free from “the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north,” which is “not saying a great deal,” she places the northern reader in the position of southern terrorist or imprisoned victim and allows no loophole out of the horrors of the nation’s history (201). Returning to New York from England, she writes that “from the distance spectres seemed to rise up on the shores of the United States. It is a sad feeling to be afraid

of one’s native country” (186). For Jacobs, the gothic shadows of slavery encompass the entire nation. Although Jacobs continues to be haunted by her “mournful past” in the North, she is able to haunt back by writing her narrative and by speaking the unspeakable about slavery (161). Jacobs describes it as the gothic horror that must be unveiled: “the secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition” (35). Throughout her narrative, Jacobs makes evident how a veil of silence supports slavery: it serves as the slavemaster’s single most important weapon in the battle of appearances. Jacobs emphasizes this point in chapter 9, “Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders.” The litany of terror and torture she recites here depends on the fact that “Nothing was said” (47); the cruelties pass “without comment” (46). Silence fuels and secures slavery’s reign of terror. Against the master’s powerful prohibition, Jacobs insists on speaking the unspeakable. From early on, she realizes the power of exposure.2 9 Even as a young girl, she understands that Dr. Flint’s hesitancy in whipping her stems from a fear that “the application of the lash might have led to remarks that would have exposed him” (35). Instead of exposing the marks on her flesh, as many ex-slaves did, Jacobs reveals the horrors of slavery through her pen: “Rise up, ye women that are at ease!” the title page announces, “Hear my voice, ye careless daughters! Give ear unto my speech.” In doing this, she reverses the position of terror. She is recording a litany of real-life horrors—from scalding drops of fat falling on bare skin and bloodhounds tearing the flesh from runaways, to whipping posts surrounded by pools of blood and slaves going insane—but in writing these horrors, she reclaims them for her own purpose: to haunt back by exposing the difference between slavery’s appearance and its reality. This rending of the veil, however, is not easy. Like most gothic texts, Jacobs’s narrative encodes the difficulty inherent in speaking the unspeakable. Her invocation to speech on her title page is balanced in both the preface and the appendix of her text with a desire for silence. Her text begins with her stating that “it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history” and ends with Post’s description of Jacobs’ reluctance to tell her story (1). The narrative frame both exhibits her resistance to exposing her painful history as a sentimental stance and registers the very real difficulty of representing such excessive horror and the pain involved in remembering it.

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that she barely has time to find a home before Dr. Flint comes looking for her: “Again I was to be torn from a comfortable home, and all my plans for the welfare of my children were to be frustrated by that demon Slavery!” she exclaims (180). Describing herself as constantly moving (she flees her home four times to evade her persecutors) and ever fearful (she never goes out “without trepidation” since Mr. Dodge, Dr. Flint’s surrogate, “might at that moment be waiting to pounce upon [her] if [she] ventured out of doors” [195, 196]), Jacobs depicts herself in a reactive position. No matter how many “double veils” and assumed names she takes on, she can never disappear or find a safe space (181). Dr. Flint’s renewed power over her is marked as so omnipotent that it not only extends upward from the South but also from beyond the grave. Even after he dies, Jacobs is not free from his curse, for his family, now destitute, is even more eager to regain its “property.” Jacobs, then, argues that the daylight world of the North resembles the nightmare world of the South.

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While the conclusion of Jacobs’s narrative appears to veil the horrors she has spent her narrative revealing in the cloak of sentiment, it remains haunted by her history: “it has been painful to me, in many ways, to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage. I would gladly forget them if I could. Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace; for with those gloomy recollections come tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark and troubled sea” (201).3 0 The passage registers Jacobs’s desire to alleviate the pain of her horrific history with the healing salve of forgetfulness, but it also insists on the futility of this desire. Haunted by the shadows of her past and the continued oppression of her present, Jacobs cannot completely exorcise the demons of slavery; yet in bearing witness to them she haunts back.

Notes 1. Despite his historicizing of the African-American gothic, Wright continues to reinforce an ahistorical reading of Poe. My discussion of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which places race at the center of Poe’s gothicism, shows how Poe dealt with the racial hauntings of his own culture. Contrary to Wright’s statement, Poe need not be resurrected to be imagined in terms of race, for its horrors had already invented him. 2. Historical studies such as Trudier Harris’s Exorcising Blackness, with its accounts of ritualized violence against African Americans, or Neil McMillen’s Dark Journey, with its description of “Negro Barbeques,” reveal the horrors of African-American history. McMillen recounts a public burning where a crowd of a thousand watched while whites tortured their black victims, “chopp[ing] off their fingers and ears, one by one, goug[ing] their eyes until they ‘hung by a shred from the socket,’ and pulled ‘big pieces of raw, quivering flesh’ from their bodies with corkscrews” (234); Trudier Harris gives similar accounts of lynching and mob violence. In his introduction to American Slavery as It Is, Theodore Weld also records a litany of real-life horrors: “We will prove that the slaves in the United States are treated with barbarous inhumanity . . . that they are frequently flogged with terrible severity, have red pepper rubbed into their lacerated flesh, and hot brine, spirits of turpentine, & c, poured over the gashes to increase the torture; that they are often stripped naked, their backs and limbs cut with knives, bruised and mangled by scores and hundreds of blows with the paddle, and terribly torn by the claws of cats, drawn over them by their tormentors. . . . All these things and more, and worse, we shall prove” (9). See Stephen Browne’s “‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is” for an analysis of the modes of representation Weld uses to prove these horrors. 3. Indeed, as Edmund Morgan has shown in American Slavery, American Freedom, the marriage of slavery and freedom is America’s central paradox: the rise of the American republic and its requisite myths depended on the terrifying realities of slavery (4).

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4. Other critics have also noted connections between slavery and the gothic. Robert Hemenway argues that slavery is “an extreme form of Gothic entrapment” (“Gothic Sociology,” 113) and Joseph Bodziock claims that the slave narrative incorporates “the fundamental forms and values of the European gothic” (“Richard Wright and Afro-American Gothic,” 29). In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Joan Dayan insists on the integral connection between the gothic and slavery. Reading the Black Codes as a gothic text, Dayan argues that the supernatural fictions of the Americas are rooted in the natural histories of slavery (193). 5. See Paulson’s “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution” and Henderson’s “An Embarrassing Subject: Problems of Value and Identity in the Early Gothic Novel.” 6. See Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations (145-47) for a discussion of the gothic discourse used in response to the revolution in St. Domingue. 7. The rhetoric of monstrosity that permeates descriptions of Turner’s insurrection exemplifies Joan Dayan’s theory that whites externalized images of their own power—the “bodily tortures and incarnate terrors necessary to sustain the institution of slavery”—by projecting them onto their victims (Haiti, History, and the Gods, 247). 8. The abolitionist’s identification with/as the victim of slavery’s horrors is a common trope. See Nudelman for a discussion of the abolitionist’s sympathetic identification with the slave and their “tales of suffering witnessed rather than suffering endured” (“Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” 948). In American Slavery as It Is, C. C. Robin gives the following testimony after recounting a whipping scene: The reader is moved; so am I: my agitated hand refuses to trace the bloody picture, to recount how many times the piercing cry of pain has interrupted my silent occupations; how many times I have shuddered at the faces of those barbarous masters, where I saw inscribed the number of victims sacrificed to their ferocity. (59) The reader’s and writer’s pain and horror here subsume the slave’s terror, which is further displaced since it is visible only in the face of the master. By rendering the slave as victim, this passage raises a corresponding problem: abolitionist discourse not only appropriated the victim’s position but also tended to picture the slave as the victim of the gothic prison of slavery, thereby denying the slave agency or resistance. 9. The slave narrative’s fictional characteristics have been examined by a number of critics, most notably William Andrews. No longer seen merely as transparent transcriptions of history, slave narratives have come to be read as sophisticated autobiographical acts. Andrews argues that the genre is a “scene of a complex discursive encounter” (To Tell a Free Story, 2); his “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative” examines the genre’s relation to fiction. Carla Peterson also discusses the gradual shift from autobiography to novel in nineteenth-century AfricanAmerican writing, arguing that the “autobiographical narrative already contained within it subversive fictional techniques” (“Capitalism, Black (Under)-

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10. In “Letters to His old Master” in the appendix to My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass further emphasizes that the gothic horrors of slavery are not imaginative renderings but actual events: The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their ghastly terror before me; the wails of millions pierce my heart and chill my blood. I remember the chain, the gag, the bloody whip; the death-like gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman; the appalling liability of his being torn away from wife and children, and sold like a beast in the market. Say not that this is a picture of fancy. You well know that I wear stripes on my back, inflicted by your direction. . . . All this, and more, you remember, and know to be perfectly true, not only of yourself, but of nearly all the slaveholders around you. (269) I will discuss Douglass’s use of gothic conventions while resisting their dematerializing effects at greater length in the body of this chapter, but it is crucial to note here how he refuses to reduce the gothic horrors of slavery to fancy. 11. This need to argue that the incredible facts of slavery are true also occurs in Weld’s American Slavery as It Is. Weld presents his documentary evidence in order to disprove the objection that “such cruelties are INCREDIBLE” (121). Arguing that the evidence is not the “exaggerations of fiction,” the text constantly reiterates that its statements, “incredible as [they] may seem” fall “short, very short of the truth” (61). 12. As many critics have noted, Douglass presents the reader with another common trope of slavery in this opening episode: the sexualized scene of whipping. Ronald Walters’s “The Erotic South” and The Antislavery Appeal argue that the antebellum discourse that gothicized slavery also eroticized it. Abolitionist discourse, he claims, pictured the evils of slavery in terms of corrupted femininity and the corrosive effects of unrestrained sexuality (The Antislavery Appeal, 111). Karen Halttunen takes this argument a step further by showing how the whipping scene eroticizes pain by turning the dreadful into the obscene, the sympathetic spectator into a sadistic voyeur (“Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture”). The sexual sensationalism of this scene has been criticized by several feminist critics including Franchot, “The Punishment of Esther”; McDowell, “In the First Place”; and Foster, “‘In Respect to Females.’” 13. Hortense Spillers argues that slavery is marked by its narrativity: slavery “remains one of the most textualized and discursive fields of practice that we could posit as a structure for attention” (“Changing the Letter,” 29). 14. As Gladys-Marie Fry shows in her study Night Riders in Black Folk History, the gothic has long been allied with reality in African-American history. During slavery and Reconstruction, the supernatural was used by

whites as a form of psychological control of African Americans. Whether it was a master designating haunted places or the Ku Klux Klan riding as ghosts through the night, the supernatural kept African Americans literally and figuratively in their place. African-American fear of the supernatural was based less on a belief in the master’s stage effects than on the institutionalized power that lay behind them (McWhiney and Simkins, “The Ghostly Legend of the Ku-Klux Klan”). As James Cameron points out in the compelling account of his own near-lynching in his memoir, A Time of Terror, African Americans grew up knowing that the hair-raising accounts of terror they heard were not figments of the imagination but daily realities. 15. Many of the reviewers of Beloved also seem uneasy affiliating Toni Morrison with the gothic: “To outline this story is to invite the very resistance I felt on first reading it,” writes one reviewer. “A specter returned to bedevil the living? A Gothic historical romance from Toni Morrison?” (Clemons, “The Ghosts of Sixty Million and More,” 74). Other reviewers use this seeming disjunction between serious writer and melodramatic form to attack Morrison. In his notorious review of the novel, Stanley Crouch uses a gothic metaphor to begin his assault: “the book’s beginning clanks out its themes” (“Aunt Medea,” 42). Carol Iannone claims Morrison’s use of the gothic marks her lack of seriousness: “The graphic descriptions of physical humiliation begin to grow sensationalistic, and the gradual unfolding of secret horror has an unmistakably Gothic dimension which soon comes to seem merely lurid, designed to arouse and entertain” (“Toni Morrison’s Career,” 63). All of these examples reveal how gothic has become a negative, demeaning term. Associated with the sensational, the formulaic, and the popular, the gothic is seen to lack seriousness of purpose and connection to actual experience. 16. This is perhaps the reason for the scant attention given to the African-American gothic within critical discourse. The work that has been done tends to focus on individual authors. For discussions of the AfricanAmerican gothic, see Joseph Bodziock, “Richard Wright and Afro-American Gothic”; Erik Curren, “Turning the Tables on the White Savage” and “Should Their Eyes Have Been Watching God?”; Louis Gross, Redefining the American Gothic; Theodore Gross, The Heroic Ideal in American Literature; Michel Fabré, “Black Cat and White Cat”; Robert Hemenway, “Gothic Sociology”; Keith Sandiford, “Gothic Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills”; Mary Sisney, “The Power and Horror of Whiteness”; and Geraldine Smith-Wright, “In Spite of the Klan.” 17. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy warns of the dangers inherent in any project that attempts to reconstruct the interplay of black and white literary traditions. Counseling against any “easy resolution” or “short-term rapprochement” between the traditions that glosses over the “substantial drama of conflict in intercultural literary engagements,” Rushdy argues that “we need to seek out the deeper meanings of conflicts in literary history and not forget that it is the social order of our nation, with its fundamental material inequities, that defines and determines the sites of contestation where those conflicts occur in our national literature” (“Reading Black, White, and Gray in 1968,” 63).

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Development, and the Production of the AfricanAmerican Novel in the 1850s,” 563). Also see Barbara Foley (“History, Fiction, and the Ground Between” and Telling the Truth) for an examination of the representational strategies nineteenth-century AfricanAmerican authors used to authenticate their writing.

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18. See Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’s Slave Narrative.” Yellin explains the confusion over Incidents’s literary status as follows: “It is no accident that many critics mistook Jacobs’s narrative for fiction. Its confessional account of sexual error and guilt, like the passages in which Linda Brent presents herself to be judged by her reader, link Incidents to a popular genre, the seduction novel” (Introduction to Incidents, xxix-xxx). The text’s relationship to fiction continues to be clarified. Jacqueline Goldsby and P. Gabrielle Foreman have both argued against reading Jacobs’s text in a purely factual way. Goldsby states that Incidents should be examined in terms of how “it engages and resists the closure implied by historical documentation” (“‘I Disguised My Hand’,” 15). Concerned with how the “implicit demands for referentiality” force critics to “interpret the principal script as if [Jacobs] had not loaded it with narrative explosions, with subversive scriptmines, so to speak,” Foreman critiques the “politics of transparency” that often informs readings of black women’s sentimental writing (“Manifest in Signs,” 77). 19. Because of its “novelization of her autobiographical voice,” as Claudia Tate describes it, Incidents is perhaps the slave narrative most often examined in terms of other literary traditions (Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 26). P. Gabrielle Foreman, for instance, argues that Incidents “defies easy generic categorization” and that it “blurs the parameters of fiction and slave narrative” (“The Spoken and the Silenced,” 315). Incidents, however, is usually discussed only in terms of the sentimental tradition. Views on Incidents’s connection to sentimentalism range from early studies like Annette Niemtzow’s, which argues that the “domestic novel swallows Linda Brent’s voice” (“The Problematic of Self in Autobiography,” 105), and Raymond Hedin’s, which claims that Jacobs does not act “against the grain of sentimental fiction” (“Strategies of Form in the American Slave Narrative,” 28), to more recent perspectives—Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood; Doherty, “Harriet Jacobs’ Narrative Strategies”; Doriani, “Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century America”; Nelson, The Word in Black and White; Nudelman, “Harriet Jacobs”; Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty; Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority; Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire; Walter, “Surviving in the Garret”; Yellin, Introduction to Incidents; and others—that argue that Jacobs appropriates, revises, and elaborates the sentimental tradition. For an extended discussion of the parallels between Incidents and the gothic, see Kari Winter’s Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change. 20. See Yellin (Introduction to Incidents, xviii-xix) and Hedrick (Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, 248-49) for a fuller account of Jacobs’s relationship to Stowe. 21. Jacobs’s use of the term “loophole of retreat” has most often been traced to William Cowper’s poem “The Task” (see Yellin’s note to Jacobs’s chapter title in Incidents, 277). I suggest that Jacobs is also referencing Stowe in her title. In “Carnival Laughter,” Anne Bradford Warner also points to the connections between Stowe’s and Jacobs’s texts. She argues that Brent’s crippling discomfort in her garret “cannot help but comment on the gothic romance and trickery of Cassy’s escape episode in Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (224). Warner develops this connection further in her conference paper “No Key to Cassy: Jacobs Revises Stowe.” While our arguments intersect in illuminating ways, Warner is concerned more with Jacobs’s discomfort with the

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gothic mode and her resistance to the gothic’s eroticization. Also see Phyllis Cole, “Stowe, Jacobs, Wilson,” for a more general discussion of how Jacobs rewrites Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 22. See Karen Halttunen’s “Gothic Imagination and Social Reform: The Haunted Houses of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe” for a study of the Stowe family’s use of the gothic in their various social critiques; and Diane Roberts’s The Myth of Aunt Jemima for a reading of Stowe’s use of the gothic in the novel. 23. The dual movement of Jacobs’s narrative, what Carla Peterson calls her “double discourse,” has been discussed in a variety of ways (“Capitalism, Black (Under)Development,” 565). See Braxton, “Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents”; Burnham, “Loopholes of Resistance”; and Foreman, “The Spoken and the Silenced” for readings of how the text uses concealment and revelation. 24. The narrative follows a typical female gothic plot. Jacobs, like so many earlier gothic and sentimental heroines, traces her initiation into a world of evil to the death of her mother. Only after the loss of this “shield” does she become self-conscious of her position as a slave: “When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave” (6). Jacobs is left even more vulnerable when at age twelve her mistress, who was “almost like a mother to [her],” also dies, leaving her without any protection from the sexual evils that accompany slavery (7). Jacobs’s dual initiation into the trials of slavery and maidenhood is made explicit in her relationship to her new master, Doctor Flint. Imprisoned in a plantation (read castle) that is cut off from the laws of the outside world, she finds herself at the mercy of a lascivious villain, her “persecutor,” Doctor Flint (35). She is saved in part, as she later remarks, by the proximity of the plantation to town and a surrogate protector, her grandmother: “If I had been on a remote plantation . . . I should not be a living woman at this day” (35). 25. See Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in African-American Narrative, for an extended discussion of the power of passivity in Incidents. 26. Mary Titus has a wonderful reading of the cotton gin: “The image encapsulates Jacobs’s argument, uniting in a single horrific image the slave, the verminous slaveholder who consumes him, and the central machine of the cotton economy” (“‘This Poisonous System’,” 203). 27. The clearest case of repetition is Jacobs’s description of her daughter Ellen. Not only does Ellen relive Brent’s plight when she has “vile language” poured into her ears by Mr. Thorne, but also, unlike her mother, she is defenseless against these words since she “scarcely knew her letters” (179, 166). Ellen’s position emphasizes Brent’s own powerlessness in the North. Unlike Stowe’s novel, which provides a happy ending for Cassy when she is magically reunited with both of her children, Jacobs’s text offers no such conclusion: Brent does not recognize her daughter when they are first reunited precisely because Ellen has deteriorated from neglect. It is through her daughter-double—who is more of a slave in the North, where her mother’s protection is ineffectual, than she ever was in the South, under her mother’s hidden protection—that Jacobs marks the North as the South’s double (165).

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29. This is not to say that silence is not an equally powerful weapon. Turning the tables and adapting the slave master’s tool, Jacobs, like many former slaves, used silence to protect those who helped her and to keep the master “in the dark.” See Valerie Smith, SelfDiscovery and Authority, and Braxton, “Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents” for further discussions of the gaps and silences in Jacobs’s text. 30. It is important to note that Child sentimentalized Jacob’s ending. As Bruce Mills points out in “Lydia Maria Child and the Endings to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Jacobs originally planned to end her narrative with a discussion of John Brown, which would have emphasized a gothic narrative of violent retribution. However, Child counseled her to end by focusing on her grandmother instead.

Works Cited Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans l’état de New-York. 3 vols. Paris: Maradan, 1801. ———. Sketches of Eighteenth Century America: More “Letters from an American Farmer”. Edited by Henri L. Bourdin, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Stanley T. Williams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925. ———. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. Edited by Albert E. Stone. New York: Penguin, 1986. ———. More Letters from the American Farmer. Edited by Dennis D. Moore. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Crouch, Stanley. “Aunt Medea.” The New Republic 197 (Oct. 19, 1987): 38-43. Cunliffe, Marcus. “Crèvecoeur Revisited.” Journal of American Studies 9 (1975): 129-44. Curren, Erik. “Turning the Tables on the White Savage: The African American Appropriation of Gothic Horror.” Paper presented at a conference on the American gothic, University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada, October 1994.

———. “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative.” PMLA 105 (1990): 23-34.

———. “Should Their Eyes Have Been Watching God?: Hurston’s Use of Religious Experience and Gothic Horror.” African-American Review 29 (1995): 17-25.

Barnes, Gilbert H. and Dwight L. Dumond, eds. Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké. Vol. 1, 1822-1844. New York: AppletonCentury, 1934.

Davis, Christina. “Interview with Toni Morrison.” Presence Africaine: Revue Culturelle du Monde Noir 145 (1988): 141-50.

Blassingame, John. “Critical Essays on Sources.” In The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. 1972; revised and enlarged edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Bodziock, Joseph. “Richard Wright and Afro-American Gothic.” In Richard Wright: Myths and Realities. Edited by C. James Trotman. New York: Garland, 1988.

Dayan, Joan. “Romance and Race.” In The Columbia History of the American Novel. Edited by Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. ———. “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies and Slaves.” American Literature 66 (1994): 239-73. ———. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Braxton, Joanne M. “Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: The Redefinition of the Slave Narrative Genre.” Massachusetts Review 27 (1986): 379-87.

Doherty, Thomas. “Harriet Jacobs’ Narrative Strategies: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Southern Literary Journal 19 (1986): 79-91.

Browne, Stephen. “‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 277-92.

Doriani, Beth Maclay. “Black Womanhood in NineteenthCentury America: Subversion and Self-Construction in Two Women’s Autobiographies.” American Quarterly 43 (1991): 199-222.

Burnham, Michelle. “Loopholes of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative and the Critique of Agency in Foucault.” Arizona Quarterly 49 (1993): 53-73. Cameron, James. A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story. Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 1994. Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. “The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989): 35-43. Child, Lydia Maria. “Stand from Under!” Massachusetts Daily Journal 24 Aug. 1829; reprint, The Liberator 28 Jan. 1832: 16. Clemons, Walter. “The Ghosts of Sixty Million and More.” Newsweek 110 (Sept. 28, 1987): 74-75. Cole, Phyllis. “Stowe, Jacobs, Wilson: White Plots and Black Counterplots.” In New Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Class in Society. Edited by Audrey T. McCluskey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Edited by Houston Baker. New York: Penguin, 1982. ———. My Bondage and My Freedom. Edited by William L. Andrews. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Fabré, Michel. “Black Cat and White Cat: Richard Wright’s Debt to Edgar Allan Poe.” Poe Studies 4 (1971): 17-19. Foley, Barbara. “History, Fiction, and the Ground Between: The Uses of the Documentary Mode in Black Literature.” PMLA 95 (1980): 389-403. ———. Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “The Spoken and the Silenced in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig.” Callaloo 13 (1990): 313-24. ———. “Manifest in Signs: The Politics of Sex and Representation in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” In Harriet

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28. Jacobs was keenly aware of the North’s complicity with slavery since her employer, Mr. Willis, was proslavery. See Yellin (Introduction to Incidents, xviii) for a discussion of Jacobs’s relationship to the Willises.

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Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Deborah M. Garfied and Rafia Zafar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Foster, Frances. “‘In Respect to Females’: Differences in the Portrayals of Women by Male and Female Narrators.” Black American Literature Forum 15 (1981): 66-70. Franchot, Jenny. “The Punishment of Esther: Frederick Douglass and the Construction of the Feminine.” In Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Edited by Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Fry, Gladys-Marie. Night Riders in Black Folk History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975. Garfield, Deborah M. “Earwitness: Female Abolitionism, Sexuality, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” In Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

McDowell, Deborah E. “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition.” In Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass. Edited by William L. Andrews. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. McWhiney, H. Grady and Francis B. Simkins. “The Ghostly Legend of the Ku-Klux Klan.” In Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of AfroAmerican Folklore. Edited by Alan Dundes. New York: Garland Publishing, 1981. Mills, Bruce. “Lydia Maria Child and the Endings to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” American Literature 64 (1992): 255-72. Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. ———. “Five Years of Terror.” U.S. News and World Report 103 (Oct. 19, 1987): 75.

Goldsby, Jacqueline. “‘I Disguised My Hand’: Writing Versions of the Truth in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and John Jacobs’s ‘A True Tale of Slavery.’” In Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989):1-34.

Gross, Louis. Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to The Day of the Dead. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989.

Nelson, Dana. The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature 1638-1867. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Gross, Theodore L. The Heroic Ideal in American Literature. New York: The Free Press, 1971.

Niemtzow, Annette. “The Problematic of Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative.” In The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Edited by John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner. Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1982.

Haltunnen, Karen. “Gothic Imagination and Social Reform: The Haunted House of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.” In New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Edited by Eric Sundquist. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———. “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture.” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 303-34.

———. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Nudelman, Franny. “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering.” English Literary History 59 (1992): 939-64. Paulson, Ronald. “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution.” ELH 48 (1981): 532-54.

Harris, Trudier. Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Peterson, Carla. “Capitalism, Black (Under)Development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s.” American Literary History 4 (1992): 559-83.

Hedin, Raymond. “Strategies of Form in the American Slave Narrative.” In The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Edited by John Sekora and Darwin. T. Turner. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Volume 1, The Imaginary Voyages. Edited by Burton R. Pollin. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

Hemenway, Robert. “Gothic Sociology: Charles Chesnutt and the Gothic Mode.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7 (1974): 101-19. Henderson, Andrea. “‘An Embarrassing Subject’: Problems of Value and Identity in the Early Gothic Novel.” In At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism. Edited by Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Waston. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Iannone, Carol. “Toni Morrison’s Career.” Commentary 84 (Dec. 1987): 59-63. Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

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Roberts, Diane. The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region. New York: Routledge, 1994. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Reading Black, White, and Gray in 1968: The Origins of the Contemporary Narrativity of Slavery.” In Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies. Edited by Henry B. Wonham. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Sandiford, Keith. “Gothic Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills.” In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah. New York: Amistad Press, 1993.

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Sisney, Mary F. “The Power and Horror of Whiteness: Wright and Ellison Respond to Poe.” College Language Association 29 (1985): 82-90. Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in AfricanAmerican Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Smith-Wright, Geraldine. “In Spite of the Klan: Ghosts in the Fiction of Black Women Writers.” In Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Spillers, Hortense J. “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly. Edited by Ann Douglas. New York: Penguin, 1986. ———. The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1987. ———. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Edited by Judie Newman. Halifax, England: Ryburn, 1992. Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Titus, Mary. “‘This Poisonous System’: Social Ills, Bodily Ills, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” In Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Tragle, Henry Irving. The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Walter, Krista. “Surviving in the Garret: Harriet Jacobs and the Critique of Sentiment.” American Transcendental Quarterly 8 (1994): 189-210. Walters, Ronald G. “The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism.” American Quarterly 25 (1973): 176-201. ———. The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Warner, Anne Bradford. “Carnival Laughter: Resistance in Incidents.” In Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “No Key to Cassy: Jacobs Rewrites Stowe.” Paper presented at the Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers in the Twenty-First Century Conference, Hartford, Connecticut, May 30-June 2, 1996. Weld, Theodore. American Slavery as It Is; Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. 1839. New York: Arno Press, 1968.

Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 17901865. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper and Row, 1940. Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Written By Herself: Harriet Jacobs’s Slave Narrative.” American Literature 53 (1981): 479-86. ———. “Text and Context of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself.” The Slave’s Narrative. Edited by Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. Introduction to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Young, Samuel. Tom Hanson, the Avenger. Pittsburgh: J. W. Cook, 1847. Ziff, Larzer, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

TERESA DERRICKSON (ESSAY DATE MARCH 2001) SOURCE: Derrickson, Teresa. “Race and the Gothic Monster: The Xenophobic Impulse of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Taming a Tartar.’” American Transcendental Quarterly 15, no. 1 (March 2001): 43-58. In the following essay, Derrickson examines Alcott’s sensationalist short story “Taming a Tartar,” and asserts that “[b]y tracing the careful way in which the ‘monstrous’ nemesis of the narrative’s triumphant protagonist embodies nineteenth-century fears of racial degradation, this essay opens up new meaning in Alcott’s work and underscores the infiltrating power of the Gothic impetus.”

In her study entitled Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Judith Halberstam concludes her rereading of the Gothic monster by implicating more than just the horror genre in the veiled construction of social prejudice. Warning against the hegemonic impulse that runs deep in areas we fail to consider, she writes, “the violence of representation does not always lie in bloody scenes of carnage or in images of monstrosity. [It] more often works through well-meaning and sincere humanist texts that feel compelled to make the human into some earnest composite of white, bourgeois, Christian heterosexuality” (188). Halberstam’s subtle injunction against a complacent reading of seemingly “innocent” texts offers a useful point of entry into a range of literary works, including the quasi-Gothic tales of one nineteenth-century writer whose social rhetoric appears morally unassailable: Louisa May Alcott. Hailed as the purveyor of “moral pap for the young” (qtd. in Falcon v), this unassuming author of Little Women seems a most unlikely dissemina-

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Sands, R. C. “Domestic Literature.” The Atlantic Magazine 1 (1824): 130-39.

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strains of “social violence” in one of Alcott’s newly recovered tales, “Taming a Tartar.” Far from attempting to rewrite the reputation of a wellrespected writer, my objective in this paper is to offer a reading of this story that confirms the cultural function of the Gothic as stipulated in the work of Halberstam.1 By tracing the careful way in which the “monstrous” nemesis of the narrative’s triumphant protagonist embodies nineteenth-century fears of racial degradation, this essay opens up new meaning in Alcott’s work and underscores the infiltrating power of the Gothic impetus.

Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914.

tor of harmful ideology. It is not just her renown as a children’s writer that positions her as such, but her personal politics as well. As Sarah Elbert indicates in her introduction to a compilation of Alcott’s stories, Alcott was not only a feminist at a time when female passivity was the hallmark of womanly virtue, but she was also a staunch abolitionist and a vocal proponent of racial integration. Her ethical resume and its prominent inscription in her narrative fiction have thus understandably discouraged critics from engaging in a more rigorous analysis of her creative work. The recent discovery of a collection of sensational stories published anonymously and pseudonymously in two nineteenth-century periodicals has done little to change that. Indeed, many of the preliminary readings of these “lost” Gothic thrillers have focused primarily on the stories’ subversive potential, praising their explicit privileging of female power and racial heterogeneity (Stern, Double Life; Stern, Feminist Alcott; Keyser; Klimasmith). The overall assessment of these stories as “politically groundbreaking” is hardly disputable. And yet as Halberstam suggests in the passage quoted above, even the most unlikely narratives participate in discursive strategies of social violence—including, above all, the Gothic genre. Such an assertion begs a rereading of Alcott’s sensational fiction, and thus it is with some justification that I undertake to illuminate the

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Judith Halberstam’s historical trajectory of the Gothic influence in nineteenth and twentiethcentury narrative leads her to theorize counter claims about the political underpinnings of this trivial and “popular” genre. Not only does she locate the Gothic as the nexus of all nineteenthcentury literature—thereby reversing historical hierarchies that privilege the primacy of realism (2)—but she does so by positing a fundamentally different interpretation of the Gothic monster. For Halberstam, monstrous beings serve to symbolize cultural configurations, not psychic configurations (116-17). Instead of mapping the latent psychology of its presumed human antagonist, the Gothic monster, according to Halberstam, embodies a discourse of power and domination that undergirds nineteenth-century attitudes towards variations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This discourse manifests itself in the presentation of stigmatized flesh—the presentation of skin that bears the odious markings of “aberrant” social subjects. Vilified because of the skin they wear— and given the skin they wear because they are to be vilified—, these monsters thus constitute a complex system of cultural coding, one in which their bodies ultimately signify a fear of identities whose “difference” proves imminently threatening: Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century specifically used the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender, and sexuality within narratives about the relation between subjectivities and certain bodies. . . . The monster functions as monster . . . when it is able to condense as many [of these] fear-producing traits as possible into one body. (6, 20)

While Halberstam illustrates this reading by analyzing representations of “conventional” Gothic monsters, she also allows for a more dynamic concept of the monstrous by defining monstrosity as something that disrupts conventions of normalcy: “In its typical form, the Gothic

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Monsters and the Gothic fiction that creates them are . . . narrative technologies that produce the perfect figure for negative identity. Monsters have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these novels make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual. (27)

Halberstam’s broadened definition of the Gothic monster as “impure” and “non-human” allows us to situate the domestic tyrant of Alcott’s “Taming a Tartar” within its meaningful parameters. Made terrible and menacing by the foreign blood (read “non-European” and non“EuroAmerican”) that colors his veins, Alcott’s antagonist assumes the skin of the nineteenthcentury Gothic monster, and in doing so both stabilizes and disrupts the ideologies of race and gender that undergird the text. “Taming a Tartar” is the first person narrative of a young British woman who quits her duties as a teacher to serve as a companion to an ailing Russian princess. Despite the pleasantries of her new employment, the protagonist, Sybil Varna, finds herself confronting challenges of an unrelated nature as she tries to determine how best to manage the notoriously explosive and tyrannical disposition of the princess’s halfbrother, Alexis. Through a series of violent domestic episodes, the two characters become locked in a virtual battle of the sexes, the strong-willed and virtuous Sybil vying for mastery over the family’s ruthless patriarch, and vice versa. Determined to “tame” Alexis into a gentle and civilized man, Sybil treats him with brutal indifference, even when—and especially when—events precipitate romantic feelings between the two. The story ends with the couple’s happy nuptials, but not before Sybil claims victory in conquering her “brave barbarian.” The most frequently cited reading of this thriller seizes upon the unconventionally explicit gender struggle between the two principal characters and concludes that the narrative’s political rhetoric speaks predominantly of female self-

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914)

Bierce’s literary reputation is based primarily on his short stories about the Civil War and the supernatural—a body of work that makes up a relatively small part of his total output. Often compared to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, these stories share an attraction to death in its more bizarre forms, featuring depictions of mental deterioration, uncanny, otherworldly manifestations, and expressions of the horror of existence in a meaningless universe. Like Poe, Bierce professed to be mainly concerned with the artistry of his work, yet critics find him more intent on conveying his misanthropy and pessimism. In his lifetime Bierce was famous as a California journalist dedicated to exposing the truth as he understood it, irrespective of whose reputations were harmed by his attacks. Bierce’s major fiction was collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893). Many of these stories are realistic depictions of the author’s experiences in the Civil War, but critics and Bierce himself noted that despite their realism his stories often fail to supply sufficient verisimilitude. Bierce’s most striking fictional effects depend on an adept manipulation of the reader viewpoint: a bloody battlefield seen through the eyes of a deaf child in “Chickamauga,” the deceptive escape dreamed by a man about to be hanged in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and the shifting perspectives of “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” Bierce’s narratives are characterized by a marked use of black humor, particularly in the ironic and hideous deaths his protagonists often suffer. The brutal satire Bierce employed in his journalism appears as plain brutality in his fiction, and critics have both condemned and praised his imagination, along with Poe’s, as among the most vicious and morbid in American literature. Bierce’s bare, economical style of supernatural horror is usually distinguished from the verbally lavish tales of Poe, and few critics rank Bierce as the equal of his predecessor.

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topos is the monstrous body a la Frankenstein, Dracula, Dorian Gray, Jekyll/Hyde; in its generic form, Gothic is the disruption of realism and of all generic purity” (11, emphasis added). Halberstam’s emphasis on “generic purity” as the antithesis of the monstrous—that is, as the primary quality against which all monsters take meaning— leads her to rearticulate the nineteenth-century Gothic monster as the objectified “other,” as the opposite of that which is pure, privileged, and in subject position:

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empowerment (Stern, Double Life; Stern, Feminist Alcott). While this interpretation is certainly valid, it in no way encompasses the full discursive import of the story. The title of the work makes this clear by subsuming issues of gender within issues of race—it is notably a “Tartar” to be tamed, not a man. We are thus made aware from the onset that there is much more to this tale than the exclusively feminist message critics have been quick to trumpet. Halberstam’s theory of the Gothic fills in much of what is unaccounted for in these interpretive gaps by allowing us to trace the racist discourse in this story and read such discourse as a “technology” that fixes Alexis as the monstrous Other. Before examining how this occurs, it is worth noting that Alcott indeed was writing during a time when the word “race” had already come to be constructed in its modern-day sense. As Colette Guillaumin has explained, “race” was originally a word used by the European aristocracy to refer to members of a privileged family line, a meaning that served an explicitly legal function and therefore was altogether devoid of genetic implications (33-57). By the early nineteenth century, however, the semantic field surrounding the word had changed considerably, and race” came to take on the biological assumptions that inform its meaning today (Guillaumin 55). The United States was not exempt from this new denotation. As Thomas Gossett observes in his book entitled Race: The History of an Idea in America, racist ideologies took hold in nineteenthcentury America as anthropologists and other social scientists heightened their search for measurable ways to classify peoples of different colors and origins (54-83). Their “definitive” conclusions made it appropriate and “natural” to associate behavioral characteristics with subsets of the population who were either visibly different from the white mainstream (e.g., “Negros” and “Indians”) or who hailed from different socio-political regions of the world (e.g., the Italians were thought to constitute their own race, as were the Germans and the French, etc.) (201). In short, as Gossett observes, “nineteenth[-]century [America] was obsessed with the idea that it was race which explained the character of peoples” (244). Despite her strong personal convictions against slavery and her “bold” fictional representations of interracial couples, Alcott herself certainly would have been influenced by nineteenthcentury racial theories. Her own father, for example, was a strong believer in the idea that temperament and character were a function of

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biology (Elbert xv-xvi). Alcott internalized this notion at least in part, interpreting her own dark complexion and dark features to signify that she herself was naturally inferior to her fair-skinned, younger sister, May (Elbert xvi). As Elbert concludes from this behavior, Alcott was indeed a product of her times in terms of how she conceptualized race: “Alcott’s notions of race were shaped by daily family interactions as surely as they were by the larger cultural discourses” (xvi). These discourses surface immediately in Alcott’s “Taming a Tartar.” Within the first few pages of the story, for example, we learn from Sybil’s confidant that Russians “are but savages,” an uncivilized people whose status as “barbarians” cannot be changed by “all their money, splendor, and the polish [of] Paris” (198). This characterization applies even more so to Alexis, whose fullblooded Russian make-up earns him a more infamous description: Paris is wild for him, as for some magnificent savage beast. Madame la Comtesse Millefleur declared that she never knew whether he would fall at her feet, or annihilate her, so impetuous were his moods. At one moment showing all the complaisance and elegance of a born Parisian, the next terrifying the beholders by some outburst of savage wrath, some betrayal of the Tartar blood that is in him. Ah! it is incredible how such things amaze one. (199)

Several aspects of this passage are significant in revealing the precise characterization of Alexis’ “monstrosity.” His depiction as a “savage beast,” a “terrifying” creature given to “outbursts of savage wrath” situates him well within the realm of both the hostile and the “nonhuman,” which are equated here as one. The reactions of the Parisian onlookers confirm his status as such, betraying a patronizing fascination for the marked strangeness of one so ostensibly unlike themselves. The most significant aspect of this description, however, comes in the final claim of the narrative in which the speaker instinctively pronounces Alexis’ behavior to be “some betrayal of the Tartar blood that is in him.” In making such an assertion, Sybil’s confidant parrots the racial prejudice of her day, conflating the distinction between the prince’s debased behavior and his race, and thereby contributing to a more global discourse that connects blood, depravity, and ethnic essentialism with western racial domination. Foucault’s theory of sexuality supports this reading by indicating that blood defined the battleground in which Victorian England carried out and rendered justifiable its eugenic and

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. . . [A]s the nation expanded to become an empire, as Englishmen left the country to go to the colonies, and as a flood of immigrants entered England from Eastern Europe and Russia, national identity came increasingly to depend upon race rather than place. . . . As racethinking gave way to full-fledged racism towards the turn of the century, the body became the setting for a drama of blood. (80, 78)

This “drama of blood” plays itself out, Halberstam continues to argue, not only in historical accounts, but in the narrative fiction of Victorian literature as well, where the symbolics of blood and the political rhetoric informing it become fully inscribed in the Gothic text: “The reemergence of Gothic monstrosity at the end of the century coincides suggestively with the Gothic interdisciplinary interest in the racial body; indeed, by the turn of the century, the Gothic horror novel . . . became a privileged site in the representations of potential dangers of racial decline” (79). By linking Gothic monstrosity with “racial bodies” and the “dangers of racial decline,” Halberstam throws new light on the political rhetoric of Alcott’s work and renders all the more meaningful those passages that serve to underscore Alexis’ monstrous difference. That such difference is in fact inextricably connected to race is made explicit not only in the opening passages previously quoted, but in numerous other places in the story as well. Indeed, racial blood imbues this text, coloring its characters in ways that paint clear demarcations between those of moral rectitude and those of moral depravity, those intrinsically civil and those hopelessly rapacious. Such is the case with respect to the two main characters in particular, whose physical descriptions turn on a telling of blood that instructs us not only in the respective natures of their persons but also in how we are to respond to them. Sybil’s self-description reads, in part, “The long mirror showed me a slender, wellmolded figure, and a pale face—not beautiful, but expressive, for the sharply cut, somewhat haughty

features betrayed good blood, spirit and strength” (200). In contrast, the prince bears a different though somewhat parallel description: The costume suited the face; swarthy, black-eyed, scarlet-lipped, heavy-browed and beardless, except a thick mustache. . . . A strange face, for even in repose the indescribable difference of race was visible; the contour of the head, molding of features, hue of hair and skin, even the attitude, all betrayed a trace of the savage strength and spirit of one in whose veins flowed the blood of men reared in tents, and born to lead wild lives in a wild land. (201)

Of particular note in these two portraits is the collapsed distinction between inside and outside: that which is beneath the surface of the skin appears visible on/in the skin itself so that blood and skin become both signifiers and signifieds of each other and racial identity is made manifest— literally embodied—in each person. Sybil’s “good blood,” for example, betrays her “pale face”—and vice versa—in the same way that Alexis’ “swarthy” face and “[dark] hue of hair and skin” betray his own foreign heritage. That his race, however, is inferior to hers is expressed in the phrase “good blood,” a rhetorical strategy that connects Sybil’s western-European descent with “goodness” and racial superiority, and therefore, by contrast, Alexis’ eastern-European descent with the undesirable inverse. Although not explicitly expressed in this passage, Alexis’ blood does indeed account for an aspect that renders him monstrous. Alcott’s use of the word “indescribable” in detailing his portrait connects him to a legacy of Gothic antagonists (e.g., Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde) whose monstrosity lies in their inscrutable physicality and in their “terrible” race. Alexis is constructed as essentially threatening in other ways as well, perhaps most succinctly through the description of his sister, a woman whose gentle and refined behavior contrasts so drastically with the violent disposition of her brother that Madame Bayard is forced to explain, “[the princess] is not of the same blood. She is a half-sister; her mother was a Frenchwoman” (199). In this instance, not only is blood again connected to outward behavior (i.e., the princess’s controlled countenance is accounted for by her French heritage), but pure foreign blood is implicitly connected to human degeneracy. No other motif in the story constructs Alexis as so monstrously “other” than this very suggestion that he is inhuman. A series of figures in the text defines him as such, including, perhaps most powerfully, Sybil’s careful painting of his likeness,

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imperialist projects: “Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth-century, the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its entire historical weight toward revitalizing the type of political power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality” (Foucault 149). Just as Foucault argues in this passage that a “thematics of blood” was invoked to justify technologies of sexuality and the regimes of power they served, so too does Halberstam argue that blood functioned as a rhetorical device for reaffirming British “superiority”:

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a painting that features his dress in painstaking detail but exhibits a “blank spot where his . . . face should have been” (220). Though we are told that she will complete the picture in time, the temporary omission of his head is nevertheless visually symbolic of the human element that he is so explicitly denied. Other places in the text underscore this point. Madame Bayard’s initial description of the prince, for example, details him as a “magnificent savage beast” (199), a phrase that places an emphasis on his distinctly animallike character. Her term is not only repeated verbatim elsewhere in the story (212), but it is also one that is widely expressed metaphorically as well, such as in Sybil’s observation that Alexis is a “handsome savage [that] chafe[s] and fret[s] behind the bars of civilized society” (222) not unlike a caged animal, and in the episode in which the prince manhandles a pair of wild horses with an ease that betrays his own bestial impulse (225). Alexis’ explicit construction as animal-like thus dominates the racial discourse that subtends his monstrosity. Not unlike the fearful doubling of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Alcott’s Russian prince plays host to a negative, animalistic identity that erupts intermittently, exposing the feral blood of his ancestry and thus giving reason for his own truculence. The explosive scene in which Sybil tries to prevent the prince from whipping his dog illustrates this darker aspect: The prince followed, whip in hand, evidently in one of the fits of passion which terrified the household. I had seen many demonstrations of wrath, but never anything like that, for he seemed literally beside himself. Pale as death, with eyes full of savage fire, teeth set, and hair bristling like that of an enraged animal, he stood fiercely glaring at me. . . . I saw he was on the point of losing all control of himself. . . . (209)

In this passage, Alexis’ skin, eyes, teeth, and hair betray his transformation into the Gothic monster of so much Victorian fiction. Of particular note here is the physical aspect of his altered state, the fact that his madness marks itself upon the body in a way that once again reinforces the connection between “aberrant” race and spiritual malevolence. Alcott later writes, for example, that as Sybil tries to reason with him, “[the prince’s] black brow lowered, and the thunderbolt veins on his forehead darkened again with the angry blood, not yet restored to quietude” (211). In this instance, the reference to “angry blood” makes explicit the cause of Alexis’ transformation and therefore condemns him with the suggestion that this “evil side” constitutes his natural essence, an

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essence that can be temporarily controlled by civilizing forces on the outside, but never fully contained. The conclusion of the episode makes this clear by indicating that the becalmed Alexis has no memory of what has occurred. According to the text, he “shiver[s] as if recovering from a swoon” and then demands of Sybil, “Did I strike you?” (210). His monstrous state is thus characterized by a complete loss of control, a complete usurpation of his rational, human-like qualities. The princess informs us of this fact of his nature in a later passage in which she explains to Sybil, “When in these mad fits he knows not what he does; he killed a man once, a servant, who angered him, struck him dead with a blow. He suffered much remorse, and for a long time was an angel; but the wild blood cannot be controlled, and he is the victim of his passion” (213). The assertion in this excerpt that “the wild blood cannot be controlled” and that “he knows not what he does” renders Alexis, much like his British Gothic corollaries, a sympathetic but ultimately unredeemable character. Such is the paradox that governs his own construction as a monster, for unlike his more infamous colleagues, his foreign blood neither destroys him nor casts him out of society. Instead, he is allowed to live, but only after a series of choreographed incidents in which he is wounded with a bullet and made to spill his Tartar blood. Race thus never ceases to be an issue in this monster’s fate, for at the same time that Alexis is praised for a new moral fortitude emboldened by love, his body is figuratively transformed through more brutal means, bleeding him of the mark of race, the mark of biological degeneracy that situated him as morally corrupt to begin with. It is this corporeal reconfiguration that qualifies as the most formidable prerequisite in ultimately fashioning him as a “new being” (245). Only in this “refined” condition is he able to engage in a union with his English nemesis, Sybil. The text thus ends on a decidedly dubious note. Alexis is saved, but only under conditions that ultimately re-inscribe his Russian depravity. A reading of this tale through Halberstam’s reconceptualization of Gothic monstrosity thus complicates the political meaning of the work. Just as the text is ambiguous as to how race is finally treated (is Alexis’ recuperation ultimately xenophobic or not?), the text is equally indeterminate as to its statement on women. A strictly feminist interpretation of the story—particularly those of the brand suggested in preliminary discussions of Alcott’s sensational thrillers—becomes problem-

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In order to examine how this reading might occur, it is necessary to reconsider the ways in which this story operates as a tale of female empowerment. One argument can be stated quite succinctly by situating this text within Kate Ellis’s subgenre of the female Gothic. According to Ellis, women’s Gothic comprises a set of conventions in which “the heroine exposes the villain’s usurpation [of the home] and thus reclaims an enclosed space that should have been a refuge from evil but has become the very opposite, a prison” (xiii). That Alcott’s text dramatizes this very theme is patently evident. Alexis’ despotic rule over the home turns the domestic sphere into a place of terror, a place that threatens the safety of women not from without, but from within. Sybil’s ultimate triumph over his tyranny not only disrupts ideological conceptions of nineteenth-century womanhood—indeed the last line of the story has the protagonist asserting that she will “Not obey” her new husband (252)—but it also situates this text, as Ellis would argue, as a “site of female resistance,” a site that subverts male power by implicitly attacking the Victorian arrangement whereby men seek to confine women to the supposedly “safe haven” of the home (xvi). Although this interpretation is certainly valid, Alcott’s text can also be read from a different perspective, one in which the narrative is viewed not as a groundbreaking work at all, but as a story that upholds the status quo, reinforcing nineteenth-century power paradigms and the ideologies on which they are based. Treating this work as a discursive strategy that concentrates western racism in the monstrous “other” allows us to see this alternative meaning. In short, Sybil’s attempts to subdue, control, and “tame” the wild aspect of Alexis’ racial blood betray her collusion in regimes of power that work to “subdue” her own area of influence as well. Ellis’s Contested Castle offers a point of entry for this reading. In her study, Ellis argues that the increased productivity of the industrial revolution and the increased corruption of middle-class morality it invariably gave rise to called for a new definition of womanhood. This definition enacted a type of “unsupervised control” over women by restricting “the weaker sex” to spaces within the

home and charging them with the responsibility of serving as the moral and spiritual guardians of a society on the edge of ruin (3-19). By fixing women’s role as the nation’s spiritual redeemer, nineteenth-century England solved one important problem. As Ellis writes, “If women focus[ed] all their attention on ameliorating the lot of those with whom they are in contact, . . . then the dangerous consequences of their freedom from physical or gainful labor w[ould] not appear” (1213). Sybil Varna performs this role precisely as it has been scripted for her, concentrating her efforts throughout the text on “ameliorating the lot” of Alexis’ debased nature. No passage makes this more explicit than Alexis’ own supplication for moral guidance. Reacting to Sybil’s critique of him as a “tyrant” and a “madman,” the prince meekly pleads, “One dares to tell me [of my faults], and I thank her. Will she then add to the obligation by teaching me to cure them? . . . Sybil, you can help me; you possess a courage and power to tame my wild temper, my headstrong will. In heaven’s name I ask you to do it, that I may be worthy of a good woman’s love” (242). This passage constructs Sybil as a paragon of Victorian femininity. Not only does it infuse her with the “power and courage” associated with women’s moralizing function, but its explicit invocation of “heaven” imbues such function with divine sanction and makes Alexis’ “conversion”—and thus Sybil’s own role as a moralizing influence—all the more imperative. That Sybil does in fact assume such a role is reflected in two later incidents in which her intervention in one of Alexis’ outbursts earns her the following praise from the servant who was spared: “[I]t is you I thank, good angel of the house” (246). Alexis makes a similar comment only pages later, addressing Sybil with the parting words, “Always our good angel. Adieu, Sybil. I submit” (250). Both references to Sybil as the Victorian “angel of the house” make explicit her interpolation in ideologies that construct her according to the will of white patriarchy. Nina Auerbach’s discussion of the iconoclastic power of “woman as angel” in Victorian society suggests some of the strictures that her construction as such imposes: [T]he Victorian angel in the house seems a bizarre object of worship, both in her virtuous femininity and its inherent limitations—she can exist only within families, when masculine angels can exist elsewhere—and in the immobilization the phrase suggests. In contrast to her swooping ancestors, the angel in the house is a violent paradox with

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atic not only because it fails to account for the racial discourse that pervades the narrative, but because it also fails to account for the possibility that the same racial discourse might minimize the subversive potential of the story’s otherwise blatant critique of women’s role in Victorian society.

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overtones of benediction and captivity. Angelic motion had once known no boundaries; the Victorian angel is defined by her boundaries. (71-72)

Auerbach’s emphasis on the Victorian angel’s sphere as one characterized by “limitation,” “immobilization,” and “captivity” speaks powerfully against a reading of this text that would attempt to stabilize meaning in the seemingly subversive potential of the story’s emboldened heroine. Halberstam’s conception of Gothic monstrosity makes this more explicit by recasting Alcott’s Russian prince not as a mere man of tyrannical impulse, but as a racial body that concentrates fears of foreign infiltration in the “wild blood” of his “deviant” ancestry. By reading Alexis as the embodiment of nineteenth-century xenophobic discourse, we can in turn see Sybil’s role as the conquering “angel of the house” in a completely different light. Her efforts, for example, to see the prince “thoroughly subdued” (244) cause us to focus not on the power that this woman so ostensibly commands, but on the machinery of white male control that lurks visibly beneath her moralizing influence. For if the impulse to civilize is so inextricably connected to a symbolics of blood, then the execution of that civilizing gesture becomes an act of patriarchy, an act that reinstates both the cage in which Alexis “chafes and frets” as well as the “cage” in which the angel of the house does the same. It is thus not without considerable significance that the final scene of the narrative has Sybil boasting to Alexis, “Come with me to England, that I may show my countrymen the brave barbarian I have tamed” (252). Sybil’s expressed desire to showcase her handiwork to an audience that all but requisitioned it to begin with could hardly be made more distinct, nor could the corresponding suggestion that her actions play right into the hands of the same men who keep her appropriately “subdued” as well. Sybil’s civilizing influence over Alexis thus renders her an instrument of white male power—a co-conspirator, if you will, of institutional forces that subjugate women. Lora Romero confirms this reading in her study on the politics of antebellum domesticity, observing that “Although thinking of women as the living gospel for men gives women a certain authority, it also defines them in terms of men’s needs . . . threaten[ing] to reduce women to little more than vessels for male salvation” (22). Sybil dutifully functions as this “vessel for male salvation,” and yet her behavior as such only complicates critical readings of Alcott’s story as a feminist text; it does not dismiss them. Indeed

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as Romero points out, nineteenth-century domestic fiction rarely lends itself to a single statement about the proper role of women in the home. On the contrary, such works routinely express both a genuine resistance to domestic ideologies at the same time that they reinstate those ideologies through other dynamics in the text (19-24). Such is the case in Alcott’s story, for it is more than evident that while Sybil may indeed reinforce structures of power that ultimately fashion her as a mere “vessel for male salvation,” she is also, undeniably, an extremely strong female character, one whose independence and whose considerable command in controlling her own affairs pose a challenge to patriarchal conceptions of womanhood. This fact is made evident through the striking juxtaposition that occurs between Sybil and the only other principal female character in the text: Alexis’ sister, the princess. The princess is defined not only by her fragile constitution, but also by her persistent dependence on others. Her confinement within the home speaks convincingly of the impotence that characterizes her pathetic existence. As Sybil herself comments about the girl upon first meeting her, “[she] was one of the clinging, confiding women who must lean on some one[;] I soon felt that protective fondness which one cannot help feeling for the weak, the sick, and the unhappy” (206). Sybil is the virtual antithesis of this portrait of female passivity. Far from being “clingy” and “weak,” Alcott’s protagonist is described to us as “fond of experiences and adventures, self-reliant and self-possessed” (199-200). Most notably, however, Sybil commands a strength of character that allows her to confront the abusive Alexis at times when all others cower and capitulate. Such a quality is by far the outstanding feature of her person and one readily highlighted in several places throughout the text. The much weaker princess, for example, often enlists Sybil to fight her battles with her brother for her, the younger woman understanding that “[Sybil] can plead for me as I cannot plead for myself” (208). Other characters also depend on Sybil’s advocacy to shield them from Alexis’ wrath. In a previously noted incident, even the family dog, suffering the blows of his master’s boot for disobeying a command, is rescued by Sybil’s assertive and timely interference. In this specific case, however, Sybil is not satisfied simply to interrupt the injustice she sees, but instead, in an unusual act of female selfassertion, she demands that Alexis not only cease his brutal behavior but also yield his will to hers by admitting his wrongdoing. As Sybil reveals to

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As this passage suggests, Sybil is indeed unwilling to assume the role of the “weaker” sex. On the contrary, she admittedly seeks to usurp the power of the master of the house and to “conquer his will” for her own gain. This same motive is apparent in a much later exchange between two rivals, one in which Sybil demands to be allowed to leave Alexis’ country estate and return to St. Petersburg without him. As she so emphatically demands, “I wish to be free. You have promised to obey; yield your will to mine and let me go” (247). Like the previous passage, the assertion in this excerpt is a direct assault on the traditional patriarchal arrangement of domestic power. Sybil not only calls for a new kind of domesticity, one in which she will be allowed to come and go as she pleases (i.e., “to be free,” as she says), but she also insists on a radically new relationship between herself and her male “superior,” demanding that the latter obediently subordinate his own interests to hers—his own interests, that is, to those of a woman. Both of these scenes thus express a new vision for female selfhood. It is this vision and its ultimate realization by the end of the story that scholars have seized upon to characterize Alcott’s work as progressively feminist. Halberstam’s theory of the Gothic does not unsettle this reading; however, it does complicate it in important ways. Specifically, her argument that the Gothic tradition is rooted in a discourse that asserts the seeming primacy of white, European peoples makes visible the politics of racism that underwrite the kind of feminist power explicit in Alcott’s text. The anti-patriarchal impulse of this story is inextricably connected to—and in fact supported by—its much more subtle yet equally significant racist impulse. Again Romero offers support for this reading, this time by observing that dynamics of gender and dynamics of race can cross in ways that produce unexpected results in terms of their collective effect on dominant ways of thinking (i.e., whether they subvert or reinforce that thinking). Gender and race are, she maintains, “competing and intersecting determinates of ideological subscription/transcendence” (19). The implications of this fact for Alcott’s work is that the story’s feminist inclinations do not preclude the possibility that the story might also support less-than-progressive views on other is-

sues—views, for example, that reinstate racial stereotypes and racial bigotry. My argument here is that this possibility approximates the microdynamics at play in Alcott’s work: that is, the feminist discourse of Alcott’s “Taming a Tartar” is deeply implicated in the racist discourse that constructs Alexis as the depraved Other. This complex intersection of competing interests is easily traced in scenes where Sybil asserts her will over Alexis’. In all such incidents, the struggle for power that occurs is explicitly written as one that involves not only a woman pitted against a man, but also a person of “good blood” pitted against a person of “bad blood.” This latter fact is significant, for Sybil’s triumph in these scenes is one that necessarily reaffirms the notion that Alexis is by nature—by virtue of his biology— morally inferior. Such a result would not be the outcome if the story did not make an issue of Alexis’ race in the way that it so carefully does. That is, the form of racism associated with these scenes does not precipitate from the mere fact that Sybil is European while Alexis is not. Instead, it precipitates from the text’s own rhetoric, which repeatedly reminds the reader that Alexis’ tyrannical behavior is grounded in his racial makeup and that Alexis’ reluctant but eventual submission is an appropriate affirmation of Sybil’s inherently superior “bloodline.” The gains Sybil realizes as a woman are therefore achieved at the expense of Alexis’ dignity as a human being: each gesture of selfhood on her part serves to underscore or remind us of the “inhuman” nature of his fiendish character. The eventual union of the two rivals does little to change this dynamic, for even their courtship is encoded with subtleties that reaffirm the racial politics so apparent in the first part of the text. Of particular note is the way in which Sybil repeatedly “apologizes” for her new affections for Alexis. Rather than openly confessing that her feelings for him are wellfounded and justifiable, Alcott’s protagonist makes veiled excuses to the reader for this unexpected preference, insinuating that her partiality is either the product of a fluke, irrational impulse that is undeniably negative in nature, or that such partiality is not genuine at all and is simply part of an act of charity that must be dutifully carried out. Sybil is “forced” to confess, for example, that she misses the prince when he is away (223, emphasis added). We are also informed that her heart is “rebellious” for harboring presumably unwelcome and impermissible feelings for him (233). And finally, we learn that her eventual marriage to him is not at all an act of deliberate

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us, “I was bent on having my own way and making him submit as a penance for his . . . menace. Once conquer his will, in no matter how slight a degree, and I had gained a power possessed by no other person” (211).

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choice, but a forced concession made to a dying man: “While life and death still fought for [Alexis], I yielded to his prayer to become his wife. . . . In my remorse I would have granted anything . . .” (251). What is significant about these instances is that they effectively reinforce the social stigma associated with Alexis’ foreign heritage by suggesting that no proper woman in her right mind would marry a man of such dubious racial ancestry without being coerced. And so while the final pages of the story appear to deliver a surprising reversal in terms of how we are to respond to Alexis as a character, the micropolitics of the text would suggest something quite different. Halberstam’s theory of the Gothic ultimately allows us to see this disparity. By reading the Gothic monster as a social construct that voices anxiety over racial infiltration and racial “decline,” we are able to unveil the racist ideologies that undergird the systems of power operating in the work—systems of power that vilify and dehumanize signs of genetic and national difference, and systems of power that work to assert a more meaningful role for women within the home. The irony implicit in this final reading is that Alcott does indeed go out of her way to make a very specific statement against racism in her work. The last page of her story focuses not on the marriage of the two major characters but on Sybil’s insistence that her new husband free the serfs who labor “through force [and] fear” on his property (252). This seemingly trivial exchange says far more than it appears to on the surface, for it functions as a clear indictment of slavery, an indictment of an institution that justifies itself on the false belief that peoples of different colors and different geographic regions are not only inferior to those of English descent, but essentially subhuman as well. It is a troubling testament to the power of nineteenth-century racist ideology that Alcott fails to see how carefully she reinstates racist thinking on the one hand while ostensibly repudiating it on the other. Part of the function of the Gothic monster is that it makes visible this incongruity and in doing so belies interpretations of Alcott’s story that would rest on the easy assumption that the work is a simple tale of romance with little or no political import.

Note 1. Certainly one might question why I have chosen to read Alcott’s work through the lens of a theoretical perspective associated with a British Gothic model as opposed to an American Gothic model. First of all, my reason for doing so is not to elide important dif-

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ferences between British and American Gothic traditions, but rather to insist that there exists a racial dimension to the American Gothic that has been largely overlooked and merits closer attention. Halberstam’s theory—whether formulated for a British literary tradition or not—is particularly useful in awakening us to that notion. Second of all, it bears pointing out that other theorists do indeed define the American Gothic in terms of the same racial underpinnings Halberstam’s theory seizes upon. Teresa Goddu makes the assertion, for example, that the fundamental “darkness” of the American Gothic genre is located in its “racial roots”: “the American Gothic is haunted by race,” she maintains (7). Eric Savoy repeats this argument in his own claim that the American Gothic makes visible the vilified being that American dominant culture cannot accept: “the entire tradition of American Gothic can be conceptualized as the attempt to invoke . . . the specter of Otherness that haunts the house of national narrative” (14). Both Goddu and Savoy make clear the fact that my use of Halberstam in reading an American text does not foist upon that text an incommensurate theory, reading, or model. On the contrary, it would appear as if Halberstam simply allows us to further explore that which other scholars have already confirmed to be an integral part of this American subgenre.

Works Cited Alcott, Louisa May. “Taming a Tartar.” A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, 1988. 198-252. Auerbach, Nina. Women and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Elbert, Sarah. Introduction. Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery. By Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Sarah Elbert. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1997. ix-lx. Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989. Falcon, Jo. Introduction. A Modern Mephistopheles. By Louisa May Alcott. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995. v-viii. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978. Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1963. Guillaumin, Colette. Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. New York: Routledge, 1995. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. Introduction. Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Elizabeth Lennox Keyser. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1993. xixix. Klimasmith, Betsy. “Slave, Master, Mistress, Slave: Genre and Interracial Desire in Louisa May Alcott’s Fiction.” ATQ (American Transcendental Quarterly) 11 (1997): 11535.

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Savoy, Eric. Introduction. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1998. 3-19. Stern, Madeleine B. Introduction. A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. By Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, 1988.128. ———. Introduction. The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman’s Power. By Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. vii-xxiii.

ANNE K. MELLOR (ESSAY DATE JUNE 2002) SOURCE: Mellor, Anne K. “Interracial Sexual Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.” European Romantic Review 13, no. 2 (June 2002): 169-73. In the following essay, Mellor demonstrates how Charlotte Dacre’s use of Gothic conventions enabled her to illuminate the traditionally taboo sexual relationship between a white woman and a black man in her novel Zofloya.

The genre of the Gothic has long enabled both its practitioners and its readers to explore subjective desires and identities that are otherwise repressed, denied or forbidden by the culture at large. As David Punter trenchantly characterized the Gothic genre in The Literature of Terror, it is centrally concerned with paranoia, the taboo, and the barbaric, a barbaric that nonetheless returns as the unheimlich, the uncanny, what is most familiar yet most disturbing. The array of culturally repressed subjectivities at the end of the eighteenth century in England, at a time of lip-service to Enlightenment rationality, of a political paranoia fuelled by the Terror in France, and of the increasing dominance of a bourgeois domesticity, is of course enormous. Here I wish to think about the way in which one Gothic novel enables us to explore what was perhaps the most taboo of all human sexual desires in Romantic-era England, the passionate, even uncontrollable, sexual desire of a beautiful white woman for the black male body. The widespread dissemination of abolitionist poems, stories, tracts and autobiographies which insisted not only upon universal human rights, but upon the sympathetic brotherhood and sisterhood of white and black peoples, raised the possibility of interracial sexual alliances and even marriages. Most of the texts which overtly represented such interracial alliances confined themselves to legitimating a white male desire for the black female body. They depended on the already widespread cultural practice in the British West

Indies of sexual liaisons between white male slaveowners and their black female slaves. Several plays performed on the London stage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century rewrote this cultural practice in the genre of romance, presenting positive portrayals of the love of a white man for a black woman. In George Colman the Younger’s version of Inkle and Yarico performed in 1787, for instance, the white English gentleman Inkle finally forswears his inheritance in order to marry the black African princess Yarico, while his white man-servant Trudge also marries Yarico’s black female attendant, Wowski. A few plays and novels reversed this pattern to legitimate the sexual desire of a black man for a white woman. In James Powell’s comic pantomime, Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro, performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1807, the black Harlequin finally manages to marry his beloved Columbine, the white daughter of a Jamaican planter. More radical was J. Ferriar’s revision of Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, titled The Prince of Angola, performed in Manchester in 1788. Here Oroonoko has already married the white daughter of the European “stranger” who visited his father’s court in Angola, taught him warfare, and died in battle in his arms. As Oroonoko recalls his courtship of the white Imoinda, echoing Shakespeare’s Othello, . . . I presented her With all the spoils of battle to atone Her father’s ghost. But when I saw her face, And heard her speak, I offer’d up myself To be the sacrifice. She bow’d and blush’d; I wonder’d and ador’d. The sacred power That had subdued me, then inspir’d my tongue, Inclin’d her heart, and all our talk was love. I married her: And tho’ my country’s custom Indulg’d the privilege of many wives, I swore myself never to know but her. She grew with child and I grew happier still. (Ferriar 13-14)

In Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda, published in 1801, the black freed slave Juba, a servant of Belinda’s suitor, Mr. Vincent, marries the white farmer’s daughter Lucy—although the public dismay at this interracial marriage forced Edgeworth in the third, 1810, edition of Belinda to marry Lucy instead to her second love, the white James Jackson (1801:243; 1810:234). And Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography reminds us that a black man could legitimately marry a white woman in England—in April 1792, Gustavus Vassa married the Englishwoman Susanah Cullen (Equiano 235, 305n674). But all these texts focus on the sexual desires of males, either of a white male for a black female

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Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

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or a black male for a white female. None tell the story from the position of a female subjectivity. More to the point, the very possibility that a white female might sexually prefer the black male body to the white male body was one that British culture in the late eighteenth century either denied or abhorred. Significantly, Edgeworth’s Lucy has to overcome an initial fear of Juba’s black face (1801: 244) before she can learn to love him. And Ferriar’s white Imoinda has been raised since infancy among the black peoples of Angola; she had never seen a white man other than her father when she married Oroonoko (Ferriar 13). Far more characteristic of the public discourse on interracial mating in the Romantic era was a horrified disgust. Typical of this racial phobia is Matthew Lewis’ poem “Isle of the Devils”, published in his Journal of a West India Proprietor in 1834, in which he can imagine the desire of a black man for a white woman only as a brutal rape, a rape which twice impregnates the chaste Irza and finally leads her to abandon her children, however reluctantly in the case of her fair-skinned (as opposed to her dark-skinned) son. More vitriolic, and perhaps most indicative of the culture’s racial paranoia concerning miscegenation, or what they called assimilation, is Edward Long’s outburst in his Candid Reflections . . . on what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause, by a Planter, published in 1772. Long first laments that escaped male slaves in England frequently intermarry with white servant-women, “but when the prospect of an easy subsistence fails, they make no scruple to abandon their new wife and mulatto progeny to the care of the parish, and betake themselves to the colony, where they are sure, at least, of not starving” (Long 48). But far worse, in Long’s view, are the sexual desires of these working-class white women. As he writes, The lower class of women in England, are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons too brutal to mention; they would connect themselves with horses and asses, if the laws permitted them. By these ladies they generally have a numerous brood. Thus, in the course of a few generations more, the English blood will become so contaminated with this mixture, and from the chances, the ups and downs of life, this alloy may spread so extensively, as even to reach the middle, and then the higher orders of the people, till the whole nation resembles the Portuguese and Moriscos in complexion of skin and baseness of mind. This is a venomous and dangerous ulcer, that threatens to disperse its malignancy far and wide, until every family catches infection from it. (Long 48-9)

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Long’s widely shared horror at the potentially interracial desires of the English working classes was powerfully evoked in Thomas Rowlandson’s print in 1810, titled “Kitchen Stuff”. Here the loving embrace of the white servant-girl with a black man is crudely paralleled by the white kitten that playfully embraces a spotted, black-and-white dog, thus suggesting that such an interracial embrace is both brutally animalistic and a form of crossspecies mating. Moreover, this embrace is fuelled by alcohol, by the “Black Jack” rum on the mantelpiece and the “Cherry Bounce” liqueur in the cup of the drunken cook. In the context of this cultural paranoia concerning interracial sexuality, it should not surprise us that when a female writer wished to explore the passionate desire of a white woman for a black man, she felt constrained to frame her novel—as many Gothic novels are framed—within a pat Christian moral. In reading Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor, published in 1806, however, we should not take this moral over-seriously. Yes, Victoria’s beloved Moor is—we finally learn—the devil in disguise; yes, Victoria has been corrupted from early adolescence by the bad example of her mother’s adulterous elopement with a treacherous suitor; yes, Dacre suggests, human nature is innately evil and strong social restraints must be placed on all human desires. At the level of this framing moral narrative, Diane Hoeveler has correctly concluded in her Gothic Feminism that Zofloya is “racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic” (Hoeveler 145), that Dacre condemns the excesses of female sexual desire and overtly affirms instead the ideals of bourgeois rationality and a maternal ideology. I would like to look at Zofloya somewhat differently, focusing not on the framing moral of the novel but rather on the textual representation of Victoria’s desires as they develop during the novel. First, let me give just the briefest of plot synopses for those of you who have not yet read this fascinating novel. Victoria de Loredani’s mother elopes with her lover Count Ardolph when Victoria is 15; her father is subsequently killed in a duel with Ardolph. The beautiful, dark-haired Victoria’s dawning sexuality is then aroused by the older libertine, Count Berenza; her mother tries to prevent this liaison by imprisoning Victoria with her aunt; Victoria escapes to Berenza, initiates their sexual affair, seduces him into marrying her, only to discover that Berenza cannot sexually satisfy her. She then becomes enamored of Berenza’s younger, more virile brother Henriquez, who rejects her advances because he is engaged to the

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What I wish to focus on in this lurid tale is Victoria’s sexuality.1 Aroused by the white male, white female sexual desire in this novel is repeatedly frustrated by that white male, who proves increasingly impotent as the novel unfolds. Count de Loredani cannot satisfy his wife, who elopes. Count Berenza, the vitiated libertine, cannot arouse or gratify his wife, and visibly wastes away before our eyes, poisoned by the lemonade he so adoringly drinks from his wife’s cup. Henriquez is besotted by the pale Lilla, but is unable to consummate his sexual desire for her, impaling himself instead on his own dagger. In the figural discourse of this text, white male bodies literally become smaller, weaker, less potent. In contrast, the bodies of both Victoria and Zofloya increase in size. Victoria, “above the middle height”, “tall and graceful” as the antelope (Dacre 96), looms over the wasted Berenza and drugged, pale Henriquez. Zofloya, a man of exceptional intelligence, musical skill and education, immediately attracts the erotic gaze of Victoria: It occurred to her that the figure of the Moor possessed a grace and majesty which she had never before remarked; his face too seemed animated with charms till now unnoticed, and his very dress to have acquired a more splendid, tasteful, and elegant appearance.—True it was, that great was the beauty of Zofloya, to a form the most attractive and symmetrical, though of superior height, deriving every advantage too from the graceful costume of his dress, was added a countenance, spite of its colour, endowed with the finest possible expression. His eyes, brilliant and large, sparkled with inexpressible fire; his nose and mouth were elegantly formed, and when he smiled, the assemblage of his features displayed a beauty that delighted and surprised. (153)

Tall, “majestic” and “solemnly beautiful” (158) when he first appears, Zofloya becomes a “towering figure” (190), “so gigantic” that he seems

“increased to a height scarcely human” (191). As Zofloya’s size increases, so does Victoria’s sexual desire for him. Initially Victoria sees Zofloya only as her servant, the one who will carry out her wish to eliminate her husband and to seduce the rejecting Henriquez. But as the novel progresses, Victoria becomes more and more dependent on Zofloya, who repeatedly professes his own desire for her, kneeling before her, kissing her hand, preserving her bloodied handkerchief next to his heart, gently pressing her to his bosom, and insisting that she belongs to him. But it is Victoria’s growing sexual desire for Zofloya that I wish to emphasize. At first the “vain” Victoria is attracted only by Zofloya’s desire—“she took pleasure in knowing that he gazed upon her” (153). As the novel progresses, she increasingly desires what he can do for her. As he promises to help her consummate her desire for Henriquez, she, “seizing his hand . . . pressed it to her bosom” (159); in Zofloya’s presence, she recognizes that “I remain unsatisfied” (172); when she hears his flute-playing, she momentarily forgets Henriquez—“sooner, yes sooner, would I hear the footstep of Zofloya, or his sweet voice, sweeter than all this music” and confesses to him that “I desired your presence!” (181). After Henriquez’ suicide, Victoria’s erotic attraction to Zofloya becomes ever more intense—“On him the eyes of Victoria involuntarily fixed; dignity and ineffable grace, were diffused over his whole figure;—for the first time she felt towards him an emotion of tenderness” (226). When he embraces her, “Victoria felt reassured . . . such powerful fascination dwelt around him that she felt incapable of withdrawing from his arms; . . . no sooner . . . did she behold that beautiful and majestic visage, that towering and graceful form, than all thought of his inferiority vanished, and the ravished sense, spurning at the caluminous idea, confessed him a being of a higher order” (227). Having fled with Zofloya to the bandits’ cave, Victoria is overcome with passion for the Moor: Victoria’s proud, but now almost subjugated heart, touched with the respectful attentions of the only companion her vices and her crimes had left her, extended to him, with softened looks her hand.—He took it with tenderness, yet delicate reserve, and raised it to his lips—his manner but encreased to ardour the feelings of Victoria. (231)

This love scene ends with Victoria’s passionate declaration—“Zofloya!—I am thine ever” (231). Even then her overwhelming sexual desire remains unconsummated, hence all-consuming.

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delicate, pale-skinned Lilla. At this point Henriquez’ servant, Zofloya, a Moor, appears, first in Victoria’s dream, then in fact, and offers her his services in gaining Henriquez’ love. Victoria, overcome with frustrated sexual passion, first poisons her husband and then, when Henriquez still rejects her, chains Lilla in a cave and drugs Henriquez with a love-potion. but her longed-for sexual consummation with Henriquez proves disappointing. Henriquez commits suicide, Victoria kills Lilla, and escapes with Zofloya to a cave of bandits. When these bandits are surrounded by the army, Victoria flees with the Moor’s help, only to learn at last that he is the Devil; he hurls her to her death from a cliff.

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Her death at the Moor’s hands thus becomes, in the figuration of sexual desire that I have been tracking in this novel, a Liebestod. Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya thus constructs a unique Gothic subjectivity as it powerfully represents a hitherto culturally outlawed sexual desire, that of an empowered white woman for a black man. It initiates a complicated dialogue with the racist discourse of Edward Long, with those who can conceptualize female interracial desire only as degenerate, immoral or threatening. And it enabled Dacre’s female readers to explore a far wider range of sexual options, a more aggressive libidinal subjectivity, than did the other writing of her day.

Note 1. Victoria’s sexuality has previously been analyzed by Adriana Craciun as a representation of nymphomania (Dacre, Introduction 21-23) and by James Dunn as a feminine appropriation of masculine sexual desire and violence (Dunn, 313-14). Kim Ian Michasiw, who perceptively locates the novel within the conventions of a “transracial chivalric aristocracy of an earlier Orientalism” (xxiii), also explores the role of sexuality within the class and racial configurations of Zofloya.

Works Cited Colman, George, the Younger. Inkle and Yarico. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1787. Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya or, The Moor: a Romance of the Fifteenth Century. Ed. with an Introduction by Adriana Craciun. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 1997. All citations in the text are from this edition. Dunn, James. A. “Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence.” Nineteenth Century Literature. 35, 1998. 307327. Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda, 1st ed. 1801. Ed. with an introduction by Eilean Ni Chilleanain. London: Everyman, J. M. Dent, 1993. ———. Belinda, 3rd ed. 1810. Ed. Eva Figes. London: Pandora, 1986. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Ed. with an introduction by Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin, 1995. Ferriar, J. The Prince of Angola, a Tragedy. Altered from the Play of Oroonoko, and adapted to the Circumstances of the Present Times. Manchester, 1788. Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism—The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State UP, 1998. Lewis, Matthew. “The Isle of Devils, A Metrical Tale,” in Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834). Ed. with an introduction by Judith Terry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999, 160-83. Long, Edward. Candid Reflections upon the Judgment lately awarded by the Court of the King’s Bench in WestminsterHall, On what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause, By a Planter. London: T. Lowndes, 1772.

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Michasiw, Kim Ian, Ed. with an introduction. Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, or The Moor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Powell, James (with G. Male). Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro—A Grand Comic Pantomime. London: C. Lowndes, 1807. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. London: Longman, 1980; 2nd ed., 1996.

WOMEN AND THE GOTHIC ELAINE SHOWALTER (ESSAY DATE 1991) SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. “American Female Gothic.” In Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing, pp. 127-44. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. In the following essay, Showalter examines Gothic literature by women within the context of American history and culture.

One of the earliest critical manifestations of the change in consciousness that came out of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s was the theorization of the Female Gothic as a genre that expressed women’s dark protests, fantasies, and fear. The first great feminist theorist of the genre was Ellen Moers, a brilliant and pioneering critic who died of breast cancer in 1971 at the age of fifty. Her book, Literary Women: The Great Writers (1975), was a highly personal, loosely organized study of women writers across national lines. The chapters on the Female Gothic were particularly striking. Moers distinguished between two types of female Gothic novel: Ann Radcliffe’s origination in The Mysteries of Udolpho of a mode in which ‘the central figure is a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine,’ and Mary Shelley’s turn of the genre in Frankenstein, a story with a heroine but very powerfully a ‘birth myth,’ a tale of hideous progeny both literary and physiological. As Moers maintained, Frankenstein is ‘A woman’s mythmaking on the subject of . . . what follows birth: the trauma of the after-birth,’ fear and guilt, anxiety and depression.1 No woman who has ever read the book will forget Moers’s description of the newborn infant, taken directly from Dr Spock: A baby at birth is usually disappointing-looking to a parent who hasn’t seen one before. His skin is coated with wax . . . his face tends to be puffy and lumpy, and there may be black and blue marks . . . the head is misshapen . . . The baby’s body is covered all over with fuzzy hair . . . and some babies have black hair on the scalp which may come far down on the forehead.

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In the late 1970s Moers’s work was rethought and revised by a number of psychoanalytically oriented feminist critics influenced by objectrelations theory and especially the work of Nancy Chodorow. They viewed the Female Gothic as a confrontation not just with maternity, but with the reproduction of mothering, and ‘the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront.’2 In the Female Gothic, Claire Kahane asserts, ‘the heroine is imprisoned not in a house but in the female body, which is itself the maternal legacy. The problematics of femininity is thus reduced to the problematics of the female body, perceived as antagonistic to the sense of self, as therefore freakish.’3 The Gothic castle is, above all, the house of the dead mother. The heroine thinks that she is trapped in the haunted castle by a sinister and seductive older man; but she is really on a quest to find the mother, who holds the secrets of feminine existence: Within an imprisoning structure, a protagonist, typically a young woman whose mother has died, is compelled to seek out the center of a mystery, while vague and usually sexual threats to her person from some powerful male figure hover on the periphery of her consciousness. Following clues that pull her onward and inward—bloodstains, mysterious sounds—she penetrates the obscure recesses of a vast labyrinthean space and discovers a secret room sealed off by its association with death. In this dark, secret center of the Gothic structure, the boundaries of life and death seem confused. Who died? Has there been a murder? Or merely a disappearance?4

In the mid-1980s another group of feminist critics influenced by poststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis saw the Female Gothic as a mode of writing corresponding to the feminine, the romantic, the transgressive, and the revolutionary. For them, its key texts were novels like Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, in which the Gothic erupted despite Brontë’s stated desire to express herself in the bourgeois and patriarchal language of reason. Reading the Female Gothic through Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, ‘Dora,’ and ‘Das Unheimliche,’ as well as through Lacan and

Kristeva, critics equated the Gothic with the feminine unconscious, and with the effort to bring the body, the semiotic, the imaginary, or the pre-Oedipal [M]Other Tongue into language. Several of these critics systematized their readings of Female Gothic under the rubric of hysteria. In the preface to her book The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Sedgwick calls ‘the heroine of the Gothic a classic hysteric, its hero a classic paranoid.’ The hysterical heroine graphically expresses through her body what cannot be spoken about the self or come into existence as narrative. Similarly, when Mary Jacobus asks, ‘what is the literary status of that version of the uncanny known to feminist critics as “female Gothic,”’ she replies that the heroine is a hysteric and the Female Gothic text is a hysterical narrative.5 But ‘hysterical readings’ that dehistoricize the Female Gothic make it a timeless universal mode, one that threatens to reinstate the familiar duality linking women with irrationality, the body, and marginality, while men retain reason, the mind, and authority. As Terry Eagleton remarks, ‘if women speak the discourse of the body, the unconscious, the dark underside of formal speech—in a word, the Gothic—they merely confirm their aberrant status.’6 And if ‘Gothic’ becomes the word that totalizes and encapsulates these positions, it loses its capacity to mediate between the uncanny and the unjust. Like other genres, the Female Gothic takes on different shapes and meanings within different historical and national contexts. Borrowing many of its conventions from the English and European traditions, it has become one of the most versatile and powerful genres of American women’s writing, with elements that have changed in relation to changes in women’s roles and American culture. We could trace a long history of American Female Gothic. The popularity of the Gothic genre in American fiction began within a decade of Ann Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, and flourished in the first years of the Republic, despite the difficulty of finding appropriate equivalents of the ‘haunted castle, the ruined abbey, the dungeons of the Inquisition’ in rural Connecticut and Long Island.7 In the introduction to her book Woman’s Record (1852), Sarah J. Hale explained the influences which had led her to become ‘the Chronicler of my own sex.’ ‘The first regular novel I read,’ she recalled, was ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ when I was quite a child. I name it on account of the influence it exercised over my mind. I had remarked that of

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Moers extended her theory of Female Gothic to self-hatred and self-disgust directed towards the female body, sexuality, and reproduction. The Gothic, in her view, had to do with women’s anxieties about birth and creativity, including the anxiety of giving birth to stories in a process that society could deem unnatural. Her ideas were crucial to the work of such feminist critics as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and to others who looked at Mary Shelley as the paradigm of the Gothic woman writer.

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Spofford, or Flannery O’Connor, but rather of Poe, Brockden Brown, Melville, Twain, Hemingway, and Faulkner. The essence of American literature, Fiedler asserted, was ‘non-realistic, even antirealistic; long before symbolisme had been invented in France and exported to America, there was a full-fledged native tradition of symbolism.’ But American women’s writing did not share this symbolist essence. In fact, American Gothic could not be written by women because it was a protest against women, a flight from the domestic and the feminine. Women stood for the dreary or repellent ‘physical data of the actual world’ or ‘the maternal blackness, imagined by the gothic writer as a prison’ below the ‘crumbling shell of paternal authority.’ In order to ‘avoid the facts of wooing, marriage, and childbearing,’ then, American writers created a ‘nonrealistic and negative, sadistic and melodramatic’ Gothic fiction, a literature of ‘darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation.’9 Women could only be totemic figures along the masculine Gothic trail, seductive Dark Ladies or lachrymose Little Evas. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935.

all the books I saw, few were written by Americans and none by women. Here was a work, the most fascinating I had ever read, always excepting ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ written by a woman! How happy it made me! The wish to promote the reputation of my own sex, and do something for my own country, were among the earliest mental emotions I can recollect.

For many nineteenth-century American women readers and writers, the Gothic suggested independence, adventure, narrative boldness, and self-reliance. It allowed writers otherwise subject to the narrative restrictions of gentility and patriotism to find covert outlets for their sexuality and to imagine exotic or European settings for transgressive plots. Yet for much of this century, when American critics theorized about the American Gothic, lurid women writers were not on their list. Most interpretations of the Gothic saw it as a myth of male power, arousing terror through incestuous or Oedipal plots, whether ‘a helpless daughter confronting the erotic power of a father or brother’; or ‘the son’s rebellious confrontation with paternal authority.’8 When Leslie Fiedler, for instance, argued in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) that the Gothic was the ‘form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers,’ he was not thinking of Louisa May Alcott, Harriet

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A story that challenged this narrative of American Gothic was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. First published in the New England Magazine in 1892, the story had dropped out of the American literary canon. It was rediscovered and reprinted in 1972 by the Feminist Press, with an introduction by Elaine Hedges which used the language of Kate Millett’s recently published feminist best-seller to call it a narrative of ‘sexual politics’ in which a woman rebels against patriarchal power. Throughout the decade, as Jean Kennard has explained, feminist critics produced numerous readings of the story which depended on new conventions and interpretations of such terms as patriarchy, madness, and quest.1 0 Now considered ‘one of the most famous feminist literary works,’1 1 it is also an American classic. (The author is certainly not well known in England, where a recent review called her ‘Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’).1 2 Yet paradoxically, when ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ was adapted for Masterpiece Theater, a program that specializes in bringing television versions of the English classics to American audiences, it was set in Victorian England. The story may have been too Gothic to seem American. Told in a series of brief paragraphs of one or two sentences, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a firstperson narrative of a woman who has been taken by her physician husband to a secluded house in the country—‘a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate’—in order to cure a nervous illness, ‘a slight

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The narrator wants to write, and indeed confides her story in secrecy to the ‘dead paper’ of a journal which becomes the text. Her husband and his sister think it is the writing that has made her sick. But gradually the enforced passivity and confinement breaks down her mind; she begins to have crying spells, fatigue, and hallucinations in which the ‘florid arabesque’ of the wallpaper becomes a living paper, ‘budding and sprouting in endless convolutions.’ Ultimately she sees a woman creeping behind the pattern of the paper, who becomes many women trapped and trying to climb through. At the story’s end, the narrator is completely mad. When her husband breaks into the room where she has locked herself, she has ripped off all the paper and is creeping around the floor. ‘I’ve got out at last in spite of you,’ she tells him, and when he faints in shock, she creeps over his body. Gilman gives the account of the breakdown and treatment that motivated her to write the story in her autobiography and also in an essay called ‘Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.”’ In 1887, after the birth of her daughter, Gilman became severely depressed. Her husband at first tried to cheer her up by hiring a maid and by reading her Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century; when neither remedy worked, he sent her to Philadelphia for six weeks to take Dr Weir Mitchell’s rest cure. A prominent and successful nerve specialist, Mitchell had developed a therapy for intellectual women, Edith Wharton among them, that involved complete bed rest, no visitors, no intellectual activity of any sort, including reading, and a rich diet intended to produce a weight gain of fifty to seventy pounds, a kind of pseudo-pregnancy in which the symbolism of biological creativity displaced artistic and intellectual creativity. The body imagery of the rest cure also implied the inverse relation of female body and female mind; women who wished to produce a large body of work had to starve them-

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935) AND “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER”

Gilman wrote only one work of horror fiction, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), but it is one of the lasting classics of the genre, and has become part of the canon of feminist literature. The novella is based upon Gilman’s own experience with the “rest cure” developed by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell to treat the mental illness known at the time as “neurasthenia”; Gilman was prescribed the treatment for the postpartum depression she suffered following the birth of her daughter. Mitchell’s rest cure, prescribed primarily to women, consisted of committing the patient to bed for a period of months, during which time the patient was fed only mild foods and deprived of all mental, physical, and social activity—reading, writing, and painting were explicitly prohibited. Gilman once stated that the rest cure nearly drove her insane; she recovered after embarking upon a trip alone, and decided to leave both her husband and her daughter permanently. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is structured as a series of secret diary entries by an unnamed woman, a young wife and new mother whose debilitating mental condition has prevented her from caring for her infant. She and her husband John, who is a doctor, have rented a house in the country, in which she is to take a rest cure. The narrator is confined to an upstairs room with barred windows and no furnishings except for a bed that is nailed to the floor. The narrator describes the color and pattern of the room’s garish yellow wallpaper in an assortment of distasteful ways, eventually becoming obsessed with the wallpaper and imagining that a woman is trapped behind it. The story ends with the narrator creeping around the edges of the room and tearing the wallpaper in ragged sheets from the walls in an attempt to free the woman she believes to be trapped behind it. Her husband unlocks the door and witnesses this activity. “I’ve got out at last,” she explains to him, “And I’ve pulled off most of the paper so you can’t put me back!” He faints, and she continues to creep around the room, crawling over her unconscious husband.

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hysterical tendency,’ she has developed after the birth of a son. The house is ‘quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village.’ On the extensive grounds, there are ‘hedges and walls and gates that lock,’ and at the top of the house, a large room with barred windows, rings on the walls, an iron bed nailed down to the floor with a canvas mattress, and a gate barring the stairs. The floor is ‘gouged and splintered,’ the bedstead ‘gnawed,’ and the yellow wallpaper ripped.

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selves physically, and women who nurtured or indulged their appetites would pay with artistic sterility.1 3 Ordered never to ‘touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live,’ Gilman came close to insanity. She recovered only when she left her husband and child for a short trip, an experience that made her decide on a therapeutic divorce; ‘it seemed plain that if I went crazy it would do my husband no good and be a deadly injury to my child.’1 4 Casting Weir Mitchell’s advice to the winds, she began to write again. Later she remarried, and had a remarkable career as a feminist journalist and activist. Like Fuller’s work, Gilman’s Gothic had its roots in the father’s library. Gilman’s father, a distinguished librarian, had abandoned the family when she was a year old. In her memory, the father’s library stood not only for patriarchal knowledge and language, but also the absence of love and support. As she wrote in her autobiography, ‘The word Father, in the sense of love, care, one to go to in trouble, means nothing to me, save indeed in advice about books and the care of them—which seems more the librarian than the father.’1 5 After her breakdown, tellingly, she found herself unable to tolerate the paraphernalia and spaces associated with her father; she could not ‘read a heavy book,’ or ‘look down an index,’ and ‘a library, which was once to me as a confectioner’s shop to a child, became an appalling weariness just to look at.’1 6 The father’s library could indeed become the locus for both hysteria and rage. Gilman’s contemporary Alice James described her fantasies of violence as she ‘used to sit immovable reading in the library with waves of violent inclination suddenly invading my muscles, taking some one of their myriad forms such as throwing myself out of the window, or knocking off the head of the benignant pater as he sat with his silver locks, writing at his table.’1 7 Gilman’s heroine too has violent fantasies against men, but expresses her rage against herself and against her child in the form of selfdestructive illness, suicidal feelings, and infanticidal impulses. The realistic subtext of the story is that the heroine’s husband and sister-in-law are afraid that she may injure her baby or herself during a postpartum psychosis. For this reason, they are indeed keeping her under tacit surveillance. The heroine wonders why the house has gone so long unrented, and why they got it so cheaply; but it seems clear that it is an abandoned private mental hospital. The barred windows are not to protect children, but to prevent inmates from

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jumping out. The walls and the bed have been gouged and gnawed by other prisoners. The women she sees creeping in the hedges are perhaps the ghosts of former patients. Some of these ghosts are literary; ‘as readers versed in female gothic,’ Mary Jacobus points out, ‘we know that Bertha Mason haunts this text.’1 8 But more than women’s reading haunts The Yellow Wallpaper. Psychosis, involving hallucinations and delusions, can develop from postpartum depressions marked by crying spells, confusion, sleeplessness, and anxiety. Victorian doctors already knew what recent studies have documented: that ‘it’s during a psychotic depression that mothers are at a great risk of killing their babies.’1 9 We learn about the heroine’s violent feelings through the fantasies she projects on the patterned yellow wallpaper in the room. Although she claims to love her child and simply be tired of caring for him, (‘Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous’) her perceptions of the wallpaper reveal images of strangling: ‘There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.’ Berman suggests that ‘the new mother’s description of the wallpaper evokes an image of an insatiable child who seems to be crawling everywhere, even into the nursery which remains her only sanctuary.’2 0 The guilt engendered by these involuntary images, while never conscious, forms her system of defenses. She congratulates herself on the baby’s ‘fortunate escape’ from having to ‘occupy this nursery with the horrid wallpaper’; and puts herself in the child’s place: ‘I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.’ Because the specter of infanticide is too appalling to be faced, the heroine transforms her violent wishes against the child to self-destructive ones. Soon there is a woman crawling behind the wallpaper, and she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white! If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.

Childbirth becomes at once the tortuous emergence of the self, and a fantasy of engulfment by many-headed offspring, hungry and crying. By the end of the story—the heroine’s last, logically impossible journal entry, when she is completely mad—her self-punishing suicidal urges have come to the surface. She thinks about burn-

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Such a ‘thematic’ feminist reading of The Yellow Wallpaper cannot, as Mary Jacobus would argue, ‘account for the . . . uncanny elements present in the text.’2 1 But the scenario of confinement and madness in Gilman’s Gothic corresponds to the scripts of repression and incarceration typical of late nineteenth-century psychiatric practice, and of late nineteenth-century American Female Gothic plots. In Literary Women, Ellen Moers suggested that the keynote of the modern, post-war American Female Gothic was its obsession with freaks. She pointed to Southern Gothic writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Carson McCullers, whose adolescent heroines see the discomforting changes in their bodies mirrored in grotesques and freaks. In O’Connor’s story ‘A Temple of the Holy Ghost,’ a hermaphrodite in a blue dress tells the twelve-year-old heroine, ‘God made me this way and if you laugh he may strike you the same way.’ In McCullers’s Member of the Wedding, the adolescent Frankie visits a circus where she stands horrified before the booth of the Half-Man, Half-Woman: ‘She was afraid of all the Freaks, for it seemed to her that they had looked at her in a secret way and tried to connect their eyes with hers, as though to say: we know you.’ Katherine Anne Porter’s Miranda also goes to the circus where a dwarf with ‘not-human golden eyes’ grimaces at her ‘imitating her own face.’ Looking at freaks in the 1940s and 1950s signified a woman artist’s determination to confront the forbidden without flinching, to activate a powerful female gaze. Freaks and feminists were weirdly bonded. Moers was particularly struck by Diane Arbus’s photographs of urban outcasts— drag queens, circus people, lunatics, nudists, and giants. Starting out in 1950 as a fashion photographer for Glamour magazine, the well-bred Arbus initially seemed like the ideal American girl. ‘Diane fitted perfectly into the white-glove syndrome,’ a colleague remembered. ‘I was astonished when she surfaced with all those freak pictures.’2 2 From the photographers Lisette Model and Weegee, and the filmmaker Emile de Antonio,

Arbus learned to photograph the forbidden: ‘the androgynous, the crippled, the deformed, the dead, the dying.’ As Model recalled, ‘she never looked away, which took courage and independence.’2 3 With her cameras as a shield, Arbus entered an underworld, an urban space usually off-limits to women. 2 4 Her gothic quest included following her subjects home; as she told a reporter for Newsweek, ‘I love to go to people’s houses—exploring—doing daring things I’ve not done before—things I’d fantasized about as a child. I love going into people’s houses—that’s part of the thrill of seduction for woman—to see how he lives.’2 5 In her celebrated photograph of triplets, Arbus represented her own three faces in the American culture of the 1950s: ‘Triplets remind me of myself when I was an adolescent,’ she said. ‘Lined up in three images: daughter, sister, bad girl, with secret lusting fantasies, each one with a tiny difference.’2 6 These images were central to the plots of American Female Gothic of the 1950s, in which such writers as Jean Stafford and Shirley Jackson were obsessed by the good girl/bad girl split. Arbus, Plath, and Marilyn Monroe, who appeared to Plath in a dream to give her ‘an expert manicure’ (perhaps to cure her of a man), and to promise her ‘a new, flowering life,’ were all Gothic heroines of a decade in which female artistic ambition as well as sexuality were deviant.2 7 ‘Write laundry lists,’ not poems, Adlai Stevenson had exhorted Sylvia Plath’s graduation class of Smith in 1953, as if in reference to the Gothic debunking of Northanger Abbey.2 8 Women artists of the period attempted to resolve their sense of freakishness by rejecting and exorcising the Mother. In her journals in the late 1950s, Plath also jotted down numerous descriptions of plots for Female Gothic stories, ‘an analysis of the Dark Mother, the Mummy, Mother of Shadows. An analysis of the Electra complex.’ The Bell Jar (1962) is set in several of the Women’s Houses of the 1950s, suffocating equivalents of the Gothic castle. Far from being idyllic female communities of sisterly support, these are cloying sickly spaces where women betray each other, as the female body betrays: the Amazon Hotel, for ‘girls . . . with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them’; Ladies Day magazine where Esther Greenwood gets food poisoning; the suburban houses where she shares a bedroom with her mother and thinks about strangling her; the women’s dormitory at the mental hospital that reminds her of college.

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ing down the house, ‘to reach the smell’ of the yellow wallpaper that torments her. She has found a rope, useful only for hanging herself, and she admits ‘I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.’ Instead she turns herself into the infant, creeping around the room, even over the body of her husband who has fainted at the sight of what she has become.

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Pregnant women especially seem like freaks to Esther, whether the Catholic Dodo Conway with her six babies, and ‘grotesque protruding stomach,’ or the anaesthetized woman whose delivery her boyfriend takes her to watch, with ‘an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs.’ Plath ‘equated maternal love with self-denial, self-sacrifice, and ultimately selfdestruction; and it is no coincidence that [her] writings are filled with matricidal and infanticidal imagery.’2 9 Fear of childbirth and its restrictions is a powerful weapon against female sexuality. ‘A man doesn’t have a worry in the world,’ Esther tells her psychiatrist, ‘while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick to keep me in line.’ Part of the fear is the appropriation of childbirth by a dehumanizing male medicine. The woman in the delivery room is ‘on a drug that would make her forget she’s had any pain . . . she was in a kind of twilight sleep.’ Esther thinks ‘it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent.’ The drug is in fact nembutal, used by obstetricians in twilight sleep anaesthesia. While the movement made the concept of painless childbirth more acceptable, ‘by encouraging women to go to sleep during their deliveries, the twilight sleep movement helped to distance women from their bodies.’3 0 As Adrienne Rich notes, ‘no more devastating image could be invented for the bondage of woman: sheeted, supine, drugged, her wrists strapped down and her legs in stirrups, at the very moment when she is bringing new life into the world.’ 3 1 Plath equates twilight sleep with electroshock treatment, also a kind of birth process engineered by men. The Bell Jar offers us several possible endings to Esther Greenwood’s gothic quest. One is sexual freedom through birth control. When Esther gets her first diaphragm, it is like a ticket on the Underground Railroad: ‘I climbed up on the examination table, thinking “I am climbing to freedom.”’ Another is killing off the lesbian self Plath associated with the ‘career woman’ in the suicide of Esther’s double Joan Gilling. It’s at Joan’s funeral that Esther wonders ‘what I thought I was burying’ and hears the ‘old brag’ of her heart: ‘I am I am I am.’ A third is the rhetorical murder of the Mother. ‘I hate her,’ she tells the psychiatrist, who smiles ‘as if something had pleased her very, very much.’ And guided ‘as by a magical thread’ she steps into the hospital boardroom to pass her final examination in sanity. Hating one’s mother was the enlightenment of the pre-feminist 1950s and 1960s. But matro-

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phobia is really only a metaphor for self-hatred. Since the daughter shares the maternal body, the dead mother continues to haunt her. In Adrienne Rich’s important book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), matrophobia is interpreted as ‘a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr.’ Rich insisted that the split be healed in a genuine reunion not only with the maternal principle, but with the real mother. No feminist, she argued, can be truly at peace with herself until she has made her peace with her own mother and sisters. Rich’s volumes of poems and essays called upon the feminist ‘will to change,’ upon women’s decisions to use their anger, sexuality, and energy to confront confining institutions and to assert control of their lives. But these feminist fantasies of the liberated will characteristic of the late 1960s came up against an external limit, as did the utopian fantasies of other revolutionary movements in politics and civil rights. Despite the expansion of vocational and political opportunities during the 1970s, women also became more imprisoned and paralyzed by the fear of male violence. Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975) was a pivotal book of the decade, one which made a strong case for the politicization of rape as a feminist issue. As Brownmiller observed. ‘The ultimate effect of rape upon the woman’s mental and emotional health has been accomplished even without the act. For to accept a special burden of self-protection is to reinforce the concept that women must live and move about in fear and can never expect to achieve the personal freedom, independence, and self-assurance of men.’ While contemporary American Female Gothic has increasingly dealt with rape, assault, and murder, it has received far less attention from feminist critics than the narratives of maternity, madness, or the grotesque. An early and influential example of this genre was Joyce Carol Oates’s short story ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been’ (1966). Dedicated to Bob Dylan, the story begins realistically. Fifteen-year-old Connie has a mind ‘all filled with trashy daydreams.’ She lies to her parents and spends her evenings flirting with boys and being picked up at the mall or the drive-in restaurant. The title thus suggests the parent’s questions to the rebellious teenager. But Connie is threatened and finally abducted by a mysterious man posing as a teenager in a gold convertible who calls himself Arnold Friend. He

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I’m your lover, honey. You don’t know what that is yet but you will . . . But look: it’s real nice and you couldn’t ask for nobody better than me or more polite. I’m always nice at first, the first time. I’ll hold you so tight you won’t think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll know you can’t.

When he takes her away from her house in his gold car, it is clear that she is going to her death. By the story’s chilling end, they have become mythic figures in a Female Gothic landscape of the True West: My sweet little blue-eyed girl, he said in a halfsung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes, but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know she was going to it.

Some have attributed such plots to the overheated and morbid imaginings of the author. In an essay called ‘Why Is Your Writing So Violent?’ Joyce Carol Oates muses on the reason she is so often asked why she doesn’t leave ‘war, rape, murder and the more colorful minor crimes’ to men, and focus her writing on ‘“domestic” and “subjective” material, in the manner . . . of Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf. The implication is that if Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf had lived in Detroit they might have been successful at “transcending” their environment and writing novels in which not a hint of “violence” could be detected.’3 2 Oates has explained however that the story came to her ‘more or less in a piece’ after hearing Bob Dylan’s song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,’ and then reading about a killer in the Southwest and thinking about ‘the old legends and folk songs of Death and the Maiden.’3 3 According to Oates, Arnold Friend is ‘a fantastic figure: he is Death, he is the elf-knight of the ballads, he is the Imagination, he is a Dream, he is a Lover, a Demon, and all that.’3 4 The plot is based on a real incident. In 1966 twenty-three-year-old Charles Howard Schmid of Tucson, Arizona was charged with the murder of three teenage girls and became the subject of a feature story in Life called ‘The Pied Piper of Tucson.’3 5 The article told how Schmid, or Smitty, as he was called, had sought to ‘create an exalted,

heroic image of himself.’ To the bored teenagers in his crowd, he was a ‘folk hero . . . more dramatic, more theatrical, more interesting than anyone else in their lives.’ With a face that was his own aesthetic creation, the hair dyed black, heavy make-up, and a beauty mark on one cheek, Smitty cruised Tucson in a gold convertible, looking in all the teen hangouts for pretty girls. Bragging about his sexual exploits, claiming to have made vast amounts of money selling drugs, Charles Schmid had assembled himself so consciously from movies and popular culture that its hard to say that he, rather than Arnold Friend, is not the fictional character. Oates does not see the Gothic as a revelation of female hysteria, but rather as the indictment of an American social disorder, the romanticization of the violent psychopath and serial killer. Yet there is also a muted maternal subtext in the story. Connie lives restlessly inside ‘her daddy’s house,’ the house of domesticity, of the housewife married to her four walls. Connie’s mother haunts the little house, always picking on her pretty daughter, who wishes they both were dead. What Connie’s mother calls her ‘trashy daydreams’ are inarticulate longings for something different, something more than having to be ‘sweet and pretty and give in.’ At the mall and the roadhouse, she becomes another person, someone who experiences sexual pleasures that are tender, ‘the way it was in movies and promised in songs.’ To experience sexual desire, for the American maiden of 1966, is to risk pregnancy, maternity, the destruction of one’s identity. It means becoming the mother and therefore dead. But twenty years later, in the film version of the story, Smooth Talk (1986), Connie goes off with her demon lover and comes home again, gentler, cured of her restlessness and rage. For the American maiden of the 1980s, sexual initiation is not fatal, but the beginning of understanding and maternal kinship. The Shadow Knows (1974) by Diane Johnson is both an artful and terrifying study of female vulnerability, and a novel about race, sexuality, and fear in 1970s America. Johnson has been called a member of the ‘California Gothic’ School of fiction;3 6 her fiction is an extended exploration of American irrationality, danger, and the bizarre. The Shadow Knows is narrated by ‘N. Hexam,’ a thirty-four-year-old divorced mother of four, who lives in a housing project in Sacramento, California. With her lives Ev, a black woman who cares for the children while N. goes to graduate school in structural linguistics. Pregnant by her married

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looks like James Dean or Marlon Brando, with ‘shaggy black hair that looked crazy as a wig,’ sunglasses that are ‘metallic and mirrored everything in miniature,’ and ‘tight faded blue jeans stuffed into black scuffed boots.’ A. Friend speaks to Connie with shocking directness:

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lover, N. has had an IUD put in to produce an abortion. As she receives obscene phone calls, has her door vandalized, and her tires slashed, N. believes that someone is trying to kill her, and she may be right. Anyone could do it: her ex-husband, her best friend, her lover, his wife, the crazy former maid Osella. While meditating on her enemies, N. reflects on male hatred of women: ‘husbands killing wives—that’s an especially recurrent sort of murder . . . I don’t understand the sources of male vanity and rage that turn them into killers. Who suckles them on these bitter poisons of expectation? Women, I know.’ Carrying the burden of guilt for her sexuality, her infidelity, her intelligence, her love and resentment for her children, N. feels that perhaps she deserves to be punished. ‘If someone is trying to kill you, do you perhaps deserve it?’ Her efforts at abortion also torment her: ‘I have reason to believe myself a murderess.’ She sees the mess smeared on her front door by unknown vandals as ‘fetal membranes and blood from inside me,’ the ‘murdered new life.’ The urban context of crime and racial tension adds to the atmosphere of the novel. According to Johnson, The Shadow Knows was ‘about race relations, the evil in human nature, and social fear.’3 7 Furthermore, ‘it was meant to be about persons on the fringe; they happen to be women, and what happens to them is meant to be particular to America in the seventies.’3 8 The maid, Ev, who lacks N.’s white-skin privilege, is a daily wrenching reminder to her of the desperation of women’s lives at the edges of the American dream. Ev’s lovers ‘slash and beat . . . and steal from her.’ She values herself so little that she often burns and cuts herself, and is deeply scarred, like Queequeg or ‘the vandalized statue of a great Nubian queen.’ Ev’s death—of acute pancreatitis? of murder?— surprises no one, not even her grieving parents. She has long been a victim. At the gothic center of the book is the relationship between N. and Osella, the enormously fat, crazy, black ex-nursemaid. Osella makes threatening phone calls to N., accusing her of witchcraft and promiscuity. Is she the mysterious vandal? Suspecting Osella of the crime, N. goes to see her perform at the Club Zanzibar, where she works as a stripper: She seemed to have been oiled, for she shone so; one saw nothing but the gleaming immense breasts lying across her huge belly, breasts astoundingly full and firm like zeppelins overhead. She wore little trunks of purple satin and nothing else but a gold armlet around the expanse of her up-

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per arm—a brilliant stroke, a rather Egyptian, goddess-like adornment calling to mind one of those frightening and horrifying fertility goddesses with swollen bodies and timeless eyes and the same engulfing infinitely absorbing quality Osella radiated now.

Osella is N.’s double and shadow; Kali, the dark jungle queen, the mother-man-eater. While N. is a thin little woman, Osella is immense, ‘a sort of super-female.’ Her huge body exudes heat; like other fat ladies and freaks in American Female Gothic, she represents the terrifying essence of female appetite and desire.3 9 Is N. a reliable narrator? Is anyone trying to kill her or is she simply paranoid, racist, neurotic? The threats may only be the projections of her own violence and rage. N. describes the ‘ordinary misery of mothers of small children’; the loneliness and desperation; ‘you must carry them. Their little arms are tightly around your throat, their sticky little fingers are on your glasses.’ She has fantasized killing her husband on a fishing trip: ‘It simply occurred to her to push him in the river.’ Johnson’s title alludes to the popular American radio show of the 1940s called The Shadow Knows, about the detective Lamont Cranston, whose eerie laugh accompanied the famous opening question; ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’ Read with the conventions of the detective story it parodies, the novel suggests the Agatha Christie device of the first-person killer. Yet Johnson has told an interviewer that she meant N. to be a ‘reliable narrator and the events more or less real, and the fear certainly real.’4 0 While N. is not murdered, Ev apparently is; and at the end of the novel N. is raped by a mysterious assailant, an event Johnson presents as a fate better than death, almost a relief. The rape is N.’s punishment for breaking the rules, for protesting and making trouble, for going to graduate school instead of working for the telephone company. Johnson has commented that ‘the rape scene was meant to be a final symbol of ambiguity and everybody’s complicity in evil. I wrote that last scene lightly, before my consciousness was raised about the political implications of rape.’4 1 Reviewing Brownmiller’s book for the New York Review of Books, Johnson realized that ‘from a woman’s earliest days she is attended by injunctions about strangers, and warnings about dark streets, locks, escorts and provocative behavior. She internalizes the lessons contained therein, that to break certain rules is to invite or deserve rape.’4 2 In an interview shortly afterwards, she admitted that a woman who was raped would feel ‘angry, resentful, venge-

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Some of this raised consciousness about women’s internalization of the responsibility for male violence came out in 1980 when Johnson wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s film version of The Shining, an American Male Gothic novel by Stephen King, which portrays a woman who fears that her husband may be trying to kill her from the point of view of the husband. Jack Torrance, the blocked writer who is the protagonist of The Shining, has been beaten by his father as a child, and remembers seeing his mother beaten as well. In a pattern psychologists have established as valid, he projects his rage onto his wife and child: ‘You have to kill her, Jacky, and him too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they’ll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down.’ The collaboration of Johnson and Kubrick on the script for The Shining is a fascinating instance of the re-gendering of Gothic plots. Johnson and Kubrick wrote together during an eleven-week period in London. What initially struck Johnson about King’s book was ‘the horror, of course—the whole atmosphere of growing fear within the domestic circle was the core.’ In the adaptation, Kubrick wrote Jack’s lines, while Johnson wrote those of the wife Wendy. But most of Wendy’s lines ended up on the cutting-room floor. Johnson comments, ‘I was interested to see that finally the Wendy that came out on the screen was much quieter than the Wendy I had written, who was more like a female character in my novels, I suppose, in that she had a lot to say.’4 4 Nevertheless, aficionados of the slasher film were disappointed in The Shining. They thought it had too much psychological nuance and feminist perspective, and too little blood. Stephen King himself did not like the film. ‘Neither Stanley Kubrick nor his screenwriter Diane Johnson had any knowledge of the genre,’ he complained. ‘It was like they had never seen a horror movie before.’4 5 Changing expectations of what horror means in the horror movie will not happen overnight, and the gender gap in American Gothic remains enormous. Yet ironically, if the contemporary Female Gothic has come increasingly to be perceived as an American mode it is because its concerns are now consistent with a larger change in American fiction towards ‘violence-centered plots’ and a Gothic revival representing ‘alterna-

tive strategies for depicting an ever more terrifying reality.’4 6 If American Psycho is the masculine Gothic of the 1990s, Female Gothic looks more and more like a realist mode.

Notes 1. Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 91-2, 93. 2. Claire Kahane, ‘The Gothic Mirror,’ in Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (eds.), The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 335. 3. Ibid. 343. 4. Ibid. 334. 5. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986), vi; Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 201. 6. Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment (Belfast: Field Day Theatre Company Limited, 1988), 13-14. 7. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. edn. (New York: Stein and Day, 1975), 144. 8. Kahane, ‘The Gothic Mirror,’ 335-6. 9. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 132. 10. See Jean E. Kennard, ‘Convention Coverage or How to Read Your Own Life,’ New Literary History, 13 (Autumn 1981), 69-88. 11. Diane Price Herndl, ‘The Writing Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna O., and “Hysterical” Writing,’ NWSA Journal, 1 (1988), 68. 12. See Kate Ford, ‘Loss and Compensation,’ Times Literary Supplement, 12-18 Jan. 1990, 46. 13. Thanks to Catherine Gallagher for this perception. 14. Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 152. 15. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1935), 5-6. 16. Ibid. 98, 100. 17. The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934), 149. 18. Reading Woman, 240. 19. Dr Paula Clayton, quoted in Daniel Goleman, ‘Wide Beliefs on Depression in Women Contradicted,’ New York Times, 9 Jan. 1990. 20. Jeffrey Berman, The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 54. 21. Jacobus, Reading Woman, 233. 22. Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 101. 23. Ibid. 132.

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ful, guilty—a whole bunch of things which N. in The Shadow Knows doesn’t feel. And maybe now that I’ve read Susan Brownmiller, I would not have had the book end that way.’4 3

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24. Arbus’s use of the camera had precedent in the early photography of Eudora Welty, and recent parallels in the work of women film directors like Susan Seidelman. In the documentary Calling the Shots, shown on British television in Spring 1990, Seidelman and other women film-makers discussed the way that the camera allowed them access to forbidden turf. 25. Bosworth, Diane Arbus, 158. 26. Ibid. 217. 27. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough (New York: Dial Press, 1982), 319. An unpublished paper by Jodi Hauptman, ‘Mirrors and Pictures: A Comparison of The Bell Jar to the Photographs of Diane Arbus,’ written for my course on ‘American Women Writers’ in May 1985, explores similar images of mirrors, shadows, and doubling in Arbus and Plath. 28. Linda Huf, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), 128. 29. Berman, Talking Cure, 127. 30. Judith Walzer Leavitt, ‘Birthing and Anesthesia: The Debate over Twilight Sleep,’ in Women and Health in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 181. 31. Of Woman Born (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 170-1. 32. ‘Why Is Your Writing So Violent?’ New York Times Book Review, 25 Mar. 1981, 10. 33. ‘Interview with Joyce Carol Oates,’ in John R. Knott, Jr., and Christopher R. Keaske (eds.), Mirrors: An Introduction to Literature, 2nd edn. (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1975), 18-19. 34. Ibid. 19. 35. See Dan Moser, ‘The Pied Piper of Tucson,’ Life, 4 Mar. 1966, 18-24. This source was identified by Tom Quirk, ‘A Source for “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”’ Studies in Short Fiction, 18 (Fall 1981), 413-19. 36. Larry McCaffery, Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 205. 37. Interview with Diane Johnson, in McCaffery, Anything Can Happen, 202. 38. Janet Todd, ‘Diane Johnson,’ in Janet Todd (ed.), Women Writers Talking (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), 125. 39. See e.g. Jean Stafford’s story, ‘The Echo and the Nemesis,’ in Children are Bored on Sunday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953). 40. Todd, ‘Diane Johnson,’ 125. 41. McCaffery, Anything Can Happen, 213. 42. Diane Johnson, ‘The War between Men and Women,’ New York Review of Books, 11 Dec. 1975. 43. Constance Carey, interview with Diane Johnson, San Francisco Review of Books, 1 (Jan. 1976), 17. 44. McCaffery, Anything Can Happen, 215. 45. Aljean Harmetz, ‘“Pet” Film Rights Sold,’ New York Times, 8 June 1984.

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46. Michiko Kakatuni, ‘Kill! Burn! Eviscerate! Bludgeon! It’s Literary Again to Be Horrible,’ New York Times, 21 Nov. 1989.

E. J. CLERY (ESSAY DATE 1992) SOURCE: Clery, E. J. “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s.” In Reviewing Romanticism, edited by Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis, pp. 69-85. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. In the following essay, Clery outlines the utility of Gothic fiction for readers in the 1790s, particularly in terms of advancing a progressive, feminist perspective.

L’Histoire d’une femme est toujours un Roman. ‘You must confess that novels are more true than histories, because historians often contradict each other, but novelists never do.’ The would-be heroine of E. S. Barrett’s satire of romance fiction, The Heroine, here goes on the attack against the conventional depreciation of the ‘feminine’ novel in favour of ‘masculine’ history (1814, 78). Gender is at the heart of the matter when it is raised again in Northanger Abbey, for history, Catherine Morland observes, ‘tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all, it is very dull. . . .’ (Austen, 1933, 108) Both of these satires set out to show, in comic terms, what happens when an avid consumer of ‘horrid novels’ fulfils James Beattie’s gloomy prognosis: Romances are a dangerous recreation . . . and tend to corrupt the heart, and stimulate the passions. A habit of reading them breeds a dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge; withdraws the attention from nature and truth; and fills the mind with extravagant thoughts, and too often with criminal propensities. (573-4)

and comes to read her own ‘history’ as if it were a sensational narrative. Yet on the way to the satire’s final rationalist confirmation of the divide between fact and fiction a curious alchemy takes place. Common sense, in temporarily assuming a fantastic disguise, finds it cannot so easily shake it off again. Thus Margaret Kirkham’s feminist reading of Northanger Abbey discovers in it ‘a major criticism of the assumptions associated with the schema of the burlesque novel in which a heroine learns that her romantic notions are all mistaken, and that the world of the everyday is better ordered than that of imagination.’ (Kirkham 89) Catherine’s

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The following essay will trace the disruptive effect of satire’s ‘other’ to its source. In it I will try to assess, in the light of historical experience, the value of Gothic fiction for its readers in the 1790s—a period when novels with a Gothic theme accounted for up to two-thirds of those published in a year. To begin with, I want to propose the paradox that it is in the narratives of this for the most part ideologically conservative form of popular fiction, in conjunction with contemporary evidence for the response to them, that we must look for signs of the development of a feminist critical self-consciousness. In Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft expresses an ambivalent opinion of the novel form’s progressive potential. While restating the rationalist valorisation of history over fiction, she nevertheless insists that novel-reading is preferable to leaving ‘a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers.’ (1985, 386) Six years later the Prologue of her novel The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798) requests the reader to consider the narrative as a ‘history . . . of woman’. A conventional historical account of ‘the partial laws and customs of society’ has been rejected as inadequate.1 In spite of her disclaimer regarding the use of ‘stage-effect’, she has recourse in her fiction to the most melodramatic devices of the Gothic mode involving imprisonment, sexual tyranny and madness. In Gothic she finds the appropriate discursive form for her social critique of the rape of women’s humanity. The change in sentiment that takes place between the writing of these two works coincides with the rise of the Gothic heroine. During the same space of time Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), apogee of Gothic fiction, had appeared, and its success had resulted in a flood

of imitations. On the basis of her enormous success Radcliffe—identified by Michel Foucault as ‘initiator of a discursive practice’—put into circulation the elements of a narrative-type structured around the subjectivity of the heroine, and thus distinct from the early romances of Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve and the more sensational strain of ‘Schauerroman’ available in translations from the German and later popularised by ‘Monk’ Lewis. Instances of the heroine-centred narrative will be read here as contributions to a ‘history of woman’. Beginning with the making of the heroine/female subject through her equivocal relations with the realm of property ownership and economic agency, my narrative follows her to the Gothic castle, a structure briefly lit up as a metaphor for woman’s ‘dematerialisation’ before the law, and then on to her arrival at the ‘happy ending’ and ultimate absorption into marriage.

1. The Heroine Emily calmly said: ‘I am not so ignorant, signor, of the laws on this subject, as to be misled by the assertion of any person. The law, in the present instance, gives me the estates in question, and my own hand shall never betray my right.’ ‘I have been mistaken in my opinion of you, it appears,’ re-joined Montoni sternly. ‘You speak boldly, and presumptuously, upon a subject which you do not understand. For once, I am willing to pardon the conceit of ignorance; the weakness of your sex, too, from which, it seems, you are not exempt, claims some allowance; but if you persist in this strain—you have everything to fear from my justice.’ ‘From your justice, signor,’ rejoined Emily, ‘I have nothing to fear—I have only to hope.’ Montoni looked at her with vexation, and seemed considering what to say . . . ‘Your credulity can punish only yourself; and I must pity the weakness of mind which leads you to so much suffering as you are compelling me to prepare for you.’ ‘You may find, perhaps, signor,’ said Emily with mild dignity, ‘that the strength of my mind is equal to the justice of my cause; and that I can endure with fortitude, when it is in resistance to oppression.’ ‘You speak like a heroine,’ said Montoni contemptuously; ‘we shall see whether you can suffer like one.’ Emily was silent, and he left the room. Recollecting that it was for Valancourt’s sake she had thus resisted, she now smiled complacently upon the threatened sufferings, and retired to the spot which her aunt had pointed out as the repository of the papers relative to the estates . . . (Radcliffe 1970, 380-1)

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Gothic imaginings about General Tilney and his late wife are partially borne out; for it emerges that Mrs Tilney had been imprisoned by her marriage, that unhappiness had contributed to her death, and that the General, in accordance with the laws of England and the customs of the time, does wield near absolute power ‘as an irrational tyrant’ in the family. We find the romance perspective, pace The Heroine’s Cherubina, may be ‘more true’ than Henry Tilney’s reassuring, Whig vision of historical progress (‘Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them?’). In attempting to cure it, by a dangerous mingling, satire itself catches the infection of fiction which Beattie feared.

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The story so far: After a blissful childhood Emily St Aubert loses her mother and father in quick succession. She is penniless and forced to go and live with her vain and foolish aunt, a rich widow. There she falls in love with and agrees to marry Valancourt, whom she had first met on a tour of the Pyrenees she made with her father. The aunt after some opposition permits the marriage and then vetoes it when she herself impulsively marries the mysterious and compelling Signor Montoni. The household moves to Venice. Emily is pressured to marry a man she dislikes but before the ceremony there is an abrupt removal to Montoni’s castle, Udolpho, in the Appenines. The castle is full of long dark passages, nameless fears and hints of ancestral wrongdoings. It emerges that Montoni is the chief of a band of condottieri. He has large gambling debts to pay off and threatens his wife in order to make her sign over some entailed estates to him. She refuses and he has her imprisoned. She dies of unhappiness and neglect and bequeaths the estates to her niece. The confrontation between heroine and villain in The Mysteries takes place at the intersection of economic structure and cultural norms. Emily’s self-assertion in defence of her property rights is countered by Montoni’s rehearsal of strictures on feminine propriety. The excessive, romantic nature of her resistance to authority is registered in her naming as ‘heroine’;2 the predestined failure of such a gesture is signified by her silence. Emily’s brushes with the supernatural at Udolpho are later explained away (the ‘explained supernatural’ is frequently used as a description of the Radcliffean narrative-type) as the products of an overstimulated imagination but they are nevertheless the proper metaphor for her own condition. Her determined relation to the economic order—in this instance the system of property relations organised by kinship—defines the nature of the heroine’s social existence.3 She is to serve as an instrument for the passage of property, whether by cession to the superior claim of a male relation or as the merchandise of a profiteering marriage agreed between men; therefore her tormented consciousness, her sensibility, her humanity, are alike excessive—ghostly emanations. She experiences, as the effect of this socioeconomic positioning, the curious ambiguity of existing simultaneously as both a thing and a person, in a twilight zone of individuation. At the same time her alienation from her own will is imposed by the shadow of propriety, making her response to economic oppression double: libertarian in so far as she is a sensible individual;

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calculating—on behalf of reputation—insofar as she is a woman, constrained by gender. In the event she is forced to sign away her property to her wicked uncle not because of any inability to suffer with fortitude, but because in a castle overrun with drunken mercenaries and Venetian courtesans she can no longer safeguard her privacy or virtue without his protection. Sex intervenes, marking the duplicity of women’s experience. ‘A man . . . secure in his own good conduct, depends only on himself, and may brave the public opinion; but a woman, in behaving well, performs but half her duty; as what is thought of her, is as important to her as what she really is. . . . Opinion is the grave of virtue in a man; but its throne among women.’ Wollstonecraft quotes Rousseau (1985, 242). Romance fiction revolves around this double standard, alternately condoning and deprecating, pointing on the one hand to the throne on which the heroine will be installed at the end of her trials, and on the other hand to the grave where one false step might, however undeservedly, lead her. Romance recognises that the gentlewoman is bound by the metaphysics of appearance, that her mind is of necessity given over to superstition. In every work that reflects on the condition of women the rule of propriety exists as a ubiquitous invisible presence, an imperative and a threat. A notable example is Regina Maria Roche’s sentimental-Gothic The Children of the Abbey (1796) in which a libertine conspires to destroy the reputation of the heroine, the cancelling of her good name being, not as in Clarissa a mere by-product of seduction, but the preliminary to it. These machinations prepare for the nightmarish sequence in which Amanda suffers a lightning fall through the levels of the English class system until she lands half-dead in the gutter.4 Emily, unprotected merchandise on the marriage market, turns the tables by learning to treat herself as a commodity. Pursuing the principle of synecdoche, part for a whole, Emily’s humanity and the sum total of her actions are absorbed by her ‘virtue’, the need to preserve it and, what is more difficult still, the need to maintain its ‘appearance’ while preserving it, in the cause of her own economic viability: her ‘property’ in her self. (Here ‘virtue’ assumes its alternative meaning as the efficacy of things—as use-value, that gives a basis for exchange-value.) This is the pragmatic import of her father’s warning against overindulgent sensibility. By self-appraisal, the recognition of her exchange-value on the marriage market, she must learn to subordinate her will to

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The Mysteries displays in the form of romance the real contradictions and dangers which every gentlewoman of the period potentially faced.5 Above all it actualises the fears of the woman of the middle class, whose social standing was most unstable, liable to upward and downward variation, and therefore particularly susceptible to the taboos surrounding femininity. Mary Wollstonecraft recognised the critical potential in the Radcliffean romance when she adopted its ‘system of terror’ for her political fiction The Wrongs of Woman, where she made explicit what was already immanent in the form. It was not coincidental that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had been addressed to middle-class women, later to become the best readers of Gothic romance.6 What Wollstonecraft calls the natural state of middle-class women, their ability to experience in a conscious way the various demands made on the sex as contradictory, that which in addition allowed them to empathise with the sufferings of the Gothic heroine, might also make them the bearers of critique. To realise contradiction as critique would be for the reader to become the heroine of her own life and apply to her own circumstances the lesson of how to ‘suffer like a heroine’. Such, certainly, was the fear implicit in the satires and condemnations of novel-reading women who confused fact and fiction. The space for critique opened within the new economic order was linked to increased restrictions on women’s social praxis.7 The heroine of romance follows the private lady into a negative, occulted relation to the sphere of economic agency. Forcibly absented from the scene of production, the private lady continues to haunt it, whether as casualty, or clandestine participant. One legitimate role was that of consumer, whose connection with the workshop, though causal, could be veiled. But here the embattled, unprotected Gothic heroine parts company with the

lady; not for her the petty sovereignty of the purse-strings. True to her vocation for suffering she comes to illustrate the harshest effects of unequal access to remunerative work. By the 1790s, although still caught up in the traditional web of kinship, some heroines begin to react to pressures from another quarter; those conditions described by Mary Ann Radcliffe in The Female Advocate (1799) when she deplores the erosion of the ‘Rights of Women’ to an independent livelihood.8 Monimia in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House does piecework for ‘a very considerable linen warehouse in the neighborhood.’ (1989, 494) Ellena in The Italian passes ‘whole days in embroidering silks, which were disposed of to the nuns of a neighboring convent, who sold them to the Neapolitan ladies . . . at a very high advantage’. (Radcliffe 1981, 9) The gentlewoman/heroine as worker transgresses the code of propriety, yet so long as she labours in secrecy, remaining within the genteel space defined by the magical walls of the home, her character is preserved from the judgement of the world. The appearance of gentility is precariously upheld by the returns of honest labour, in the knowledge that the fact of labour may destroy what it was meant to save. The revelation of transgression into the economic sphere would dissolve the layer which separates the world from the home, making private woman irrevocably, disreputably, public. When Ellena’s social status is thrown in doubt, she, like the products of her labour, is disposed of to a convent. The convent of romance fiction, the insolvent heroine’s last resort, approximates the symbolic extreme of the brothel in a Protestant society, the ‘nunnery’ of Anglo-Saxon slang. Novel-writing was another means of support for needy gentlewomen, though to my knowledge no heroine makes use of it. Again a kind of piecework permitting both physical seclusion within the household and an anonymous, mediated relationship to the marketplace, it offered correspondingly meagre rewards. The late eighteenth century was the great age of the nameless ‘Lady’, signatory of innumerable popular publications. It was not unusual for an author’s preface to indicate financial hardship as the motive of writing, making the purchase of novels a form of charity, while the public recognition of financial need sometimes excused the public advertisement of a woman’s name—to an extent. Charlotte Smith’s was one such case. She wrote for the support of herself and her children after leaving her profligate husband, and subsequently won the

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the maintenance of herself as object. Of what use is her inheritance if her body is devalued? Although she needs a dowry to afford the husband, the loss of respectability would debar her forever from the happiness of secure social status. If Emily emerges unscathed and triumphant, her exertions have by the end of the narrative left her paler and more pensive, as though, by her strict adherence to it, the ideology of femininity had drained her of lifeblood, vampire-like. She has finished her task as entrepreneur of herself. She is in direct line of succession to Pamela, another literary paragon who turns propriety to profit, in effect managing her virginity as if it were a business.

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sympathy and even friendship of some wellconnected readers. The novels, for which she received £50 per volume, appeared with the regularity of a production line. Her friend William Cowper wrote of her ‘Chained to her desk like a slave to his oar’; she herself valued them ‘no more than a Grocer does figs’. (cit., Smith 1989, xii, x) Moreover the price of her industry was the exposure of her private life as spectacle. The reviewers discussed her fiction as autobiography, identified unflattering portraits of her husband and reproved her for her disloyalty to the marriage vows. As we will see, Ann Radcliffe, perhaps the most highlypaid English novelist of the century (£500 for The Mysteries, £800 for The Italian), was also punished in the public imagination for her manifest success. From the literary sweatshop to the magical legacies of the fictional happy ending: by the close of The Mysteries Emily St Aubert has received not one but two inheritances in sublime recognition of her virtue, yet she receives them in the name of another, ‘for Valancourt’s sake.’ In defending her ‘property in her own person’, there too her care has amounted to a caretaker government, for it was property safeguarded for another. On her wedding day all property rights, including those to her own person, will be given over to her husband; English common law presides over the transaction. The fate of the Gothic heroine, civil disembodiment, was prefigured by the unhappy end of Madame Montoni, conveyed in the premonitory message of the Gothic castle.

2. The Castle ‘We inherit an old Gothic castle,’ wrote Sir William Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), ‘erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless. The inferior apartments, now converted into rooms of convenience, are chearful and commodius, though their approaches are winding and difficult.’ (III, 268) The great legal authority of the eighteenth century drew on a trope current in both the aesthetic and political discourses of his time in order to picture the historical range of his field of enquiry. But there is nothing here of Burke’s passionate evocation of feudalism as a rebuke to the present in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1792). In these pre-revolutionary days, it appeared that modernisation by a ‘series of minute contrivances’, as opposed to full-scale ‘new-modelling’, could do no damage to the social

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fabric. The old system of property laws—for this was the immediate object of Blackstone’s remarks—could be comfortably fitted up to suit the requirements of the now predominant ‘commercial mode of property . . . to facilitate exchange and alienation’. (III, 268) The object of the Commentaries as a whole was a complete review, codification and vindication of the law as it upheld the right of the newly-dominant capitalist system of property relations in the interest of the revised status quo. It was also intended to establish the law’s disinterested and fully autonomous functioning, and this was implemented at a discursive level through the representation of the law, in four volumes of print, as a unified and functional whole, where, as in the renovated Gothic castle, reason is superimposed on natural evolution. Blackstone’s Commentaries operate two distinct strategies of rationalisation, each on the basis of a different sense of the word ‘rationalise’. The first is an attempt to codify the law as a rational system governed by fixed and immutable principles, extracting logic from its haphazard underwriting of sectional interest, and enabling it to take its place as a branch of the human sciences. The second works to justify or legitimate the law by identifying it with natural order, beyond the reach of human criticism. The two ends appear at first sight to be contradictory; another case posing the eighteenth century riddle: can enlightenment and theodicy be reconciled? Yet at an institutional level their functions were complementary. Both constituted the law as a closed system, selfsufficient, impartial, abstracted from social relations. In such a way the law confirmed its participation in the general phenomenon of reification, social manifestation of the economic order to which it now devoted its services, the ‘essence of commodity-structure’, as Lukács describes it. He continues, ‘Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a “phantom-objectivity”, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.’ (Lukács 83). Meanwhile, the contrivances of the law involve a number of ‘fictions and circuities’, which, as Blackstone admits, might ‘shock the student’. One fiction that shocked the 1794 editor of the Commentaries, as he confessed in a footnote, was Blackstone’s boast that the legal provisions for marriage showed how ‘great a favourite is the female sex of the laws of England’. (I, 445) Elsewhere, in a digression concerning laws dependent

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Among the real consequences of this principle were the following: the husband took control of the whole of his wife’s property, past, present and future; he had sole rights over their children; a married woman could not enter into any legal agreement or lawsuit on her own behalf; she could not bring proceedings against her husband in common law; and, since her ‘very being’ was suspended, she no longer held property in her own person, Locke’s minimum condition for civil rights. ‘My wife and I are one and I am he.’ The husband was held to represent his wife’s interests at every level. Marriage meant what has been called ‘a kind of civil death’ for women (Davidoff and Hall 200). The debate about marriage as an institution in this period raised the same issues of representation as elision—the legalised absorption of one body by another—as contemporary debates over the extension of male suffrage, the colonial system and slavery. At precisely the time that coverture was found to be irreconcilable with the liberal humanist ideals of reason and autonomy of the individual it arrived at its moment of maximum utility. The intensified ‘privatising’ of middle- and upper-class women which took place throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century was underwritten by law. But the legal fictions required to support legal objectivity on this point were becoming increasingly transparent. The doctrine of coverture formalised and brought to completion the ongoing education in supernatural non-being which we have already noted in the history of the Gothic heroine. In the legislation relating to married women it is no

surprise to find the elements of a Gothic fiction. In the first place, its foundation in doubt expressed in the dictum ‘Maternity is a fact, paternity is a matter of speculation.’ This single absence of proof of paternity, jeopardising the legitimate transmission of property from generation to generation, was the ultimate justification for all restraints placed on women of the property-owning classes. As Burke recognised, sublimity and violence are native to obscurity. Thus, secondly, and in two stages, we have: the civil death of the woman by order of the law; and the haunting of the law by the spectre of the woman as potential occlusion of its working principle. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, a period in which patrilineal property laws were enforced with increasing strictness, literary fictions by and about women bore witness to the haunting of a coercive legal system. They took as their subject matter the persistent threats to the clarity of patrilineity—abduction, rape, elopement, adultery, illegitimacy, incest— aberrations generated by the very attempt to enforce security of property through the male line. ‘Marriage has bastilled me for life.’ With these words the heroine of The Wrongs of Woman radicalises a commonplace condition (154-5). The conjunction marriage/Bastille defamiliarises the private zone to which women are consigned by law in a way more obliquely realised in Gothic fiction. Like the castle of Udolpho, the private lunatic asylum to which Wollstonecraft’s Maria is consigned by her vicious husband is in ruins, intended as optimistic evidence, maybe, of the decadence of the institution they represent. Less optimistic in tendency is the device of serial autobiographies punctuating the main narrative, a kaleidoscope of women’s lives which seem to demonstrate only a universal misery—the technique again borrowed by Wollstonecraft from romance fiction. In the works of Radcliffe and her followers as in Wollstonecraft the heroine seems to move through a bleak landscape littered with the remains of destructive marriages; every casualty she encounters is a ruin and a prophecy. Yet the repetition implies a sort of collectivity, or the potential for one. Out of Gothic dystopia Wollstonecraft attempted to formulate the utopian telos of her politics. Radcliffean romance, the so-called ‘supernatural explained’, briefly unmasks the interested nature of man-made laws. Their narratives perform a break-up of the reification of the law by permitting a reflection on the illusory nature of its ‘phantom-objectivity’—and this through a literalminded representation of the law as haunted

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on the ‘wisdom and will of the legislators’, Blackstone had been more explicit about their function: ‘Thus our own common law has declared, that the goods of the wife do instantly upon marriage become the property and right of the husband; and our statute law has declared all monopolies a public offence: yet that right, and this offence, have no foundation in nature; but are merely created by the law, for the purposes of civil society.’ (I, 55) Workers’ monopolies remaining from the medieval guild system were to be discarded. But the doctrine of coverture was one of those ancient feudal relics which were readily integrated within the new structure of capitalism.9 Blackstone defined it like this: ‘By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing . . .’. (I, 441)

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house. The metaphysical paraphernalia of an ‘objectivist’ system of justice is portrayed with objectivity in the terrifying phantasmagoria of Gothic fiction. For in this vision ‘justice’ is estranged from itself, retranslated into an asymmetric, repressive relation between people. In each novel there is a confrontation, however brief, with the unthinkable: a world of inescapable injustice; a brush with the Sadeian universe where the pleas of the victims are forever unheard and wrongdoing forever unpunished, before the narrative reverts to a properly providential dénouement. How appropriate that the author who most vividly communicated this transient terror should be sent to end her life in a madhouse by the daydreams of the British reading public.1 0 The castle of Udolpho would appear to serve the function of an illumination, its darkness representing for the heroine the truth of her condition, a truth she can withstand only momentarily, in the instant before she faints. But in the overall scheme the castle provides only a theatrical, metaphorical horror, structurally isolated from the main body of narrative. The castle offers itself as an approximate expression, a proxy, for those quotidian horrors situated elsewhere, outside, in the realm of the ‘real.’ Horror is detained in quarantine, to guard against infection of the daylight world to which the story, in accordance with the therapeutics of romance, must return for the happy ending.

3. The Happy Ending What is the status of Gothic fiction’s revelations? I have made a claim for the grounding of horror in historical truth. That the condition of women at this time was oppressive, and was frequently experienced as such, is undeniable. Romances both helped to produce and offered a reflection upon this experience. They actively implement the division of public and private spheres by constituting their female readers as a fragmented body, accomplishing a pleasurable sequestration of the novel-reader in the realm of private aesthetic consumption. The public voice the novel form offered women writers was necessarily inflected by the fact of trespass. I have suggested that at the same time the romances allowed a reflection on this very exclusion from civil society and the violence it entailed. Critique appears at a phantasmagoric level, at the level of consciousness or imagination. But within the illogic of the novel it must replace illusion with illusion. Divorced from practical transformation, cut off from the rationale of causality,

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in the final analysis Gothic enlightenment endorses the ideological patterns it has briefly exposed. The irrational, feminine popular novel can show the violence and irrationality of reason, prising apart its contradictions; but the truth of a novel is by definition fictional and its force contained by the correlative ‘laws’ of narration. The achievement of these novels was not to represent the real condition of women in supernatural trappings, but to intimate, through the reader’s identification with the heroine, the supernatural condition of women in the real world. Implicitly, they tell of the fiction of reality rather than reflecting reality in fiction. The implications of this inversion become evident when we reconsider the main charge brought against romances, namely, that female readers, by identification with the romantic heroine, would be led to confuse fact with fiction, recreating themselves after her image, and learning to read their own lives like a sensational narrative. Romances were charged with cultivating in the reader a sense of the supernaturalism of everyday life by the dissemination of impermissible thoughts, untenable values, irrational models of behaviour.1 1 Read episodically, the fictions of Radcliffe and her followers yield the suggestion that patriarchal right is founded on force, not nature; that the ‘right’ of patriarchy is itself a fiction. But such a reading is against the linear flow of the narrative towards resolution and closure. For the significance of the whole is subsumed in the final tableau of idealised wedlock: a partnership freely entered into by both parties and made equal by the strength of mutual affection; a sacred union of reason and sensibility.1 2 The threatening indeterminacy of past terrors is resolved in the light of this final manifestation of providential order. The previous melt-down of reification by fear is superseded by moral hypostasis: a concluding freezeframe.

Notes 1. Gary Kelly, editor of The Wrongs of Woman (1976), suggests that the novel was the second volume promised in the Vindication; the work which would look closely at “the laws relative to women.”; 156 n1. 2. The ‘naming of the heroine’ occurs as a reflexive trope in heroine-centred novels from Richardson onwards: with ritual malice, an enemy jeeringly associates the main female character with romance-reading, accusing her of entertaining paranoid fantasies, of selfdramatisation, in order to undermine her opposition to (corrupt) authority. When the heroine is vindicated, so too is the exemplary ‘truth’ of fiction. 3. Several recent interpretations of The Mysteries of Udolpho have alerted us to the importance of economic

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4. The same radical dualism—throne or grave—appeared with exemplary force in Wollstonecraft’s own lifestory after the publication of William Godwin’s incautious Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (1798). A champion of feminine propriety like the Rev. R. Polewhele was able to write, ‘I cannot but think, that the Hand of Providence is visible, in her life, her death, and in the Memoirs themselves. As she was given up to her “heart’s lusts,” and let “to follow her own imagination,” that the fallacy of her doctrines and the effects of an irreligious conduct might be manifested to the world; and as she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable; so her husband was permitted, in writing her Memoirs, to labour under a temporary infatuation, that every incident might be seen without a gloss—every fact exposed without an apology.’ (2930) 5. It is necessary to emphasise, in what might otherwise appear a rather static outline of the condition of women, that the boundaries between public and private, visible and invisible, the proper and the inadmissible, were undergoing major transition in this period. The critical reflections under discussion here were to some extent made possible by this process of change, and the explicit negotiations it involved. For more about the transformations in gender ideology, and the effect on women of the property-owning classes in particular, see Poovey (1984) Chapter 1 and Davidoff and Hall (1987). 6. In The Discourse of the Sublime: History, Aesthetics and the Subject Peter de Bolla provides a well-documented account of the ‘feminization’ of reading practices in the late of eighteenth century, with the rider that the majority of novel-readers may have been men (237). Statistics are difficult to come by in this area; they would not in any case alter an interpretation based on the novels’ own inscription of their readership, and the prevalent stereotype of the female reader circulated by journals and conduct books—added to the oblique image found in the satires. 7. See note 5. 8. Mary Ann Radcliffe’s polemic centres on the peculiar horrors of the plight of genteel women without financial means or male protectors, subjected to ‘the absolute necessity of bartering their virtue for bread.’ She criticises among other things the lack of useful

education for women, their exclusion from professions and replacement in traditionally female trades by ‘effeminate tradesmen’, and the abuses of ‘mercenary marriages’. 9. See Pateman (1988) on the survival of patriarchy in what has traditionally been seen by historians as the post-patriarchal ‘civil world of contract’ of the eighteenth century and after. 10. The rumour that Ann Radcliffe had gone mad by ‘the excessive use of her imagination in representing extravagant and violent scenes’ was widely credited (McIntyre, 1920, 19-20). It seemed to offer an explanation for her prolonged silence after the publication of The Italian. The Monthly Review circulated the story in their issue of July 1826, but printed an apology and correction after the posthumous appearance of Gaston de Blondville (1826) complete with a doctor’s report confirming her sanity at the time of death. 11. ‘We would admonish our young female readers not to expect, as the reward of their virtues, those critical and extraordinary coincidences which, against all the laws of probability and calculations of chances, invariably remove every obstacle that opposes the wishes of their favourite heroines . . .’; a representative example from a review of The Castle of Ollada in Critical Review. S.2, 14 (July 1795), 113-14. 12. The truth-value of Emily’s disturbing adventures as both subject and object resides precisely in that split identity—an unhappy consciousness manacled to an object of avaricious desire and economic exchange. This truth-value is apparently cancelled by the novel’s closure, when narrative and heroine disappear together in marriage. Yet it is worth noting that the wedding as a form of closure would itself express a partial, figurative truth for a society in which marriage was the vanishing-point of women’s individual existence, ‘a kind of civil death’.

Works Cited Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). Vol. 5 of The Novels of Jane Austen. Barrett, Eaton Stannard, The Heroine, or Adventures of Cherubina (Dublin: 1814). Beattie, James, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell; Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1783). Blackstone, Sir William, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Notes and additions by Edward Christian, 15th ed., 4 vols (London: Cadell & Davies, 1809). Boorstin, Daniel J., The Mysterious Science of the Law. An Essay on Blackstone’s COMMENTARIES, etc. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958). Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchison, 1987). de Bolla, Peter, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Kirkham, Margaret, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (New York, Methuen, 1986). Lukács, Georg, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971).

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factors in the unravelling of its plot, pulling into focus for the first time passages like that quoted above. ‘Money’, Mary Poovey states in ‘Ideology and the Mysteries of Udolpho’, ‘lurks behind every turn of The Mysteries plot.’ (1979, 323) In Literary Women, Ellen Moers pioneered the view that property takes precedence over ‘true love’ among the themes of what she called the ‘Female Gothic’. (1978, 136) Janet Todd has found in all of Radcliffe’s works an unstated equation of sexual and financial threat ‘but it is not really an equal association; perhaps it might better be said that the economic is sexualised.’ (262) Each suggests that fiction provided an apt if heightened representation of the real condition of women: ‘Fear is an appropriate response in a world where women have property or at least the opportunity of transmitting it, but where they have little power to control it.’ (Todd 262)

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND THE GOTHIC

McIntyre, Clara Francis, Ann Radcliffe in Relation to Her Time, Yale Studies in English, Vol. 62 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920).

Book-length study that examines works by Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Dacre, and Mary Shelley.

Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (London: Women’s Press, 1978).

D’Haen, Theo. “Postmodern Gothic.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, pp. 283-94. Atlanta, Ga. and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

Pateman, Carol, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Polewhele, Rev. R., The Unsex’d Females (London: Cadell and Davis, 1798). Poovey, Mary, ‘Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho’, Criticism 21 (Fall, 1979): 307-30. ———, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology and Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Radcliffe, Ann, The Italian, Or The Confessional of the Black Penitents, ed. Frederick Garber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). ———, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Radcliffe, Mary Ann, The Female Advocate, Or An Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation (London: Verner and Hood, 1799). Roche, Regina Maria, The Children of the Abbey (London: Minerva Press, 1797). Smith, Charlotte, The Old Manor House, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angelica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 (London: Virago Press, 1989). Wollstonecraft, Mary, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). ———, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

FURTHER READING

Argues that “the Gothic, as part of the fantastic, in postmodernism fulfils a particular function, and the recognition of the role it plays has rather far reaching implications for the entire discussion on postmodernism.” DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: a Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1990, 368 p. Applies feminist theory to the analysis of nineteenthcentury Gothic literature. Edmundson, Mark. “American Gothic.” In Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic, pp. 1-68. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Surveys the connections between the Gothic and sadomasochism in modern American society, horror films, and literature. Goldner, Ellen J. “Other(ed) Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison.” MELUS 24, no. 1 (1999): 59-83. Evaluates works by Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, and Toni Morrison that treat the subject of race, racism, and slavery. Haggerty, George E. “‘The End of History’: Identity and Dissolution in Apocalyptic Gothic.” Eighteenth Century 41, no. 3 (fall 2000): 225-46. Outlines millennialism in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Heller, Tamar. “Reigns of Terror: The Politics of the Female Gothic.” In Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, pp. 13-37. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Notes the various connections between Gothic literature and opinions regarding the traditional roles of women in the domestic sphere and in society.

Criticism Andriano, Joseph. Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, 182 p.

Hendershot, Cyndy. The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, 281 p.

Comprehensive analysis of the role of female demons in works of Gothic fiction by male authors.

Studies the treatment of masculinity in Gothic fiction and film.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880-1914.” In Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 18301914, pp. 227-53. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the fin de siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 203 p. Full-length analysis of the influence of science on the treatment of the human body and subjectivity in latenineteenth-century Gothic fiction.

Studies the significance of what Brantlinger classifies as the “imperial Gothic,” which, he asserts, “combines the seemingly scientific, progressive, often Darwinian ideology of imperialism with an antithetical interest in the occult.”

Kollin, Susan. “Race, Labor, and the Gothic Western: Dispelling Frontier Myths in Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (fall 2000): 67594.

Clery, E. J. Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley. Plymouth, England: Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 2000, 168 p.

Discusses the treatment of race and sex roles, as well as elements of both American Western fiction and Gothic conventions in Scarborough’s novel, The Wind.

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Interprets depictions of such stock Gothic characters as monsters, half-breeds, cannibals, and vampires as revealing British attitudes toward people of other races and cultures. Michasiw, Kim Ian. “Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor.” In Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, pp. 35-55. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Postcolonialist reading of Zofloya, emphasizing Dacre’s subversion of the traditional racial power structure. Navarette, Susan J. The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998, 314 p. Delineates the connection between horror literature of the late nineteenth century and the intellectual school of thought and works comprising the “Decadent style.” Person, Leland S. “Poe’s Philosophy of Amalgamation: Reading Racism in the Tales.” In Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, pp. 205-24. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Highlights racism present in works by Edgar Allan Poe. Reddy, Maureen T. “Female Sexuality in ‘The Poor Clare’: The Demon in the House.” Studies in Short Fiction 21, no. 3 (summer 1984): 259-65. Discusses Elizabeth Gaskell’s treatment of sexuality, women, and the double in her Gothic short story, “The Poor Clare.” Royster, Francesca T. “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (winter 2000): 432-55. Surveys the Gothic elements and Shakespeare’s treatment of race in Titus Andronicus. Schafer, Martin. “The Rise and Fall of Antiutopia: Utopia, Gothic Romance, Dystopia.” Science-Fiction Studies, no. 6 (1979): 287-95.

Studies Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, asserting that “an analysis of the thematic attention to surfaces changes the traditional view of the Gothic contribution to characterization and figuration in fiction.” ———. “Toward the Gothic: Terrorism and Homosexual Panic.” In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, pp. 83-96. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Explores the significance of homosexuality to the Gothic tradition. Smith, Allan Lloyd. “Postmodernism/Gothicism.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 6-19. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Suggests “some rather more significant parallels” between postmodernist and Gothic discourse, asserting that “[i]n this dual focus some new perspectives can be offered on both.” Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds. Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 248 p. A collection of essays that study Gothic literature through the lens of postcolonial literary theory. Spencer, Kathleen. “Victorian Urban Gothic: The First Modern Fantastic Literature.” In Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, pp. 87-96. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Examines the treatment of the city in Victorian fantasy novels and its connection to gothicism. Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 17901865. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992, 172 p. Full-length study of the treatment of the oppression of women in Gothic fiction and slave narratives.

Surveys the evolution of the Gothic romance from utopia to dystopia.

Wolstenholme, Susan. Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, 201 p.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 96, no. 2 (March 1981): 255-70.

Illustrates how Gothic fiction, perceived as a women’s literary genre, provided women writers with an unprecedented opportunity to explore an expansive array of narrative conventions, subjects, and perspectives.

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Malchow, H. L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996, 335 p.

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G

othic literature has influenced and inspired several subgenres of literature, including the supernatural tale, the ghost story, horror fiction, and vampire literature. Many critics have analyzed the connections between these subgenres and the Gothic tradition, as well as some of the most widely-discussed themes, figures, and settings found in Gothic literature and works in these various subgenres. While belief in the supernatural served as the basis for the mythologies of early civilizations, and afterward remained an enduring aspect of world folklore, it was not until the nineteenth century that a substantial body of works evolved that focused upon the otherworldly as a source of horror. Although Gothic novelists often included supernatural incidents in their works, they also pursued other concerns, particularly those related to eighteenth-century morals and manners. Such concerns precluded the single-minded focus and inventiveness of their successors in portraying weird and ghostly phenomena. The Gothic novel was characterized by intricate but often loosely constructed plots and subplots, stock characters such as the naive young woman and the lascivious male villain, and a medieval setting, such as a haunted, ruined castle. In contrast, nineteenthcentury supernatural fiction often takes the form of the short story, which critics agree is better suited to achieving the effect of horror, and

features more thoroughly developed characters and contemporary settings. The growth of popular magazines increased the proliferation of supernatural tales, and “penny dreadfuls” provided the working class with serialized tales of the macabre, such as Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1847), written by either Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer. Alternatively, some critics assert that, rather than serving as an escapist diversion from rigid social norms, the ghost story, advancing the idea that wrongdoers and eccentrics incur the wrath of ghosts, defended the status quo by discouraging rebellion against one’s position in society. Nineteenth-century supernatural fiction has also been viewed as a reaction against the materialism and rationalist philosophy that accompanied the rapid social changes brought about by the industrial revolution, during which an older, more stable way of life, with its traditional ways of thinking, was eclipsed by technological progress and the routines of urban life. The struggle between religion and science became an important issue as new theories that challenged traditional beliefs were advanced, most prominently Charles Darwin’s speculations on human evolution. Although a few commentators have maintained that a literalistic belief in the supernatural has always been, and will always be, a prerequisite

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for the creation and enjoyment of horror tales, most critics propose special reasons to explain the relatively recent phenomenon of supernatural fiction as a literary form. Among these reasons, one is most often given: the nineteenth century was an age of scientific and technological advancement that had distanced itself from many of the superstitions of the past; as a consequence, it was precisely these superstitions, exiled from the progressive consciousness of the day, that emerged in the works of literature. A corollary to this theory states that because earlier societies assumed the supernatural as part of the cosmic order, its manifestations could not inflict that dread peculiar to modern humanity. This explanation has been most prominently articulated by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay “Das Unheimlich” (“The Uncanny”), and is based on the assumption that beneath the surface of civilized skepticism survive all the irrational beliefs of humanity’s past. Thus, a common storyline in Gothic and horror fiction involves an unbelieving protagonist to whom it is proven—with unpleasant consequences—that some aspect of the supernatural is true. While supernatural fiction emerged as a distinct literary form in the Victorian era, it was also during this period that the focus of the genre began to shift away from confrontations with ghostly phenomena toward character psychology. Supernatural fiction had often addressed, albeit unwittingly, the concerns of the inchoate field of psychology by rendering unresolved inner conflict in a symbolic manner that is exemplified in the standard plot of a murderer haunted by the ghost of his victim, which then represents the murderer’s guilty conscience. Critics commonly read such works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and those in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (1894) as allegories of humankind’s struggle with instinctual needs and drives, laying bare the dark side of the human soul. Many observers maintain that supernatural fiction underwent a significant change when Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu introduced, with his “Green Tea” (1869), the apparition that may in fact be a product of the mind. This type of story was later developed with great success by Henry James in his novella The Turn of the Screw (1898). Thus, the legacy of supernatural fiction, somewhat paradoxically, has been a tendency among modern fiction writers to favor psychological horrors over those that have their roots in the archaic and essentially pastoral lore based on the existence of the supernatural.

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Despite all contentions that supernatural fiction suffered a decline in the early decades of the twentieth century, this literary genre has continued to flourish and grow in popularity, assisted by television and movie adaptations and imitations. Although some might contend that it has radically changed in quality and substance, becoming merely a source of income for hack writers who exploit the more sensationalistic aspects of the form, horror fiction has always been allied to the lower types of commercial literature, from the “shilling shockers” of the Gothic period to the mass-market “pageturners” of the present day. Even those authors who are recognized as the most profound and artistic practitioners of literary supernaturalism, such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, are often criticized as hopelessly vulgar and categorized far below the level of serious artists. At the same time, the highest examples of the supernatural genre have endured for the same reason as the more accepted classics of literature—their power to express through the medium of language some significant aspect of human experience. In the perception of many readers and critics, the works of such authors as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Walter de la Mare do not “transcend” the essential traits of supernatural fiction but rather bring them to perfection. As Lovecraft stated in his 1945 study Supernatural Horror in Literature: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.” The theme of the doppelgänger (the double, or “second self”) is prominent in nineteenth-century literature, from stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany to works of Robert Louis Stevenson in Great Britain, Edgar Allan Poe in the United States, and countless others. Although stories as ancient as the Greek myth of Narcissus feature characters’ fascination with their mirror images, and numerous folk tales center on the mysterious relation between a person and his or her shadow, the double as a dominant element in an artistic work was the creation of the German Romantics. Critics commonly note the appearance of the double in such earlier works as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s drama Faust (1808), presenting in Siebenkäs and his friend Leibgeber two intimately connected figures who are clearly meant to be taken as aspects of a single personality. Subsequently the German fantasist and musician Hoff-

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While the vampire can be traced throughout literary history and world folklore to antiquity, vampirism as the focus of narrative and theme in works of literature first became prominent in the early nineteenth century. John William Polidori’s novella The Vampyre, published in 1819, is generally considered to be the first work of vampire fiction and introduced several traits of the literary vampire, including a deathlike countenance and hypnotic powers. This work sparked popular interest, and a deluge of vampire stories followed, most prominently Varney the Vampyre. Another influential work of vampire literature was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1871-72), which depicted a lesbian relationship between vampire and victim, further expanding the conventions of vampirism to include an ambiguous sexual attraction between predator and prey, the vampire’s aversion to religious symbols, and aspects of sadism. With the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, the popular conception of vampires and their portrayal in literature became codified, resulting in the familiar stereotype of an aristocratic bloodsucker who preys upon beautiful young women. Stoker’s novel has been the focus of diverse social, psychological, and historical

interpretations. Many critics, for example, have asserted that the work is an admonition against deviant sexual behavior, emphasizing the association between vampires and the subversion of Christian and Victorian morality. Although much twentieth- and twenty-first-century vampire fiction incorporates characteristics of the nineteenthcentury vampire, commentators have noted a trend toward depictions of vampires as sympathetic and morally ambiguous characters, such as Louis in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), which contrasts with the traditional image of the vampire as threatening and thoroughly evil. Both as character and as symbol, critics find that the vampire in literature serves to reflect society’s views on sexuality, death, religion, and the role of women, and functions as a psychological metaphor for humanity’s most profound fears and desires.

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS Jane Austen Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 4 vols. (novels) 1818

Joanna Baillie Orra: a Tragedy, in Five Acts (play) 1812

Clive Barker The Damnation Game (novel) 1985 The Hellbound Heart (novella) 1986; published in the collection Night Visions 3, edited by George R. R. Martin; published separately, 1988

William Beckford *Vathek (novel) 1787

Algernon Blackwood The Empty House, and Other Ghosts (short stories) 1906 Ancient Sorceries, and Other Tales (short stories) 1927 The Dance of Death, and Other Tales (short stories) 1927 The Tales of Algernon Blackwood (short stories) 1938

Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights [as Ellis Bell] (novel) 1847

Charles Brockden Brown Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. 3 vols. (novel) 1799

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mann imaginatively and forcefully exploited the artistic potential of doubling in numerous short stories, including “Der Sandmann” (1817; “The Sandman”), and in the novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16; The Devil’s Elixir), which explores the power of demonic forces over a person’s existence. Hoffmann conjured up the doppelgänger, or double: a tangible and wholly independent embodiment of sinister powers. Hoffmann’s doubles draw from both human psychology and belief in the supernatural, reflecting nineteenth-century interest in scientific psychology but also retaining a link to occult traditions. As writers strove to explain duality according to the laws of reason and common sense, the double became an important metaphor of humankind’s struggle to reconcile opposing inner forces, such as destructiveness and creativity. Moreover, as the consequences of the industrial revolution became apparent, writers increasingly began to express in their works the idea of the divided self as a reaction to unnatural pressures exerted on the individual by an alienating society. Many works, such as Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla” (1886), Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina (1846; The Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg), Poe’s “William Wilson” (1840), and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), feature doubles.

GOTHIC THEMES, SETTINGS, AND FIGURES

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

William Godwin

Zanoni. 3 vols. (novel) 1842

Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. 3 vols. (novel) 1794

Lucretia; or, The Children of Night. 3 vols. (novel) 1846 A Strange Story. 2 vols. (novel) 1862

St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. 4 vols. (novel) 1799

George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale (poetry) 1813

Faust: Ein Fragment (play) 1790

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Third (poetry) 1816

Faust—Der Tragödie erster Teil [Faust. Part I.; published in Faust: A Drama by Goethe and Schiller’s “Song of the Bell”] (play) 1808

Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (verse drama) 1817 Don Juan, Cantos I-XVI. 6 vols. (poetry) 1819-24

Suzy McKee Charnas

Marquis von Grosse Genius [Horrid Mysteries] (short stories) 1796

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Vampire Tapestry (novel) 1980

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“The Birthmark” (short story) 1843; published in the journal Pioneer

Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep (poetry) 1816

The House of the Seven Gables, A Romance (novel) 1851

Charlotte Dacre Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century. 3 vols. (novel) 1806

Ellen Datlow Blood is Not Enough: Seventeen Stories of Vampirism (short stories) 1989

E. T. A. Hoffmann Die Elixiere des Teufels. 2 vols. [published anonymously; The Devil’s Elixir] (novel) 1815-16 †“Der Sandmann” [“The Sandman”] (short story) 1817

A Whisper of Blood (short stories) 1991

James Hogg

Walter de la Mare Ghost Stories (short stories) 1936

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (novel) 1824; republished as The Suicide’s Grave, 1828

Thomas De Quincey

Washington Irving

Confessions of an English Opium Eater (novel) 1821; published in two parts in London Magazine; published in book form, 1822

‡“Adventure of the German Student” [as Geoffrey Crayon] (short story) 1824

Shirley Jackson

Charles Dickens Bleak House (novel) 1853

The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris (short stories) 1949

“The Signal-Man” (short story) 1866; published in Mugby Junction

The Haunting of Hill House (novel) 1959

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Henry James

Dvoinik: Prikliucheniia gospodina Goliadkina [The Double: A Poem of St. Petersburg] (novel) 1846

The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End (novellas) 1898

Brat’ia Karamazovy [The Brothers Karamazov] (novel) 1880

Stephen King

Arthur Conan Doyle

Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with a Frightening Power (novel) 1974

The Parasite (novel) 1894

’Salem’s Lot (novel) 1975

Sigmund Freud

The Mist (novella) 1980; published in the collection Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley

“Das Unheimlich” [“The Uncanny”] 1919; published in the journal Imago

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The Tommyknockers (novel) 1987

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The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times. 3 vols. (novel) 1783

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh. 3 vols. (novel) 1864 “Green Tea” (short story) 1869; published in the journal All the Year Round “Carmilla” (short story) 1871-72; published serially in the journal Dark Blue

Matthew Gregory Lewis The Monk: A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1796 The Captive: A Scene in a Private Mad-House (play) 1803

H. P. Lovecraft

“The Gold Bug” (short story) 1843; published in two installments in the journal Dollar Newspaper “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (short story) 1844; published in the journal Godey’s Lady’s Book The Raven, and Other Poems (poetry) 1845 Tales by Edgar A. Poe (short stories) 1845

John William Polidori The Vampyre; a Tale (novella) 1819; published in the journal New Monthly Magazine

Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer **Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (novel) 1847

#“At the Mountains of Madness” (short story) 1936; published in the journal Astounding Stories

Ann Radcliffe

Supernatural Horror in Literature (criticism) 1945

The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents. A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1797

Arthur Machen The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (short stories) 1894

Richard Matheson Hell House (novel) 1971

The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance; Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry. 4 vols. (novel) 1794

Clara Reeve The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story (novel) 1777; republished as The Old English Baron, 1778

G. W. M. Reynolds

Charles Robert Maturin

Faust: A Romance of the Second Empire (novel) 1847

Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. 4 vols. (novel) 1820

Wagner the Wehr-wolf (novel) 1857

Guy de Maupassant

Anne Rice

㛳“Le Horla” [“The Horla”] (short story) 1886; published in the journal Le Gil Blas; revised version published in 1887

Interview with the Vampire (novel) 1976

Thomas Moore

The Witching Hour (novel) 1990

The Epicurean. A Tale (novel) 1827

The Vampire Armand (novel) 1998

Edgar Allan Poe

Blood Canticle (novel) 2003

Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian (poetry) 1827

Regina Maria Roche

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, North America: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny, Famine, and Shipwreck, During a Voyage to the South Seas; Resulting in Various Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries in the Eightyfourth Parallel of Southern Latitude [published anonymously] (novel) 1838 §“William Wilson” (short story) 1840 “The Oval Portrait” (short story) 1842; published in the journal Graham’s Magazine

The Vampire Lestat (novel) 1985 The Queen of the Damned (novel) 1988

Children of the Abbey (novel) 1798

Dante Gabriel Rossetti “Hand and Soul” (short story) 1850; published in the journal the Germ ††“St. Agnes of Intercession” (unfinished short story) c. 1850 ‡‡“The Portrait” (poem) 1869

Sir Walter Scott Rokeby: A Poem (poetry) 1813

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Sophia Lee

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Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. 3 vols. (novel) 1814 ##The Keepsake for 1829 (short stories) 1828 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (nonfiction) 1830

William Shakespeare Hamlet (play) c. 1600-01

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. (novel) 1818; revised edition, 1831

Percy Bysshe Shelley Zastrozzi, A Romance (novel) 1810 St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance [as “A Gentleman of the University of Oxford”] (novel) 1811

Dan Simmons Carrion Comfort (novel) 1989

Robert Louis Stevenson

The Palace: A Historical Horror Novel (novel) 1979 Blood Games: A Novel of Historical Horror (novel) 1980 *

The unauthorized translation of Vathek was published as An Arabian Tale, 1786. † This story was included in the collection, Nachtstücke, herausgegeben von dem Verfasser der Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, Vol. 1, published anonymously, 1817. ‡ This story was first published in the collection Tales of a Traveller. 2 vols., in 1824. # This story was written in 1931, and was collected in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels in 1985. 㛳 This story was first published in an earlier version as “Lettre d’un fou” (“Letter from a Madman”) in 1885. § This story was published in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840. ** Authorship of this novel has been alternately attributed to Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer. †† This unfinished story was begun in 1850 and was not published during Rossetti’s lifetime. It was included in the collection The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1911. ‡‡ This sonnet was published in the collection Poems, 1869. ## This collection includes the short stories “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” “The Tapestried Chamber; or, The Lady in the Sacque,” and “The Laird’s Jock.”

Treasure Island (novel) 1883 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (novella) 1886

Bram Stoker Dracula (novel) 1897 Dracula’s Guest, and Other Weird Stories (short stories) 1914

Whitley Strieber The Hunger (novel) 1981

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (POEM DATE 1809) SOURCE: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Three Graves: A Fragment of a Sexton’s Tale.” In Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction and notes by Richard Holmes, pp. 69-80. New York: Penguin Group, 1994. The following poem was composed by Coleridge in 1797, and first published in the journal The Friend in 1809. Coleridge explains in his preface that his own fragment of this ballad is based upon a poem (which Coleridge summarizes) written by William Wordsworth.

Communion: A True Story (nonfiction) 1987 The Wild (novel) 1991

George Sylvester Viereck The House of the Vampire (novel) 1907

Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto, A Story (novel) 1764 The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy (play) 1768

Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) 1890; first published in the journal Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine; revised edition, 1891

C. Q. Yarbro Hotel Transylvania: A Novel of Forbidden Love (novel) 1978

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“The Author has published the following humble fragment, encouraged by the decisive recommendation of more than one of our most celebrated living Poets. The language was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore presented as the fragment, not of a Poem, but of a common Ballad-tale. Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is himself in some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as poetry, and it is in no way connected with the Author’s judgment concerning poetic diction. Its merits, if any, are exclusively psychological. The

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“Edward, a young farmer, meets at the house of Ellen her bosom-friend Mary, and commences an acquaintance, which ends in a mutual attachment. With her consent, and by the advice of their common friend Ellen, he announces his hopes and intentions to Mary’s mother, a widow-woman bordering on her fortieth year, and from constant health, the possession of a competent property, and from having had no other children but Mary and another daughter (the father died in their infancy), retaining for the greater part her personal attractions and comeliness of appearance; but a woman of low education and violent temper. The answer which she at once returned to Edward’s application was remarkable—‘Well, Edward! you are a handsome young fellow, and you shall have my daughter.’ From this time all their wooing passed under the mother’s eye; and, in fine, she became herself enamoured of her future son-inlaw, and practised every art, both of endearment and of calumny, to transfer his affections from her daughter to herself. (The outlines of the Tale are positive facts, and of no very distant date, though the author has purposely altered the names and the scene of action, as well as invented the characters of the parties and the detail of the incidents.) Edward, however, though perplexed by her strange detractions from her daughter’s good qualities, yet in the innocence of his own heart still mistook her increasing fondness for motherly affection; she at length, overcome by her miserable passion, after much abuse of Mary’s temper and moral tendencies, exclaimed with violent emotion—‘O Edward! indeed, indeed, she is not fit for you—she has not a heart to love you as you deserve. It is I that love you! Marry me, Edward! and I will this very day settle all my property on you.’ The Lover’s eyes were now opened; and thus taken by surprise, whether from the effect of the horror which he felt, acting as it were hysterically on his nervous system, or that at the first moment he lost the sense of the guilt of the proposal in the feeling of its strangeness and absurdity, he flung her from him and burst into a fit of laughter. Irritated by this almost to frenzy, the woman fell on her knees, and in a loud voice that approached to a scream, she prayed for a curse both on him and on her own child. Mary happened to be in the room directly above them, heard Edward’s laugh, and her mother’s blasphemous prayer, and fainted away. He, hearing the fall, ran upstairs, and taking her in his arms, carried her off to Ellen’s home; and after some fruitless attempts on

her part toward a reconciliation with her mother, she was married to him.—And here the third part of the Tale begins. “I was not led to choose this story from any partiality to tragic, much less to monstrous events (though at the time that I composed the verses, somewhat more than twelve years ago, I was less averse to such subjects than at present), but from finding in it a striking proof of the possible effect on the imagination, from an idea violently and suddenly impressed on it. I had been reading Bryan Edwards’s account of the effects of the Oby witchcraft on the Negroes in the West Indies, and Hearne’s deeply interesting anecdotes of similar workings on the imagination of the Copper Indians (those of my readers who have it in their power will be well repaid for the trouble of referring to those works for the passages alluded to); and I conceived the design of shewing that instances of this kind are not peculiar to savage or barbarous tribes, and of illustrating the mode in which the mind is affected in these cases, and the progress and symptoms of the morbid action on the fancy from the beginning. “The Tale is supposed to be narrated by an old Sexton, in a country church-yard, to a traveller whose curiosity had been awakened by the appearance of three graves, close by each other, to two only of which there were grave-stones. On the first of these was the name, and dates, as usual: on the second, no name, but only a date, and the words, ‘The Mercy of God is infinite.’”

Part III The grapes upon the Vicar’s wall Were ripe as ripe could be; And yellow leaves in sun and wind Were falling from the tree. On the hedge-elms in the narrow lane Still swung the spikes of corn: Dear Lord! it seems but yesterday— Young Edward’s marriage-morn. Up through that wood behind the church, There leads from Edward’s door A mossy track, all over boughed, For half a mile or more. And from their house-door by that track The bride and bridegroom went; Sweet Mary, though she was not gay, Seemed cheerful and content. But when they to the church-yard came, I’ve heard poor Mary say, As soon as she stepped into the sun, Her heart it died away.

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story which must be supposed to have been narrated in the first and second parts is as follows:—

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And when the Vicar join’d their hands, Her limbs did creep and freeze: But when they prayed, she thought she saw Her mother on her knees.

The mother walked into the church— To Ellen’s seat she went: Though Ellen always kept her church All church-days during Lent.

And o’er the church-path they returned— I saw poor Mary’s back, Just as she stepped beneath the boughs Into the mossy track.

And gentle Ellen welcomed her With courteous looks and mild: Thought she, “What if her heart should melt, And all be reconciled!”

Her feet upon the mossy track The married maiden set: That moment—I have heard her say— She wished she could forget.

The day was scarcely like a day— The clouds were black outright: And many a night, with half a moon, I’ve seen the church more light.

The shade o’er-flushed her limbs with heat— Then came a chill like death: And when the merry bells rang out, They seemed to stop her breath.

The wind was wild; against the glass The rain did beat and bicker; The church-tower swinging over head, You scarce could hear the Vicar!

Beneath the foulest mother’s curse No child could ever thrive: A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.

And then and there the mother knelt, And audibly she cried— “Oh! may a clinging curse consume This woman by my side!

So five months passed: the mother still Would never heal the strife; But Edward was a loving man And Mary a fond wife.

“O hear me, hear me, Lord in Heaven, Although you take my life— O curse this woman, at whose house Young Edward woo’d his wife.

“My sister may not visit us, My mother says her nay: O Edward! you are all to me, I wish for your sake I could be More lifesome and more gay.

“By night and day, in bed and bower, O let her curséd be!!!” So having prayed, steady and slow, She rose up from her knee! And left the church, nor e’er again The church-door entered she.

“I’m dull and sad! indeed, indeed I know I have no reason! Perhaps I am not well in health, And ’tis a gloomy season.” ’Twas a drizzly time—no ice, no snow! And on the few fine days She stirred not out, lest she might meet Her mother in the ways. But Ellen, spite of miry ways And weather dark and dreary, Trudged every day to Edward’s house, And made them all more cheery.

I saw poor Ellen kneeling still, So pale! I guessed not why: When she stood up, there plainly was A trouble in her eye. And when the prayers were done, we all Came round and asked her why: Giddy she seemed, and sure, there was A trouble in her eye. But ere she from the church-door stepped She smiled and told us why: “It was a wicked woman’s curse,” Quoth she, “and what care I?”

Oh! Ellen was a faithful friend, More dear than any sister! As cheerful too as singing lark; And she ne’er left them till ’twas dark, And then they always missed her.

She smiled, and smiled, and passed it off Ere from the door she stept— But all agree it would have been Much better had she wept.

And now Ash-Wednesday came—that day But few to church repair: For on that day you know we read The Commination prayer.

And if her heart was not at ease, This was her constant cry— “It was a wicked woman’s curse— God’s good, and what care I?”

Our late old Vicar, a kind man, Once, Sir, he said to me, He wished that service was clean out Of our good Liturgy.

There was a hurry in her looks, Her struggles she redoubled: “It was a wicked woman’s curse, And why should I be troubled?”

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But Mary heard the tale: her arms Round Ellen’s neck she threw; “O Ellen, Ellen, she cursed me, And now she hath cursed you!” I saw young Edward by himself Stalk fast adown the lee, He snatched a stick from every fence, A twig from every tree. He snapped them still with hand or knee, And then away they flew! As if with his uneasy limbs He knew not what to do! You see, good sir! that single hill? His farm lies underneath: He heard it there, he heard it all, And only gnashed his teeth. Now Ellen was a darling love In all his joys and cares: And Ellen’s name and Mary’s name Fast-linked they both together came, Whene’er he said his prayers. And in the moment of his prayers He loved them both alike: Yea, both sweet names with one sweet joy Upon his heart did strike! He reach’d his home, and by his looks They saw his inward strife: And they clung round him with their arms, Both Ellen and his wife.

I’d rather dance upon ’em all Than tread upon these three! “Aye, Sexton! ’tis a touching tale.” You, Sir! are but a lad; This month I’m in my seventieth year, And still it makes me sad. And Mary’s sister told it me, For three good hours and more; Though I had heard it, in the main, From Edward’s self, before. Well! it passed off! the gentle Ellen Did well nigh dote on Mary; And she went oftener than before, And Mary loved her more and more: She managed all the dairy. To market she on market-days, To church on Sundays came; All seemed the same: all seemed so, Sir! But all was not the same! Had Ellen lost her mirth? Oh! no! But she was seldom cheerful; And Edward looked as if he thought That Ellen’s mirth was fearful. When by herself, she to herself Must sing some merry rhyme; She could not now be glad for hours, Yet silent all the time. And when she soothed her friend, through all Her soothing words ’twas plain She had a sore grief of her own, A haunting in her brain.

And Mary could not check her tears, So on his breast she bowed; Then frenzy melted into grief, And Edward wept aloud.

And oft she said, I’m not grown thin! And then her wrist she spanned; And once when Mary was down-cast, She took her by the hand, And gazed upon her, and at first She gently pressed her hand;

Dear Ellen did not weep at all, But closelier did she cling, And turned her face and looked as if She saw some frightful thing.

Then harder, till her grasp at length Did gripe like a convulsion! “Alas!” said she, “we ne’er can be Made happy by compulsion!”

Part IV To see a man tread over graves I hold it no good mark; ’Tis wicked in the sun and moon, And bad luck in the dark! You see that grave? The Lord he gives, The Lord, he takes away: O Sir! the child of my old age Lies there as cold as clay. Except that grave, you scarce see one That was not dug by me;

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These tears will come—I dandled her When ’twas the merest fairy— Good creature! and she hid it all: She told it not to Mary.

And once her both arms suddenly Round Mary’s neck she flung, And her heart panted, and she felt The words upon her tongue. She felt them coming, but no power Had she the words to smother; And with a kind of shriek she cried, “Oh Christ! you’re like your mother!” So gentle Ellen now no more Could make this sad house cheery; And Mary’s melancholy ways Drove Edward wild and weary.

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Lingering he raised his latch at eve, Though tired in heart and limb: He loved no other place, and yet Home was no home to him.

“The Sun peeps through the close thick leaves, See, dearest Ellen! see! ’Tis in the leaves, a little sun, No bigger than your ee;

One evening he took up a book, And nothing in it read; Then flung it down, and groaning cried, “O! Heaven! that I were dead.”

“A tiny sun, and it has got A perfect glory too; Ten thousand threads and hairs of light, Make up a glory gay and bright Round that small orb, so blue.”

Mary looked up into his face, And nothing to him said; She tried to smile, and on his arm Mournfully leaned her head. And he burst into tears, and fell Upon his knees in prayer: “Her heart is broke! O God! my grief, It is too great to bear!” ’Twas such a foggy time as makes Old sextons, Sir! like me, Rest on their spades to cough; the spring Was late uncommonly.

And then they argued of those rays, What colour they might be; Says this, “They’re mostly green”; says that, “They’re amber-like to me.” So they sat chatting, while bad thoughts Were troubling Edward’s rest; But soon they heard his hard quick pants, And the thumping in his breast. “A mother too!” these self-same words Did Edward mutter plain; His face was drawn back on itself, With horror and huge pain.

And then the hot days, all at once, They came, we knew not how: You looked about for shade, when scarce A leaf was on a bough.

Both groaned at once, for both knew well What thoughts were in his mind; When he waked up, and stared like one That hath been just struck blind.

It happened then (’twas in the bower, A furlong up the wood: Perhaps you know the place, and yet I scarce know how you should,)

He sat upright; and ere the dream Had had time to depart, “O God, forgive me!” (he exclaimed) “I have torn out her heart.”

No path leads thither, ’tis not nigh To any pasture-plot; But clustered near the chattering brook, Lone hollies marked the spot.

Then Ellen shrieked, and forthwith burst Into ungentle laughter; And Mary shivered, where she sat, And never she smiled after.

Those hollies of themselves a shape As of an arbour took, A close, round arbour; and it stands Not three strides from a brook. Within this arbour, which was still With scarlet berries hung, Were these three friends, one Sunday morn, Just as the first bell rung. ’Tis sweet to hear a brook, ’tis sweet To hear the Sabbath-bell, ’Tis sweet to hear them both at once, Deep in a woody dell. His limbs along the moss, his head Upon a mossy heap, With shut-up senses, Edward lay: That brook e’en on a working day Might chatter one to sleep. And he had passed a restless night, And was not well in health; The women sat down by his side, And talked as ’twere by stealth.

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GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON (NOVEL FRAGMENT DATE 1819) SOURCE: Byron, George Gordon Noel, Lord. “Fragment of a Novel.” In Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Vampyre, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. 287-91. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966. The following novel fragment, written in 1816 but first published as an appendix to Byron’s Mazeppa in 1819, served as John Polidori’s inspiration and model for his novella, The Vampyre. Byron composed the fragment during the competition between Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and himself, during which Mary Shelley produced her 1818 novel, Frankenstein. June 17, 1816

“In the year 17—, having for some time determined on a journey through countries not hitherto much frequented by travellers, I set out, accompanied by a friend, whom I shall designate by the name of Augustus Darvell. He was a few years my elder, and a man of considerable fortune G O T H I C L I T E R AT U R E : A G A L E C R I T I C A L C O M PA N I O N , VO L . 1

“I was yet young in life, which I had begun early; but my intimacy with him was of a recent date: we had been educated at the same schools and university; but his progress through these had preceded mine, and he had been deeply initiated into what is called the world, while I was yet in my novitiate. While thus engaged, I heard much both of his past and present life; and, although in these accounts there were many and irreconcilable contradictions, I could still gather from the whole that he was a being of no common order, and one who, whatever pains he might take to avoid remark, would still be remarkable. I had cultivated his acquaintance subsequently, and endeavoured to obtain his friendship, but this last appeared to be unattainable; whatever affections he might have possessed seemed now, some to have been extinguished, and others to be concentred: that his feelings were acute, I had sufficient opportunities of observing; for, although he could control, he could not altogether disguise them: still he had a power of giving to one passion the appearance of another, in such a manner that it was difficult to define the nature of what was working within him; and the expressions of his features would vary so rapidly, though slightly, that it was useless to trace them to their sources. It was evident that he was a prey to some cureless disquiet; but whether it arose from ambition, love, remorse, grief, from one or all of these, or merely from a morbid temperament akin to disease, I could not discover: there were circumstances alleged which might have justified the application to each of these causes; but, as I have before said, these were so contradictory and contradicted, that none could be fixed upon with accuracy. Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil: I know not how this may be, but in him there certainly was the one, though I could not ascertain the extent of the other—and felt loth, as far as regarded himself, to believe in its existence. My advances were received with sufficient coldness: but I was young, and not easily discouraged, and at length succeeded in obtaining, to a certain degree, that common-place intercourse and moderate confidence of common

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ GEORGE GORDON NOEL, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)

Despite Lord Byron’s enormous influence in Europe—both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Aleksander Pushkin considered him a master poet—his work was not favorably received in his native England until almost a century after his death. Continued interest in Byron’s work is as rooted in the examination of his controversial personality and exploits as in the literary merits of his work. Byron’s most notable contribution to Romanticism is the Byronic hero, a character type that was influenced by the Gothic hero-villains in novels by such authors as Horace Walpole, Matthew Gregory Lewis, William Beckford, and Mary Shelley. The Byronic hero has been likened to Byron himself, and is a melancholy man, often with a dark past, who eschews societal and religious strictures and seeks truth and happiness in an apparently meaningless universe. The title character of Byron’s first verse drama, Manfred (1817), is a quintessential Byronic hero: consumed by his own sense of guilt for an incestuous relationship with his sister, Astarte, he finally seeks peace through his own death. The drama is set in the Alps where Manfred lives in a Gothic castle. Tortured by his guilt, Manfred invokes six spirits associated with earth and the elements, and a seventh who determines Manfred’s personal destiny. Byron composed a novel fragment during the famous “ghoststory sessions” in 1816 when Mary Shelley is purported to have composed Frankenstein; this novel fragment served as the inspiration and impetus for John Polidori’s The Vampyre. This novel fragment and the other works Byron composed between 1812 and 1818 (prior to the 1819 publication of Don Juan, his most highly respected work) contain many elements of the Gothic tradition, including ruined settings, tortured characters, and encounters with the supernatural. These works include the three “Turkish tales”—The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), and The Corsair—, Lara (1814), and the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812).

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and ancient family: advantages which an extensive capacity prevented him alike from undervaluing or overrating. Some peculiar circumstances in his private history had rendered him to me an object of attention, of interest, and even of regard, which neither the reserve of his manners, nor occasional indications of an inquietude at times nearly approaching to alienation of mind, could extinguish.

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and every-day concerns, created and cemented by similarity of pursuit and frequency of meeting, which is called intimacy, or friendship, according to the ideas of him who uses those words to express them. “Darvell had already travelled extensively; and to him I had applied for information with regard to the conduct of my intended journey. It was my secret wish that he might be prevailed on to accompany me; it was also a probable hope, founded upon the shadowy restlessness which I observed in him, and to which the animation which he appeared to feel on such subjects, and his apparent indifference to all by which he was more immediately surrounded, gave fresh strength. This wish I first hinted, and then expressed: his answer, though I had partly expected it, gave me all the pleasure of surprise—he consented; and, after the requisite arrangement, we commenced our voyages. After journeying through various countries of the south of Europe, our attention was turned towards the East, according to our original destination; and it was in my progress through these regions that the incident occurred upon which will turn what I may have to relate. “The constitution of Darvell, which must from his appearance have been in early life more than usually robust, had been for some time gradually giving away, without the intervention of any apparent disease: he had neither cough nor hectic, yet he became daily more enfeebled; his habits were temperate, and he neither declined nor complained of fatigue; yet he was evidently wasting away: he became more and more silent and sleepless, and at length so seriously altered, that my alarm grew proportionate to what I conceived to be his danger. “We had determined, on our arrival at Smyrna, on an excursion to the ruins of Ephesus and Sardis, from which I endeavoured to dissuade him in his present state of indisposition—but in vain: there appeared to be an oppression on his mind, and a solemnity in his manner, which ill corresponded with his eagerness to proceed on what I regarded as a mere party of pleasure little suited to a valetudinarian; but I opposed him no longer— and in a few days we set off together, accompanied only by a serrugee and a single janizary. “We had passed halfway towards the remains of Ephesus, leaving behind us the more fertile environs of Smyrna, and were entering upon that wild and tenantless tract through the marshes and defiles which lead to the few huts yet lingering over the broken columns of Diana—the roofless

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walls of expelled Christianity, and the still more recent but complete desolation of abandoned mosques—when the sudden and rapid illness of my companion obliged us to halt at a Turkish cemetery, the turbaned tombstones of which were the sole indication that human life had ever been a sojourner in this wilderness. The only caravansera we had seen was left some hours behind us, not a vestige of a town or even cottage was within sight or hope, and this ‘city of the dead’ appeared to be the sole refuge of my unfortunate friend, who seemed on the verge of becoming the last of its inhabitants. “In this situation, I looked round for a place where he might most conveniently repose:— contrary to the usual aspect of Mahometan burialgrounds, the cypresses were in this few in number, and these thinly scattered over its extent; the tombstones were mostly fallen, and worn with age:—upon one of the most considerable of these, and beneath one of the most spreading trees, Darvell supported himself, in a half-reclining posture, with great difficulty. He asked for water. I had some doubts of our being able to find any, and prepared to go in search of it with hesitating despondency: but he desired me to remain; and turning to Suleiman, our janizary, who stood by us smoking with great tranquillity, he said, ‘Suleiman, verbana su,’ (i.e. ‘bring some water,’) and went on describing the spot where it was to be found with great minuteness, at a small well for camels, a few hundred yards to the right: the janizary obeyed. I said to Darvell, ‘How did you know this?’—He replied, ‘From our situation; you must perceive that this place was once inhabited, and could not have been so without springs: I have also been here before.’ “‘You have been here before!—How came you never to mention this to me? and what could you be doing in a place where no one would remain a moment longer than they could help it?’ “To this question I received no answer. In the mean time Suleiman returned with the water, leaving the serrugee and the horses at the fountain. The quenching of his thirst had the appearance of reviving him for a moment; and I conceived hopes of his being able to proceed, or at least to return, and I urged the attempt. He was silent—and appeared to be collecting his spirits for an effort to speak. He began— “‘This is the end of my journey, and of my life;—I came here to die; but I have a request to make, a command—for such my last words must be.—You will observe it?’

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“‘I have no hopes, nor wishes, but this— conceal my death from every human being.’ “‘I hope there will be no occasion; that you will recover, and———’ “‘Peace!—it must be so: promise this.’ “‘I do.’ “‘Swear it, by all that———’ He here dictated an oath of great solemnity. “‘There is no occasion for this. I will observe your request; and to doubt me is———’ “‘It cannot be helped,—you must swear.’ “I took the oath, it appeared to relieve him. He removed a seal ring from his finger, on which were some Arabic characters, and presented it to me. He proceeded— “‘On the ninth day of the month, at noon precisely (what month you please, but this must be the day), you must fling this ring into the salt springs which run into the Bay of Eleusis; the day after, at the same hour, you must repair to the ruins of the temple of Ceres, and wait one hour.’ “‘Why?’ “‘You will see.’ “‘The ninth day of the month, you say?’

“‘Doubtless: there is nothing uncommon in it; it is her natural prey. But it is odd that she does not devour it.’ “He smiled in a ghastly manner, and said faintly, ‘It is not yet time!’ As he spoke, the stork flew away. My eyes followed it for a moment—it could hardly be longer than ten might be counted. I felt Darvell’s weight, as it were, increase upon my shoulder, and, turning to look upon his face, perceived that he was dead! “I was shocked with the sudden certainty which could not be mistaken—his countenance in a few minutes became nearly black. I should have attributed so rapid a change to poison, had I not been aware that he had no opportunity of receiving it unperceived. The day was declining, the body was rapidly altering, and nothing remained but to fulfil his request. With the aid of Suleiman’s ataghan and my own sabre, we scooped a shallow grave upon the spot which Darvell had indicated: the earth easily gave way, having already received some Mahometan tenant. We dug as deeply as the time permitted us, and throwing the dry earth upon all that remained of the singular being so lately departed, we cut a few sods of greener turf from the less withered soil around us, and laid them upon his sepulchre. “Between astonishment and grief, I was tearless.”

“‘The ninth.’ “As I observed that the present was the ninth day of the month, his countenance changed, and he paused. As he sat, evidently becoming more feeble, a stork, with a snake in her beak, perched upon a tombstone near us; and, without devouring her prey, appeared to be steadfastly regarding us. I know not what impelled me to drive it away, but the attempt was useless; she made a few circles in the air, and returned exactly to the same spot. Darvell pointed to it, and smiled—he spoke—I know not whether to himself or to me—but the words were only, ‘’Tis well!’ “‘What is well? What do you mean?’ “‘No matter; you must bury me here this evening, and exactly where that bird is now perched. You know the rest of my injunctions.’ “He then proceeded to give me several directions as to the manner in which his death might be best concealed. After these were finished, he exclaimed, ‘You perceive that bird?’ “‘Certainly.’ “‘And the serpent writhing in her beak?’

JOHN WILLIAM POLIDORI (NOVELLA DATE 1819) SOURCE: Polidori, John William. The Vampyre: A Tale. 1819. Reprinted in The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick, pp. 265-83. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. The following excerpt is from Polidori’s novella, written in 1816 and first published in 1819 in New Monthly Magazine.

Next morning Aubrey set off upon his excursion unattended; he was surprised to observe the melancholy face of his host, and was concerned to find that his words, mocking the belief of those horrible fiends, had inspired them with such terror.—When he was about to depart, Ianthe came to the side of his horse and earnestly begged of him to return, ere night allowed the power of these beings to be put in action—he promised. He was, however, so occupied in his research that he did not perceive that day-light would soon end, and that in the horizon there was one of those specks which in the warmer climates so rapidly gather into a tremenduous mass and pour all their

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“‘Most certainly; but I have better hopes.’

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rage upon the devoted country.—He at last, however, mounted his horse, determined to make up by speed for his delay: but it was too late. Twilight in these southern climates is almost unknown; immediately the sun sets, night begins; and ere he had advanced far, the power of the storm was above—its echoing thunders had scarcely an interval of rest—its thick heavy rain forced its way through the canopying foliage, whilst the blue forked lightning seemed to fall and radiate at his very feet. Suddenly his horse took fright, and he was carried with dreadful rapidity through the entangled forest. The animal at last, through fatigue, stopped, and he found, by the glare of lightening, that he was in the neighbourhood of a hovel that hardly lifted itself up from the masses of dead leaves and brushwood which surrounded it. Dismounting, he approached, hoping to find some one to guide him to the town, or at least trusting to obtain shelter from the pelting of the storm. As he approached, the thunders, for a moment silent, allowed him to hear the dreadful shrieks of a woman mingling with the stifled exultant mockery of a laugh, continued in one almost unbroken sound; he was startled: but, roused by the thunder which again rolled over his head, he with a sudden effort forced open the door of the hut. He found himself in utter darkness; the sound, however, guided him. He was apparently unperceived; for though he called, still the sounds continued, and no notice was taken of him. He found himself in contact with some one, whom he immediately seized, when a voice cried ‘again baffled,’ to which a loud laugh succeeded, and he felt himself grappled by one whose strength seemed superhuman: determined to sell his life as dearly as he could, he struggled: but it was in vain: he was lifted from his feet and hurled with enormous force against the ground:—his enemy threw himself upon him, and kneeling upon his breast, had placed his hands upon his throat, when the glare of many torches penetrating through the hole that gave light in the day, disturbed him—he instantly rose and, leaving his prey, rushed through the door, and in a moment the crashing of the branches, as he broke through the wood, was no longer heard.—The storm was now still; and Aubrey, incapable of moving, was soon heard by those without.—They entered; the light of their torches fell upon the mud walls, and the thatch loaded on every individual straw with heavy flakes of soot. At the desire of Aubrey they searched for her who had attracted him by her cries; he was again left in darkness; but what was his horror,

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when the light of the torches once more burst upon him, to perceive the airy form of his fair conductress brought in a lifeless corse. He shut his eyes, hoping that it was but a vision arising from his disturbed imagination; but he again saw the same form, when he unclosed them, stretched by his side. There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there:—upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein:—to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, ‘a Vampyre, a Vampyre!’ A litter was quickly formed, and Aubrey was laid by the side of her who had lately been to him the object of so many bright and fairy visions, now fallen with the flower of life that had died within her. He knew not what his thoughts were—his mind was benumbed and seemed to shun reflection and take refuge in vacancy—he held almost unconsciously in his hand a naked dagger of a particular construction, which had been found in the hut.— They were soon met by different parties who had been engaged in the search of her whom a mother had soon missed.—Their lamentable cries, as they approached the city, forewarned the parents of some dreadful catastrophe.—To describe their grief would be impossible; but when they ascertained the cause of their child’s death they looked at Aubrey and pointed to the corpse.—They were inconsolable; both died broken-hearted. Aubrey being put to bed was seized with a most violent fever, and was often delirious; in these intervals he would call upon Lord Ruthven and upon Ianthe—by some unaccountable combination he seemed to beg of his former companion to spare the being he loved.—At other times he would imprecate maledictions upon his head, and curse him as her destroyer. Lord Ruthven chanced at this time to arrive at Athens, and, from whatever motive, upon hearing of the state of Aubrey, immediately placed himself in the same house and became his constant attendant. When the latter recovered from his delirium he was horrified and startled at the sight of him whose image he had now combined with that of a Vampyre; but Lord Ruthven by his kind words, implying almost repentance for the fault that had caused their separation, and still more by the attention, anxiety, and care which he showed, soon reconciled him to his presence. His Lordship seemed quite changed; he no longer appeared that apathetic being who had so astonished Aubrey; but as soon as his convalescence began to be rapid, he again

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Aubrey’s mind, by this shock, was much weakened, and that elasticity of spirit which had once so distinguished him now seemed to have fled for ever.—He was now as much a lover of solitude and silence as Lord Ruthven; but much as he wished for solitude, his mind could not find it in the neighbourhood of Athens; if he sought it amidst the ruins he had formerly frequented, Ianthe’s form stood by his side—if he sought it in the woods, her light step would appear wandering amidst the underwood, in quest of the modest violet; then suddenly turning round would show, to his wild imagination, her pale face and wounded throat with a meek smile upon her lips. He determined to fly scenes, every feature of which created such bitter associations in his mind. He proposed to Lord Ruthven, to whom he held himself bound by the tender care he had taken of him during his illness, that they should visit those parts of Greece neither had yet seen. They travelled in every direction, and sought every spot to which a recollection could be attached; but though they thus hastened from place to place yet they seemed not to heed what they gazed upon.—They heard much of robbers, but they gradually began to slight these reports, which they imagined were only the invention of individuals, whose interest it was to excite the generosity of those whom they defended from pretended dangers. In consequence of thus neglecting the advice of the inhabitants, on one occasion they travelled with only a few guards, more to serve as guides than as a defence.—Upon entering, however, a narrow defile, at the bottom of which was the bed of a torrent, with large masses of rock brought down from the neighbouring precipices, they had reason to repent their negligence—for, scarcely were the whole of the party engaged in the narrow pass, when they were startled by the whistling of bullets close to their heads, and by the echoed report of several guns. In an instant their guards had left them, and placing themselves behind rocks had begun to fire in the direction whence

the report came. Lord Ruthven and Aubrey, imitating their example, retired for a moment behind a sheltering turn of the defile; but ashamed of being thus detained by a foe, who with insulting shouts bade them advance, and being exposed to unresisting slaughter, if any of the robbers should climb above and take them in the rear, they determined at once to rush forward in search of the enemy.—Hardly had they lost the shelter of the rock, when Lord Ruthven received a shot in the shoulder that brought him to the ground.— Aubrey hastened to his assistance, and no longer heeding the contest or his own peril, was soon surprised by seeing the robbers’ faces around him; his guards having, upon Lord Ruthven’s being wounded, immediately thrown up their arms and surrendered. By promises of great reward, Aubrey soon induced them to convey his wounded friend to a neighbouring cabin, and having agreed upon a ransom he was no more disturbed by their presence, they being content to merely guard the entrance till their comrade should return with the promised sum for which he had an order.—Lord Ruthven’s strength rapidly decreased; in two days mortification ensued, and death seemed advancing with hasty steps.—His conduct and appearance had not changed; he seemed as unconscious of pain as he had been of the objects about him; but towards the close of the last evening his mind became apparently uneasy, and his eye often fixed upon Aubrey, who was induced to offer his assistance with more than usual earnestness—‘Assist me! you may save me—you may do more than that—I mean not my life, I heed the death of my existence as little as that of the passing day; but you may save my honour, your friend’s honour.’— ‘How, tell me how; I would do any thing,’ replied Aubrey. ‘I need but little—my life ebbs apace—I cannot explain the whole—but if you would conceal all you know of me, my honour were free from stain in the world’s mouth—and if my death were unknown for some time in England—I—I— but life.’—‘It shall not be known.’—‘Swear!’ cried the dying man, raising himself with exultant violence, ‘Swear by all your soul reveres, by all your nature fears, swear that for a year and a day you will not impart your knowledge of my crimes or death to any living being in any way, whatever may happen, or whatever you may see.’—His eyes seemed bursting from their sockets: ‘I swear!’ said Aubrey; he sunk laughing upon his pillow and breathed no more. Aubrey retired to rest, but did not sleep; the many circumstances attending his acquaintance

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gradually retired into the same state of mind, and Aubrey perceived no difference from the former man, except, that at times he was surprised to meet his gaze fixed intently upon him with a smile of malicious exultation playing upon his lips; he knew not why, but this smile haunted him. During the last stage of the invalid’s recovery, Lord Ruthven was apparently engaged in watching the tideless waves raised by the cooling breeze, or in marking the progress of those orbs, circling, like our world, the moveless sun;—indeed he appeared to wish to avoid the eyes of all.

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with this man rose upon his mind, and he knew not why; when he remembered his oath a cold shivering came over him, as if from the presentiment of something horrible awaiting him. Rising early in the morning he was about to enter the hovel in which he had left the corpse, when a robber met him, and informed him that it was no longer there, having been conveyed by himself and comrades, upon his retiring, to the pinnacle of a neighbouring mount, according to a promise they had given his lordship, that it should be exposed to the first cold ray of the moon that rose after his death. Aubrey was astonished, and taking several of the men, determined to go and bury it upon the spot where it lay. But, when he had mounted to the summit he found no trace of either the corpse or the clothes, though the robbers swore they pointed out the identical rock on which they had laid the body. For a time his mind was bewildered in conjectures, but he at last returned, convinced that they had buried the corpse for the sake of the clothes. Weary of a country in which he had met with such terrible misfortunes, and in which all apparently conspired to heighten that superstitious melancholy that had seized upon his mind, he resolved to leave it, and soon arrived at Smyrna. While waiting for a vessel to convey him to Otranto, or to Naples, he occupied himself in arranging those effects he had with him belonging to Lord Ruthven. Amongst other things there was a case containing several weapons of offence, more or less adapted to ensure the death of the victim. There were several daggers and ataghans. Whilst turning them over, and examining their curious forms, what was his surprise at finding a sheath apparently ornamented in the same style as the dagger discovered in the fatal hut; he shuddered; hastening to gain further proof, he found the weapon, and his horror may be imagined when he discovered that it fitted, though peculiarly shaped, the sheath he held in his hand. His eyes seemed to need no further certainty—they seemed gazing to be bound to the dagger; yet still he wished to disbelieve; but the particular form, the same varying tints upon the haft and sheath were alike in splendour on both, and left no room for doubt; there were also drops of blood on each. He left Smyrna, and on his way home, at Rome, his first inquiries were concerning the lady he had attempted to snatch from Lord Ruthven’s seductive arts. Her parents were in distress, their fortune ruined, and she had not been heard of since the departure of his lordship. Aubrey’s mind became almost broken under so many repeated

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horrors; he was afraid that this lady had fallen a victim to the destroyer of Ianthe. He became morose and silent, and his only occupation consisted in urging the speed of the postilions, as if he were going to save the life of some one he held dear. He arrived at Calais; a breeze, which seemed obedient to his will, soon wafted him to the English shores; and he hastened to the mansion of his fathers, and there, for a moment, appeared to lose, in the embraces and caresses of his sister, all memory of the past. If she before, by her infantine caresses, had gained his affection, now that the woman began to appear, she was still more attaching as a companion. Miss Aubrey had not that winning grace which gains the gaze and applause of the drawingroom assemblies. There was none of that light brilliancy which only exists in the heated atmosphere of a crowded apartment. Her blue eye was never lit up by the levity of the mind beneath. There was a melancholy charm about it which did not seem to arise from misfortune, but from some feeling within, that appeared to indicate a soul conscious of a brighter realm. Her step was not that light footing, which strays where’er a butterfly or a colour may attract—it was sedate and pensive. When alone, her face was never brightened by the smile of joy; but when her brother breathed to her his affection, and would in her presence forget those griefs she knew destroyed his rest, who would have exchanged her smile for that of the voluptuary? It seemed as if those eyes,—that face were then playing in the light of their own native sphere. She was yet only eighteen, and had not been presented to the world; it having been thought by her guardians more fit that her presentation should be delayed until her brother’s return from the continent, when he might be her protector. It was now, therefore, resolved that the next drawing room, which was fast approaching, should be the epoch of her entry into the ‘busy scene’. Aubrey would rather have remained in the mansion of his fathers, and fed upon the melancholy which overpowered him. He could not feel interest about the frivolities of fashionable strangers, when his mind had been so torn by the events he had witnessed; but he determined to sacrifice his own comfort to the protection of his sister. They soon arrived in town, and prepared for the next day, which had been announced as a drawing room. The crowd was excessive—a drawing room had not been held for a long time, and all who were anxious to bask in the smile of royalty, hastened thither. Aubrey was there with his sister.

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Aubrey became almost distracted. If before his mind had been absorbed by one subject, how much more completely was it engrossed, now that the certainty of the monster’s living again pressed upon his thoughts. His sister’s attentions were now unheeded, and it was in vain that she intreated him to explain to her what had caused his abrupt conduct. He only uttered a few words, and

those terrified her. The more he thought, the more he was bewildered. His oath startled him;—was he then to allow this monster to roam, bearing ruin upon his breath, amidst all he held dear, and not avert its progress? His very sister might have been touched by him. But even if he were to break his oath, and disclose his suspicions, who would believe him? He thought of employing his own hand to free the world from such a wretch; but death, he remembered, had been already mocked. For days he remained in this state; shut up in his room, he saw no one, and ate only when his sister came, who, with eyes streaming with tears, besought him, for her sake, to support nature. At last, no longer capable of bearing stillness and solitude, he left his house, roamed from street to street, anxious to fly that image which haunted him. His dress became neglected, and he wandered, as often exposed to the noon-day sun as to the midnight damps. He was no longer to be recognized; at first he returned with the evening to the house; but at last he laid him down to rest wherever fatigue overtook him. His sister, anxious for his safety, employed people to follow him; but they were soon distanced by him who fled from a pursuer swifter than any—from thought. His conduct, however, suddenly changed. Struck with the idea that he left by his absence the whole of his friends, with a fiend amongst them, of whose presence they were unconscious, he determined to enter again into society, and watch him closely, anxious to forewarn, in spite of his oath, all whom Lord Ruthven approached with intimacy. But when he entered into a room, his haggard and suspicious looks were so striking, his inward shudderings so visible, that his sister was at last obliged to beg of him to abstain from seeking, for her sake, a society which affected him so strongly. When, however, remonstrance proved unavailing, the guardians thought proper to interpose, and, fearing that his mind was becoming alienated, they thought it high time to resume again that trust which had been before imposed upon them by Aubrey’s parents. Desirous of saving him from the injuries and sufferings he had daily encountered in his wanderings, and of preventing him from exposing to the general eye those marks of what they considered folly, they engaged a physician to reside in the house, and take constant care of him. He hardly appeared to notice it, so completely was his mind absorbed by one terrible subject. His incoherence became at last so great, that he was confined to his chamber. There he would often lie for days, incapable of being roused. He had become emaci-

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While he was standing in a corner by himself, heedless of all around him, engaged in the remembrance that the first time he had seen Lord Ruthven was in that very place—he felt himself suddenly seized by the arm, and a voice he recognized too well, sounded in his ear—‘Remember your oath.’ He had hardly courage to turn, fearful of seeing a spectre that would blast him, when he perceived, at a little distance, the same figure which had attracted his notice on this spot upon his first entry into society. He gazed till his limbs almost refusing to bear their weight, he was obliged to take the arm of a friend, and forcing a passage through the crowd, he threw himself into his carriage, and was driven home. He paced the room with hurried steps, and fixed his hands upon his head, as if he were afraid his thoughts were bursting from his brain. Lord Ruthven again before him—circumstances started up in dreadful array—the dagger—his oath.—He roused himself, he could not believe it possible—the dead rise again!—He thought his imagination had conjured up the image his mind was resting upon. It was impossible that it could be real—he determined, therefore, to go again into society; for though he attempted to ask concerning Lord Ruthven, the name hung upon his lips, and he could not succeed in gaining information. He went a few nights after with his sister to the assembly of a near relation. Leaving her under the protection of a matron, he retired into a recess, and there gave himself up to his own devouring thoughts. Perceiving, at last, that many were leaving, he roused himself, and entering another room, found his sister surrounded by several, apparently in earnest conversation; he attempted to pass and get near her, when one, whom he requested to move, turned round, and revealed to him those features he most abhorred. He sprung forward, seized his sister’s arm, and, with hurried step, forced her towards the street: at the door he found himself impeded by the crowds of servants who were waiting for their lords; and while he was engaged in passing them, he again heard that voice whisper close to him—‘Remember your oath!’—He did not dare to turn, but, hurrying his sister, soon reached home.

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ated, his eyes had attained a glassy lustre;—the only sign of affection and recollection remaining displayed itself upon the entry of his sister: then he would sometimes start, and, seizing her hands, with looks that severely afflicted her, he would desire her not to touch him. ‘Oh, do not touch him—if your love for me is aught, do not go near him!’ When, however, she inquired to whom he referred, his only answer was—‘True! true!’ and again he sank into a state, whence not even she could rouse him. This lasted many months: gradually, however, as the year was passing, his incoherences became less frequent, and his mind threw off a portion of its gloom, whilst his guardians observed, that several times in the day he would count upon his fingers a definite number, and then smile. The time had nearly elapsed, when, upon the last day of the year, one of his guardians entering his room, began to converse with his physician upon the melancholy circumstance of Aubrey’s being in so awful a situation when his sister was going next day to be married. Instantly Aubrey’s attention was attracted; he asked anxiously to whom. Glad of this mark of returning intellect, of which they feared he had been deprived, they mentioned the name of the Earl of Marsden. Thinking this was a young earl whom he had met with in society, Aubrey seemed pleased, and astonished them still more by his expressing his intention to be present at the nuptials, and desiring to see his sister. They answered not, but in a few minutes his sister was with him. He was apparently again capable of being affected by the influence of her lovely smile; for he pressed her to his breast, and kissed her cheek, wet with tears, flowing at the thought of her brother’s being once more alive to the feelings of affection. He began to speak with all his wonted warmth, and to congratulate her upon her marriage with a person so distinguished for rank and every accomplishment; when he suddenly perceived a locket upon her breast; opening it, what was his surprise at beholding the features of the monster who had so long influenced his life. He seized the portrait in a paroxysm of rage, and trampled it under foot. Upon her asking him why he thus destroyed the resemblance of her future husband, he looked as if he did not understand her—then seizing her hands, and gazing on her with a frantic expression of countenance, he bade her swear that she would never wed this monster, for he———But he could not advance—it seemed as if that voice again bade him remember his oath—he turned suddenly round, thinking Lord Ruthven was near

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him, but saw no one. In the meantime the guardians and physician, who had heard the whole, and thought this was but a return of his disorder, entered, and forcing him from Miss Aubrey, desired her to leave him. He fell upon his knees to them, he implored, he begged of them to delay but for one day. They, attributing this to the insanity they imagined had taken possession of his mind, endeavoured to pacify him, and retired. Lord Ruthven had called the morning after the drawing room, and had been refused with every one else. When he heard of Aubrey’s ill health, he readily understood himself to be the cause of it: but when he learned that he was deemed insane, his exultation and pleasure could hardly be concealed from those among whom he had gained this information. He hastened to the house of his former companion, and, by constant attendance, and the pretence of great affection for the brother and interest in his fate, he gradually won the ear of Miss Aubrey. Who could resist his power? His tongue had dangers and toils to recount—could speak of himself as of an individual having no sympathy with any being on the crowded earth, save with her to whom he addressed himself;—could tell how, since he knew her, his existence had begun to seem worthy of preservation, if it were merely that he might listen to her soothing accents;—in fine, he knew so well how to use the serpent’s art, or such was the will of fate, that he gained her affections. The title of the elder branch falling at length to him, he obtained an important embassy, which served as an excuse for hastening the marriage, (in spite of her brother’s deranged state,) which was to take place the very day before his departure for the continent. Aubrey, when he was left by the physician and his guardian, attempted to bribe the servants, but in vain. He asked for pen and paper; it was given him; he wrote a letter to his sister, conjuring her, as she valued her own happiness, her own honour, and the honour of those now in the grave, who once held her in their arms as their hope and the hope of their house, to delay but for a few hours, that marriage, on which he denounced the most heavy curses. The servants promised they would deliver it; but giving it to the physician, he thought it better not to harass any more the mind of Miss Aubrey by, what he considered, the ravings of a maniac. Night passed on without rest to the busy inmates of the house; and Aubrey heard, with a horror that may more easily be conceived than described, the notes of busy preparation. Morning came, and the sound of carriages broke

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upon his ear. Aubrey grew almost frantic. The curiosity of the servants at last overcame their vigilance, they gradually stole away, leaving him in the custody of an helpless old woman. He seized the opportunity, with one bound was out of the room, and in a moment found himself in the apartment where all were nearly assembled. Lord Ruthven was the first to perceive him: he immediately approached, and, taking his arm by force, hurried him from the room, speechless with rage. When on the staircase, Lord Ruthven whispered in his ear—‘Remember your oath, and know, if not my bride to day, your sister is dishonoured. Women are frail!’ So saying, he pushed him towards his attendants, who, roused by the old woman, had come in search of him. Aubrey could no longer support himself; his rage, not finding vent, had broken a blood-vessel, and he was conveyed to bed. This was not mentioned to his sister, who was not present when he entered, as the physician was afraid of agitating her. The marriage was solemnized, and the bride and bridegroom left London. Aubrey’s weakness increased; the effusion of blood produced symptoms of the near approach of death. He desired his sister’s guardians might be called, and when the midnight hour had struck, he related composedly what the reader has perused—he died immediately after. The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!

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ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890-1937)

H. P. LOVECRAFT (ESSAY DATE 1945) SOURCE: Lovecraft, H. P. “The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction.” In Supernatural Horror in Literature. 1945. Reprint edition, edited by E. F. Bleiler, pp. 36-44. New York: Dover, 1973. In the following essay, first published in 1945, renowned horror and science fiction writer Lovecraft surveys the development of the Gothic in major and minor literary works written during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like Marquis von Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche’s Children of the Abbey (1798), Mrs. Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet Shelley’s schoolboy effusions Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvine (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya) there arose many memorable weird works both in English and German. Classic in merit, and markedly different from its fellows because of its foundation in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is the celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilettante William Beckford, first written in the French language but published in an English translation before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales, introduced to European literature early in the eighteenth century through Galland’s French translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had become a reigning fashion; being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humour which

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H. P. Lovecraft is widely considered the most important literary supernaturalist of the twentieth century and one of the greatest in a tradition that originated with the Gothic novelists of the eighteenth century and was perpetuated throughout the nineteenth century by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Arthur Machen. Like these literary forebears, Lovecraft practiced an essentially popular form of writing, the evolution of which he traced in the critical history Supernatural Horror in Literature (1945). Combining elements of the lowest pulp melodrama with the highest imaginative artistry, Lovecraft’s “weird tales” have become classics of an enduring branch of literature, and among authorities in this province he is regarded as a peer of his Gothic predecessors. Lovecraft’s stories are commonly divided into three types: those influenced by the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, a diverse group of horror narratives set in New England, and tales sharing a background of cosmic legendry usually referred to as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” One of the most important and controversial issues in Lovecraft criticism is that regarding nomenclature for his Mythos stories. Various labels have been employed, from the broad designations of “horror” and “Gothic” to more discriminating terms such as “supernormal” and “mechanistic supernatural.” At the source of this diverse terminology is the fact that, while these works clearly belong to the tradition of Gothic literature, Lovecraft did not make them dependent on the common mythic conceits associated with this tradition—ghosts, vampires, witches, werewolves, and other figures of folklore—and even when they do appear in his work, these entities are often modified to function against a new mythical background, one whose symbolism emphasizes the philosophical over the psychological. The question of how to describe tales whose effect derives from the violation of the laws of nature rather than those of personal or public morality was somewhat resolved by Lovecraft himself when he applied the term “weird” to such works.

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But Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient. Other writers, closer to the Gothic tradition and to European life in general, were content to follow more faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the countless producers of terrorliterature in these times may be mentioned the Utopian economic theorist William Godwin, who

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only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness had captivated a sophisticated generation, till Bagdad and Damascus names became as freely strewn through popular literature as dashing Italian and Spanish ones were soon to be. Beckford, well read in Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere with unusual receptivity; and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty luxury, sly disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous seldom mars the force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward with a phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under arabesque domes. Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph Haroun, who, tormented by that ambition for super-terrestrial power, pleasure and learning which animates the average Gothic villain or Byronic hero (essentially cognate types), is lured by an evil genius to seek the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous pre-Adamite sultans in the fiery halls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The descriptions of Vathek’s palaces and diversions, of his scheming sorceress-mother Carathis and her witch-tower with the fifty one-eyed negresses, of his pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) and of the impish bride Nouronihar whom he treacherously acquired on the way, of Istakhar’s primordial towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is compelled to wander in anguish for ever, his right hand upon his blazingly ignited and eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the book to a permanent place in English letters. No less notable are the three Episodes of Vathek, intended for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek’s fellow-victims in Eblis’ infernal halls, which remained unpublished throughout the author’s lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for his Life and Letters of William Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism which marks the acutest form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain knowing Latin hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright.

H. P. Lovecraft, 1890-1937.

followed his famous but non-supernatural Caleb Williams (1794) with the intendedly weird St. Leon (1799), in which the theme of the elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret order of “Rosicrucians,” is handled with ingeniousness if not with atmospheric convincingness. This element of Rosicrucianism, fostered by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on occult principles and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was represented by George W. M. Reynold’s Faust and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf. Caleb Williams, though nonsupernatural, has many authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a master whom he has found guilty of murder, and displays an invention and skill which have kept it alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as The Iron Chest, and in that form was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece. His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her inimitable Frankenstein;

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or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the horror-classics of all time. Composed in competition with her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy in horror-making, Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein was the only one of the rival narratives to be brought to an elaborate completion; and criticism has failed to prove that the best parts are due to Shelley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely marred by moral didacticism, tells of the artificial human being molded from charnel fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss medical student. Created by its designer “in the mad pride of intellectuality,” the monster possesses full intelligence but owns a hideously loathsome form. It is rejected by mankind, becomes embittered, and at length begins the successive murder of all whom Frankenstein loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein create a wife for it; and when the student finally refuses in horror lest the world be populated with such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat “to be with him on his wedding night.” Upon that night the bride is strangled, and from that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even into the wastes of the Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the man who tells the story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the shocking object of his search and creation of his presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes in Frankenstein are unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster enters its creator’s room, parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the yellow moonlight with watery eyes—“if eyes they may be called.” Mrs. Shelley wrote other novels, including the fairly notable Last Man; but never duplicated the success of her first effort. It has the true touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much the movement may lag in places. Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short story, The Vampyre; in which we behold a suave villain of the true Gothic or Byronic type, and encounter some excellent passages of stark fright, including a terrible nocturnal experience in a shunned Grecian wood. In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes producing such independent bits of narration as The Tapestried Chamber or Wandering Willie’s Tale in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which still forms one of our best

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compendia of European witch-lore. Washington Irving is another famous figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most of his ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of his productions. The German Student in Tales of a Traveller (1824) is a slyly concise and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven into the comic tissue of The Money Diggers in the same volume is more than one hint of piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed. Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem Alciphron, which he later elaborated into the prose novel of The Epicurean (1827). Though merely relating the adventures of a young Athenian duped by the artifice of cunning Egyptian priests, Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his account of subterranean frights and wonders beneath the primordial temples of Memphis. De Quincey more than once revels in grotesque and arabesque terrors, though with a desultoriness and learned pomp which deny him the rank of specialist. This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides writing such short tales as The Werewolf, made a memorable contribution in The Phantom Ship (1839), founded on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed vessel sails for ever near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional weird bits like The Signalman, a tale of ghastly warning conforming to a very common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude which allied it as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic school. At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the present day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a “psychic” or pseudoscientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these the prolific and popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied. The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV’s mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written. The novel Zanoni (1842) contains similar elements

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In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement in the creation of weird images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by opportune coincidences, and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science designed to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader, is exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent—if somewhat melodramatic—tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user of life’s elixir in the person of the soulless magician Margrave, whose dark exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the modern background of a quiet English town and of the Australian bush; and again we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral world of the unknown in the very air about us—this time handled with much greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing pavilion of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told. Unknown words are twice dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight. When a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker’s spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the

soul could recognize ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign spell. This fragment well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his usual pomp and stock romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs to the domain of poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in the course of which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabbalist Alphonse Louis Constant (“Eliphas Levy”), who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic, and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero’s times. The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson—the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in Markheim, The Body Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong such of our contemporary horrortales as specialise in events rather than atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than the impressionistic imagination, cultivate a luminous glamour rather than a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It has its undeniable strength, and because of its “human element” commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity of a concentrated essence. Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, with its mad vista of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life, and of human passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in the streets as a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted by the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic spirit rather than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal is

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more elaborately handled, and introduces a vast unknown sphere of being pressing on our own world and guarded by a horrible “Dweller of the Threshold” who haunts those who try to enter and fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood kept alive from age to age till finally reduced to a single member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on the guillotine of the French Revolution. Though full of the conventional spirit of romance, marred by a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic meanings, and left unconvincing through lack of perfect atmospheric realization of the situations hinging on the spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel; and can be read with genuine interest by the not too sophisticated reader. It is amusing to note that in describing an attempted initiation into the ancient brotherhood the author cannot escape using the stock Gothic castle of Walpolian lineage.

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further approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive child-ghost at a bough-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more terrible than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave, and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less than her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he feels a strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night he either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he yet walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Brontë’s eerie terror is no mere Gothic echo, but a tense expression of man’s shuddering reaction to the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol of a literary transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder school.

HAUNTED DWELLINGS AND THE SUPERNATURAL S. T. JOSHI (ESSAY DATE WINTER 1994) SOURCE: Joshi, S. T. “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror.” Studies in Weird Fiction 14 (winter 1994): 9-28. In the following essay, Joshi surveys Jackson’s works, noting the difficulties inherent in attempting to classify them by genre, and discussing Jackson’s horrific inversion of societal ideals of human relationships and homelife in her works, particularly in The Haunting of Hill House.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)1 and Ramsey Campbell are the two leading writers of weird fiction since Lovecraft. In making this assertion I am not merely bypassing other writers who, at least in their own minds, aspire to that title—in particular the best-selling quartet of Stephen King, Peter Straub, Anne Rice, and Clive Barker—but am making the problematical assertion that Jackson is a weird writer at all. It is true that only one of her novels is avowedly supernatural—the masterful Haunting of Hill House (1959)—while others are weird only slightly or not at all; it is also true that perhaps at most fifteen or twenty of her hundred-

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odd short stories can be said to belong either to the weird tale or to the mystery story or to science fiction.2 Certainly there is nothing supernatural about “The Lottery” (1948), whose impact rests on the very possibility of its occurrence. But I wish to place Jackson within the realm of weird fiction not only for the nebulous reason that the whole of her work has a pervasive atmosphere of the odd about it, but, more importantly, because her entire work is unified to such a degree that distinctions about genre and classification become arbitrary and meaningless. Like Arthur Machen, Shirley Jackson developed a view of the world that informed all her writing, whether supernatural or not; but that world view is more akin to the cheerless and nihilistic misanthropy of Bierce than to Machen’s harried anti-materialism. It is because Shirley Jackson so keenly detected horror in the everyday world, and wrote of it with rapier-sharp prose, that she ranks as a twentieth-century Bierce. Jackson’s world view does not extend into the realm of metaphysics: it is not possible to deduce from her work any coherent conception of the nature of the universe. She is wholly and avowedly concerned with human relationships, and it is from their complexities that both horror and the supernatural emerge in her work. Both early and late in her career Jackson was affirming that, at least for her, the supernatural is a metaphor for human beings’ relation to the world. Consider a remark in 1948: I have had for many years a consuming interest in magic and the supernatural. I think this is because I find there so convenient a shorthand statement of the possibilities of human adjustment to what seems to be at best an inhuman world. . . . everything I write [involves] the sense which I feel, of a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction, which may be the devil and may be intellectual enlightenment. (O 125)

In 1962 she wrote in a lecture: Just remember that primarily, in the story and out of it, you are living in a world of people. A story must have characters in it; work with concrete rather than abstract nouns, and always dress your ideas immediately. Suppose you want to write a story about what you might vaguely think of as “magic.” You will be hopelessly lost, wandering around formlessly in notions of magic and incantations; you will never make any forward progress at all until you turn your ideas, “magic,” into a person, someone who wants to do or make or change or act in some way. Once you have your first character you will of course need another to put into opposition, a person in some sense “antimagic”; when both are working at their separate

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It is entirely possible, then, that a proper startingpoint for the study of Jackson’s fiction from a weird perspective may not be her actual weird work but those tales for which she gained an entirely different following: her family chronicles collected in Life among the Savages and Raising Demons.

Domestic Fiction The strain of autobiography that is so dominant throughout Jackson’s work can be traced to her very earliest writing. Her first professionally published story, “My Life with R. H. Macy” (L), appears to be a lightly fictionalised account of a job she had as a saleswoman at Macy’s department store. The stories she wrote about her family date no earlier than 1948, several years after she began her literary career; but they continued at a fairly constant pace to the end of her life. Jackson admitted to her parents that many of these stories were potboilers: They are written simply for money and the reason they sound so bad is that those magazines won’t buy good ones, but deliberately seek out bad stuff because they say their audiences want it. I simply figure that at a thousand bucks a story, I can’t afford to try to change the state of popular fiction today. . . . I won’t write love stories and junk about gay young married couples, and they won’t take ordinary children stories, and this sort of thing is a compromise between their notions and mine . . . and is unusual enough so that I am the only person I know of who is doing it. (O 145)

This dismissal of her domestic fiction may be somewhat disingenuous: to be sure, they brought in needed income ($1000 per story came in very handy in supporting four children, as Hyman, a university professor, never made much money of his own from his literary criticism), but the zest, vigour, and wit with which they are written testify to their importance to Jackson. Even if many of these tales are written with the sort of coy, innocuous, and resolutely cheerful tone expected in fiction for women’s magazines in the 1950s, they nevertheless contain certain disturbing undercurrents that may subvert their surface hilarity. James Egan, in a thoughtful essay that attempts to reconcile Jackson’s domestic fiction and her weird work, sees a twofold division of her work, as “either the expression of an idyllic domestic vision or the inversion of that vision into the fantastic and Gothic” (Egan 15). I am

fundamentally in agreement with this assessment, but it may require a little more shading. Especially when we examine the chronology of Jackson’s short fiction, we will find that the domestic stories themselves undergo a gradual modification— brought on, perhaps, by her marital problems or simply by the fact that her children grew up and no longer exhibited that affinity to “magic” (O 209) which Jackson thought the very young reveal—so that the later domestic fiction now and then displays a brooding irony and even misanthropy that brings it surprisingly close in tone to her other work. Although Jackson appears to pay lip service to the conventions of middleclass life in the 1950s, the vibrancy of her writing, the flawlessly exact capturing of her children’s idiosyncrasies, and above all Jackson’s complete lack of sentimentalism make these stories pungent and vivid even today. I am not sufficiently interested in their sociological implications, but I imagine that much interesting work could be done on gauging how exactly these tales do or do not reflect the stereotypes of their class and time. What I am interested in is the degree of their veracity; that is, the extent to which they are unvarnished or faithful transcriptions of actual events in Jackson’s life and in the life of her family. It is, of course, naive to imagine that any autobiographical writing simply relates events as they occurred; and Jackson’s remark that these stories allowed her to see her children “through a flattering veil of fiction” (O 119) may be all we need to infer that her domestic fiction, no less than her other work, is in some sense a creation of the imagination. Egan’s reference to this work as “idyllic” is correct insofar as Jackson systematically attempts to present what may in reality have been highly traumatic events as the source of harmless jest—her son being struck by a car, for instance, in which he suffered a concussion and some broken bones. The importance of this domestic fiction—as regards her other work, at any rate—rests in its manipulation of very basic familial or personal scenarios that would be utilised in her weird work in perverted and twisted ways: things like riding a bus, employing a maid, taking children shopping, going on vacation, putting up guests, and, in general, adhering—or seeming to adhere—to the “proper conduct” expected of her as a middle-class housewife. It is interesting that her function as a writer is almost never mentioned in these works, or if it is, it is to poke fun at it as an anomaly for a wife with four children. “The Third Baby’s the

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intentions, dragging in other characters as needed, you are well into your story. (“Notes for a Young Writer” [C 153-54])

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Easiest” captures the idea perfectly, as Jackson registers with a desk clerk at the hospital: “Age?” she asked. “Sex? Occupation?” “Writer,” I said. “Housewife,” she said. “Writer,” I said. “I’ll just put down housewife,” she said. (LS 426)

An earlier sketch, “Fame” (1948), amusingly tells of a gossip columnist who phones Jackson and is interested in everything about her except the fact that her first novel is soon to be issued by a major New York publisher. It is important to note, however, that this body of domestic fiction really does underggo some significant changes over the years; it is in no sense a monolithic block of determined cheer. Some cracks begin to appear as early as “Lucky to Get Away” (1953), in which Jackson emphatically betrays a weariness with the unending round of housework required of her as a mother, especially one whose husband contributes nothing to the household chores: I got to feeling that I could not bear the sight of the colored cereal bowls for one more morning, could not empty one more ashtray, could not brush one more head or bake one more potato or let out one more dog or pick up one more jacket. I snarled at the bright faces regarding me at the breakfast table and I was strongly tempted to kick the legs out from under the chair on which my older son was teetering backward. (LS 583)

Three other pieces show that Jackson’s relationship with her husband might not have been one of unending bliss. One of the many curious things about these stories is the infrequency with which her husband even appears: they are all about herself and her children, and when her husband does make an appearance it is almost always as a clumsy buffoon (“The Life Romantic”, “The Box”). In “Queen of the May” the tone becomes a little more sinister: the jealousy Jackson felt toward her husband (a known philanderer) is much in evidence:

There was a deep, enduring silence, until at last my husband’s eye fell on Jannie. “And what did you learn in school today?” he asked with wild enthusiasm. (RD 661-62)

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Some of the later, uncollected domestic fiction comes off sounding a little tired: Jackson must have realised that her material was running dry, especially as her children were growing up into the less superficially “cute” stage of young adulthood. Indeed, a late piece, “Karen’s Complaint” (1959), is quite poignant in depicting Jackson’s sense of loneliness and aimlessness as her youngest child begins to go to school and she faces the prospect of an empty house for the first time in nearly two decades. However haphazardly her household appeared to be run, she took evident pride in providing a loving home for her husband and children. It is exactly this sense of togetherness and warmth that is obtrusively lacking in her other fiction. Where the reality of her own family lay, no one but she herself could have answered: perhaps all the carefree and welladjusted children in her domestic fiction were themselves imaginary—her greatest fantasy.

Domestic into Weird

The humour in this passage is, surely, a little sardonic.

“Daddy is going to see a lot of girls,” Sally told Barry. She turned to me. “Daddy likes to look at girls, doesn’t he?”

Still odder and still more bitter is “One Last Chance”, in which a husband announces somewhat sheepishly that an old flame of his will be dropping by (in fact she cancels her plans and never arrives), tactlessly and unintentionally suggesting that this woman is much prettier and a better cook than his wife. Finally, “On Being a Faculty Wife” (1956) is astonishingly vicious in its portrayal of callow young girls worshipping the distinguished professor while his wife is brushed aside as a useless (and unattractive) ornament.

The transformation of some incidents found in the domestic fiction into something very different and much more disturbing can occasionally occur with scarcely an alteration save that of context. The textbook example of this is the story “Charles”. Here, of course, the transition has occurred in the reverse direction, as the story was first published in a magazine and gathered in The Lottery before being reprinted in Life among the Savages. In its earlier two contexts the story is subtly menacing and rather grim: her son Laurie (mentioned by name in all three versions), attending kindergarten, tells of a strange boy, Charles, who is by turns extremely unruly and even evil (”’Today Charles hit the teacher’ . . . ‘He kicked the teacher’s friend’” [L 71-72]) and excessively well-behaved. Later, when Jackson meets Laurie’s teacher, she finds out that there is no Charles in the class. I shall return to the implications of this story later, but here I wish to note what a remarkably different atmosphere this story has when it is buried in the genial confines of Life among the Sav-

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Another means for effecting the transition from domestic to weird, or vice versa, is omission. A very peculiar tale, “The House”, was reprinted in Life among the Savages—but not all of it. The latter portion was excised, no doubt because it is precisely here that the tale veers off into suggestions of the supernatural. At the outset it is difficult to ascertain whether, in its magazine appearance, this story is genuinely autobiographical, since Jackson never refers to her husband or children by name. In any case, the story concerns her family moving into an old, somewhat ramshackle, and faintly sinister house in New England (the precise location is never specified in the original appearance). The narrative of fixing up the house for habitation and moving in is told with mild humour—certainly not with the overt hilarity of pieces like “Look, Ma, We’re Moving!” (1952) or “Worldly Goods”—but with an undercurrent of the strange. The house seems almost animate: There was a door to an attic that preferred to stay latched, and would latch itself no matter who was inside; another door hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close good-humoredly for a time when some special reason required it. We had five attics, we discovered, built into one another; one of them kept bats, and we shut that one up; another one, light and cheerful in spite of a small window, liked to be a place of traffic and became a place to store things temporarily.3

The house controls its inhabitants, not the inhabitants the house. It is on its sufferance that they are there at all. All this may be only mildly disturbing; but then an old lady comes to pay a visit: “It’s a lovely old house,” I said. “Do you think so?” She turned quickly to look at me. “Do you really think it’s a lovely old house?” “We’re very happy here.” “I’m glad.” She folded her hands and smiled again. “It’s always been such a good house,” she said. “The old doctor always used to say it was a good house.” “The old doctor?” “Doctor Ogilvie.” “Doctor Ogilvie?” “I see they kept the pillars, after all,” she said, nodding. “We always thought they gave the house character.”

“There was a hornets’ nest in one,” I said weakly. Doctor Ogilvie had built the house in 1816!4

The first passage I quoted above was included in Life among the Savages, but again context robs it of any undertones of the weird; and that reprint breaks off the tale shortly thereafter. If anything, this story could be a model of Jackson’s ability to transform the events of her own life into weird fiction. Jackson’s work returns time and again to certain fundamental domestic themes, sometimes in an autobiographical manner, sometimes in a mainstream manner, and sometimes in a weird manner. I again emphasise that these distinctions are arbitrary and nebulous; it takes only a small touch to push a story from one of these groups to another, and some stories remain resolutely averse to clear categorisation. Consider, for example, the number of stories by Jackson involving the hiring of a maid. There are at least four such tales, and they all play startling variations of tone and mood upon this one theme. Chronologically the first is “Tootie in Peonage” (1942; C), one of Jackson’s earliest stories. It tells of a young woman, Tootie Maple, whom the narrator hires to help with the housework. It is an amusing tale of how Tootie has too many other pressing things to do—painting her toenails, finishing the latest issue of True Confessions—to get down to her actual duties; but the real object of satire is the housewife who hired her, who lacks the strength of will either to order Tootie to do her work or to fire her. The next maid story, “Family Magician” (1949), is a rather odd and benign weird tale about a maid, Mallie, who appears to fulfil her household responsibilities through magic. The tale is not of much note save in being Jackson’s first avowedly supernatural work. Then comes “Monday Morning”, incorporated in Life among the Savages and similar in tone to “Tootie in Peonage”. In this explicitly autobiographical and quite amusing story we read of the maid Phoebe, who shows up more than an hour late. Then we come to the extremely nasty “Strangers in Town” (1959). The tale does not focus upon the maid, named Mallie (as in “Family Magician”), but it is clear that this maid too has supernatural powers: she gathers an acorn, a mushroom, and a scrap of grass and makes a stew out of them. The simple act of riding a bus or train and travelling to a strange location—usually a big city—has generated a number of Jackson’s most powerful stories, whether weird or otherwise. We have seen the innocuous version of this in chapter

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ages: there the whole tale comes off as simply another prank by her cute but headstrong son, whereas in the former instances one has the strong sensation that her son may well have serious problems of adjustment.

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4 of Raising Demons, in which Jackson relates taking her children to New York; other tales are much more ominous. “The Tooth” (1949; L) is a queer and meandering story of a young woman who travels to New York to see a dentist; I confess to being at a loss what point this story is trying to make, but the atmosphere of shimmering, dreamlike fantasy that was to become a Jackson trademark finds its first genuine embodiment here. “Pillar of Salt” (1948; L) involves a nearly identical scenario, although here a couple from New Hampshire comes to New York for a vacation. The emphasis is, inevitably, on the wife, whose appreciation of the city oscillates between amazement and condescension (looking at a set of miniature milk bottles being sold as toys, she notes archly, “We get our milk from cows” [L 177]). Gradually the giganticism, pace, and impersonality of the city overwhelm her, and her plight is keenly encapsulated by her utter inability to cross a busy street even when the light is with her: The minute the light changes, she told herself firmly; there’s no sense. The light changed before she was ready and in the minute before she collected herself traffic turning the corner overwhelmed her and she shrank back against the curb. She looked longingly at the cigar store on the opposite corner, with her apartment house beyond; she wondered, How do people ever manage to get there, and knew that by wondering, by admitting a doubt, she was lost. (L 184)

“The Bus” (1965; C) finally takes this topos into the realm of the supernatural. An old woman is dropped off at the wrong stop late at night, eventually catches a ride on a truck to some dismal-looking roadhouse, and, as the atmosphere becomes at once more menacing and more unreal, the old woman imagines herself a child in her room, looks in a closet, and finds her old doll speaking to her: “‘Go away, old lady, go away, old lady, go away’” (C 200). At this point the old woman wakes up—it was all a dream and she is still on the bus! Not content with this trite device, Jackson gives it a further predictable twist by having the old woman get off at the same wrong stop as before. Several other stories speak of the peculiar vulnerability of people on vacation, away from their friends and their familiar environment. “The Summer People” (1949; C) is a mordant tale about an elderly couple who decide to stay on in their summer cottage past Labor Day, something they have never done before. The dour countryfolk of the region appear to resent this decision—

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”’Nobody ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day before’” (C 73)—and insidiously conspire against them: the couple cannot get kerosene or ice, the mail suddenly stops, the groceries can’t be delivered, and so on. This masterful story is worth considering in several other respects, but the gradual isolation of the couple, as one by one the locals turn against them through sheer inaction, is harrowing. There is, of course, nothing supernatural about this tale, but a work like this makes the strongest possible case for the inclusion of the non-supernatural horror story as a genuine subset of the weird tale. “The Lovely Night” (1952; retitled “A Visit” in C) introduces the supernatural in the subtlest way. A college girl, Margaret, goes with her friend Carla Rhodes to the latter’s palatial home, whose location is never specified. Initially it all seems idyllic: Carla stopped before the doorway and stood for a minute, looking first behind her, at the vast reaching gardens and the green lawn going down to the river, and the soft hills beyond, and then at the perfect grace of the house, showing so clearly the long-boned structure within, the curving staircases and the arched doorways and the tall thin lines of steadying beams, all of it resting back against the hills, and up, past rows of windows and the flying lines of the roof, on, to the tower . . . (C 98)

The tale develops a powerful atmosphere of weirdness through the deliberately artificial dialogue—it is as if all the characters know they are in a work of fiction. Carla’s brother Paul arrives; Margaret spends much time with him. She goes up to the tower and has an enigmatic talk with Carla’s grandmother. Throughout the story Mrs Rhodes is weaving a tapestry of the house. This is the end of the tale: “You will not leave us before my brother comes again?” Carla asked Margaret. “I have only to put the figures into the foreground,” Mrs. Rhodes said, hesitating on her way to the drawing room. “I shall have you exactly if you sit on the lawn near the river.” “We shall be models of stillness,” said Carla, laughing. “Margaret, will you come and sit beside me on the lawn?” (C 120)

What does this mean? What is the significance of Paul’s remark that “’without this house I could not exist’” (C 119)? Is this not a pun, meaning that neither he nor the entire family can live without (i.e. outside of) the house? And isn’t Margaret now being woven into the fabric of the house by way of the tapestry? This exquisite and

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Language, Truth, and Horror Many of Jackson’s stories turn on the statements uttered by her characters: is what they are saying true? What if, Jackson asks in a number of tales, there is some sort of insane conspiracy to deceive a single individual? Such stories are almost unclassifiable: we cannot know if the supernatural actually comes into play because ambiguity is maintained to the end as to the truth of the matter. Nevertheless, some of her most powerful tales revolve around simple utterances by individual characters, which, when taken together, potentially suggest some horrific and irrational victimisation of an individual who is frequently somewhat disturbed to begin with. The standard distinction between what might be called interior and exterior supernaturalism (i.e., that occurring within the confines of an individual’s mind and that occurring in the external world) seems to collapse here, or even to fuse together: it is as if Jackson is suggesting that the supernatural falls specifically upon those individuals whose hold on reality is itself shaky. Jackson’s very first story, “Janice” (1938; C) already starts the pattern. This mordant shortshort story is nothing more than a page of dialogue held by the title character, a college student, with some of her friends: she is telling each of them that she “nearly killed herself” (C 41) by carbon monoxide poisoning. Is this actually the case? Is it anything more than an attempt at selfdramatisation? When the first-person narrator suddenly obtrudes with the pointed query, “How did it feel to be dying, Jan?”, Janice can only reply with a meaningless and stereotypical remark: “Gee, funny. All black” (C 42). It is the first of many stories in which the veracity of characters’ utterances is subtly impugned without any concrete statement ever being made by the narrator one way or the other. “Charles” also fits this pattern, although at the end we are clearly led to believe that “Charles” is nothing more than a sort of fictitious dummy to whom Laurie is attributing his own unruliness in school: his teacher remarks, “We had a little trouble adjusting, the first week or so . . . but now

he’s a fine little helper. With occasional lapses, of course” (L 74), which corresponds exactly to the cycle of “Charles’s” good and bad moments in school. Doubt still remains, however, whether Laurie (or anyone) actually committed the acts he fastens upon Charles: some may still be exaggerated or, indeed, entirely imaginary. Several of Jackson’s best tales involve the harrowing question of a mad (because unmotivated, wholly malicious, and, conceivably, supernaturally inspired) conspiracy on the part of seemingly unrelated individuals—perhaps the entire world—to cause mental or emotional pain to some hapless individual. It is here that the suggestion of the veracity of the characters’ statements is of the greatest importance, but it is also the most hopelessly irresolvable. The effect is extremely unnerving. The celebrated tale “The Daemon Lover” (1949; L) is one of the best of this type. This story inaugurates a curious thread in the stories in The Lottery (and elsewhere) in which the figure of James Harris, the Daemon Lover, flits in and out of stories, seemingly at random. To my mind, however, not much can be made of this: the name Harris appears in several stories in the collection, and sometimes it is specified as James or Jim Harris; but I do not think that in the end it amounts to much save a sort of in-joke that has no particular point. Jackson herself admitted to being haunted by a daemon lover, from as early as her college years, and she describes it in a sketch as follows (she was in a noncapitalisation phase at this point): but all i remember is that i met him (somewhere where was it in the darkness in the light was it morning were there trees flowers had i been born) and now when I think about him i only remember that he was calling margaret, as in loneliness margaret margaret, and then (did i speak to him did he look at me did we smile had we known each other once) i went away and left him (calling to me after me) calling margaret margaret. (O 49)

This is poignant enough, and the several stories she wrote about a daemon lover all have this same quality of bittersweet unreality; but the interconnexions she attempts to forge by dropping the name Harris in the Lottery collection do not add up to a coherent whole. But “The Daemon Lover” is an exquisite piece. It introduces us to the most easily recognisable character-type in all Jackson’s work: the lonely, weak-willed, sensitive, overly imaginative, and possibly psychotic young woman who usually

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haunting tale—a fantastically transmogrified version of a visit Dylan Thomas paid to Jackson’s home in Westport, Connecticut (O 151-52)— exemplifies the “quiet weird tale” at its pinnacle. And, of course, it embodies a theme that we can already see is a dominant one in Jackson’s work and perhaps also her life: the manner in which a house can subsume its occupants.

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ends her pitiable and meaningless existence in madness or suicide. This figure recurs with such obsessive frequency in her stories that one is tempted to see in it Jackson’s imaginative view of herself, however much or little it may have coincided with the reality of her personality. In “The Daemon Lover” we encounter such a figure in Margaret, who awakes one morning in her shabby one-room apartment awaiting the arrival of James Harris, to whom she is to be married. We are already a little uneasy, since we learn that she has known Harris only for a month; and our fears seem confirmed when he fails to show up at her apartment at the appointed time. She begins to look for him, reaching the building where he had borrowed the apartment of a Mr and Mrs Royster for the last month. Finding the Roysters, who have just returned, she asks about James. Mrs Royster’s reaction is not reassuring: “’O Lord . . . What’d he do?’” (L 18). At least this appears to confirm Harris’ existence, however tenuously. But the Roysters do not really know him—he was a friend of a friend. Margaret begins to ask the neighbourhood shopowners whether they have seen a man answering Harris’ description. No one has. Finally she so pesters a news-agent that he confesses to have seen him: “Now I don’t know for sure, mind you, but there might have been someone like your gentleman friend coming by this morning.” “About ten?” “About ten,” the newsdealer agreed. “Tall fellow, blue suit. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” “Which way did he go?” she said eagerly. “Uptown?” “Uptown,” the newsdealer said, nodding. “He went uptown. That’s just exactly it. What can I do for you, sir?” (L 21)

This is the critical point of the story: is the man admitting to having seen Harris only to get rid of the pestiferous Margaret? Why does he agree with such alacrity to having seen him at the time and place she insists he must have seen him? From this point the story devolves into either a paranoid fantasy or an evil conspiracy, or perhaps both: the florist admits that Harris bought flowers (wouldn’t a man going to his wedding buy flowers for his bride?); the shoe shine man admits he shined Harris’ shoes (a natural thing for a bridegroom to do), and he directs Margaret to a street (not hers) where he says he saw Harris go; a boy at the corner says he saw Harris go in a building

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across the street. Margaret goes in and hears voices behind a door. The tale ends inconclusively (as it must) and agonisingly: She knew there was someone inside the other apartment, because she was sure she could hear low voices and sometimes laughter. She came back many times, every day for the first week. She came on her way to work, in the mornings; in the evenings, on her way to dinner alone, but no matter how often or how firmly she knocked, no one ever came to the door. (L 26)

Have all these people lied to her? If so, why? Do they all hate her and wish to torture her emotionally? Or are they simply cheerful sadists? This is the most frightening prospect of the story, more frightening than the prospect that Margaret has imagined much of her relationship with Harris: how can people be so irresponsibly evil? “The Daemon Lover” has an atmosphere of wistful pathos that somehow works in tandem with the conte cruel horror of the tale; another story, “The Renegade” (1948; L), is pure conte cruel. A family from the city, the Walpoles, have moved to a placid-seeming country town and seem to be settling in nicely. Then Mrs Walpole receives a call from a neighbour: the Walpoles’ dog has been killing this person’s chickens; something must be done. Mrs Walpole cannot believe it of her gentle pet. Soon the story is all over the town (the phone is on a party line), and everyone has remedies for stopping a dog from killing chickens. These remedies become more and more hideous: you can chain the dog; you can tie a dead chicken around its neck until it rots, so that the dog hates chicken; you can place it in a pen with some chicks and a mother hen who is sure to scratch the dog’s eyes out; or you could put around the dog’s neck a collar that has spikes on the inside, and when the dog approaches a chicken you pull on a rope attached to the collar, and (as Mrs Walpole’s own son notes with glee), “The spikes cut her head off” (L 65). Which one is it to be? In this tale it is a little clearer that the townspeople have conspired to tease Mrs Walpole mercilessly, although other questions remain unclear: did the dog actually kill chickens (it is true that the dog comes into the house with blood on its legs—but what does this mean? was the dog somehow framed?), and why have the townspeople ganged up on Mrs Walpole like this? As to the latter, Mrs Walpole “wondered briefly if Mr. White had maliciously blamed Lady because they were city folk, and then thought, No, no man

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The odd story “The Intoxicated” (1949; L) might perhaps be studied in this context. Here a man who finds himself bored at a party wanders into the kitchen, meeting the hostess’ daughter Eileen, a girl of seventeen. She is writing a paper about the future of the world; but she doesn’t think the world has much of a future. Rather harrowingly, she chronicles the destruction of civilisation—or, at least, this phase of it: “Somehow I think of the churches as going first, before even the Empire State building. And then all the big apartment houses by the river, slipping down slowly into the water with the people inside. And the schools, in the middle of Latin class maybe, while we’re reading Caesar.” She brought her eyes to his face, looking at him in numb excitement. “Each time we begin a chapter in Caesar, I wonder if this won’t be the one we never finish. Maybe we in our Latin class will be the last people who ever read Caesar.” (L 11)

The worst thing about it is that she seems so certain of it; and this raises the query: What if she is right? This story somehow reminds me of Margaret St Clair’s famous tale, “The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes”, although in that tale the boy is undoubtedly clairvoyant and knows that the world will end, whereas in “The Intoxicated” we are left only with the unnerving thought that the girl is either right (in which case the world will end) or that she is wrong (in which case she is insane) or that she is having a little fun (in which case she is a sadist). None of these is very reassuring. Here again Jackson is simply trying to jolt us out of our conventional ways of thinking— and a tiresome party is the perfect backdrop for such an enterprise. I might as well study Jackson’s one genuine science fiction (or at least futuristic) story, “Bulletin” (1954), here, for it not only follows up on the theme of “The Intoxicated” (the future of civilisation) but indirectly exemplifies the same issues of language, truth, and horror as the other

stories I have been discussing. This very brief tale is surprisingly difficult to interpret. Let us bypass the very crude mechanics of the story: a clumsy editor’s note informing us that certain documents have come back in a time machine that was sent into the early twenty-second century, although the scientist who went in the machine did not return. The first document we find is a fragment of a newspaper dating from May 8, 2123; this indicates little save that the people of that time were given to pompous and empty circumlocution (hardly a unique trait!). A letter from a boy to his parents has the spellings “haveing”, “cokies” (for cookies), “loveing”, and the like, implying either that the boy was illiterate (and perhaps, by extension, the rest of the society?) or that these spellings had by then become standard. The most interesting and problematical document is a highschool or college history exam. Here we find that the twenty-second century has fallen into irremediable confusion about the past, citing such figures as “George Washingham”, “Sinclair (Joe) Lewis”, and “Sergeant Cuff” (as if he were a real individual). Then there are a series of statements that one is to mark either true or false, and this is where things get complicated. Take this statement: “The aboriginal Americans lived above-ground and drank water.” This is obviously true, but carries the suggestion that the people of the twentysecond century do not live above-ground or drink water: in a single sentence an entire mode of future existence is potently suggested. But consider this statement: “The hero Jackie Robinson is chiefly known for his voyage to obtain the golden fleece.” The point is not whether this is true or false; the point is: What if the people of the future think it to be true? Given their other errors, this is entirely conceivable. Even if the future society knows this to be false, the very manner in which the statement is framed suggests that Jackie Robinson is now regarded as some sort of hero, perhaps in some religious fashion. Other statements carry similarly disturbing implications. But the clincher is at the end. The final document is a card giving someone’s weight (presumably the scientist’s) and a meaningless machine-generated fortune. But the editor of these documents professes to find this silly thing “of great significance”. And it suddenly becomes clear that the time machine was not sent forward from our time into the future but backward from an infinitely farther future, in which people’s grasp of the events of our time and before must be even poorer than the

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around here would bear false witness against a dog” (L 61). What Jackson has done in this story, and in others of this type, is to make us doubt every single utterance made by every character in the tale; at the same time, we are inexorably made to think the worst of all the characters. In this instance, the townspeople are either liars of sadists or both; and the worst part of it is, of course, that her own children are infected with this blood-lust against a dog and happily imagine the many tortures one could inflict upon it to cure it of this reprehensible habit.

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twenty-second century’s if they cannot correctly identify an insignificant weight and fortune card.

Loneliness Shirley Jackson once wrote that she took to writing out of loneliness: when i first used to write stories and hide them away in my desk i used to think that no one had ever been so lonely as i was and i used to write about people all alone. once i started a novel . . . but i never finished because i found out about insanity about then and i used to write about lunatics after that. i thought i was insane and i would write about how the only sane people are the ones who are condemned as mad and how the whole world is cruel and foolish and afraid of people who are different. (O 40)

It is conceivable that this single utterance encompasses nearly the whole of her fiction, and loneliness may be the single most dominant theme in her work. But note again what a contrast the domestic fiction presents: in that body of work she herself is not lonely because she has her lively and energetic children (I have already noted how infrequently her husband appears in these works); and although she and her family may be isolated from the rest of the community (as in reality they were because of their intellectualism and, it must be admitted, Jackson’s snobbishness [O 183-84]), they still participate with gusto in such social rituals as shopping, moving, celebrating Christmas, and participating in sports. If the domestic fiction therefore benignly papers over the true loneliness of Jackson and her family, her other fiction scathingly lays it bare with such force that the tales become genuinely horrific. Loneliness appears to be manifested in these stories in two parallel ways, as in the domestic fiction: 1) the loneliness of an individual within a wider group (whether that be a family, a community, or the world); and 2) the loneliness of a family within a wider group. In both categories we find some of Jackson’s most memorable and terrifying work. We have already noted individual loneliness in a number of tales—the partygoer in “The Intoxicated”, Margaret in “The Daemon Lover”, the niece in “The Little House”. The opening paragraph of “The Intoxicated” encapsulates the idea perfectly: He was just tight enough and just familiar enough with the house to be able to go out into the kitchen alone, apparently to get ice, but actually to sober up a little; he was not quite enough of a friend of the family to pass out on the living-room

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couch. He left the party behind without reluctance, the group by the piano singing “Stardust,” his hostess talking earnestly to a young man with thin clean glasses and a sullen mouth; he walked guardedly through the dining-room, where a little group of four or five people sat on the stiff chairs reasoning something out carefully among themselves . . . (L 9)

By implication, the man’s loneliness is a product both of his own volition (he does not want to join the singers) and of rebuffs by others (the hostess clearly does not wish to be interrupted in her tête-à-tête with the young man; the people in the dining room are discussing something “among themselves”, leaving no room for anyone else), and we will find this sort of dichotomy frequently in Jackson. A surprising number of individuals or families will withdraw themselves from society, washing their hands of it entirely; this tendency reaches its apex in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). But can we truly be certain that this self-imposed hermitry is solely a result of misanthropy? Might it perhaps not conceal a longing for acceptance that has finally turned to what Lovecraft called the “bitterness of alienage”? I am not at all certain that “The Lottery” (1948; L) ought to be considered in this precise context, but I may as well do so here as anywhere. Whereas this tale seems generally to convey the notion of a community that wilfully isolates an individual within it, Jackson herself appears to have had different ideas. Judy Oppenheimer writes: “She always refused to answer the question put to her by thousands of readers, ‘What is “The Lottery” really about?’—but to a good friend she confided very matter-of-factly that it had, of course, been about the Jews” (O 72). Respectful as I generally am to authors’ statements about their own work, in this case I must frankly declare Jackson to be mistaken. “The Lottery” cannot be about anti-Semitism because of the fundamental randomness of the procedure by which an individual from the community is selected to die. In any case, the community depicted in the story appears racially and culturally homogeneous, and the individual chosen for death—Mrs Hutchinson—differs in no appreciable way from the other citizens. Indeed, it is exactly this randomness that is the source of horror in the story. Another comment by Jackson seems a little more on target: “I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity of their

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For ritual is at the heart of the story—a meaningless, stupid ritual whose original rationale, whatever it may have been, has now been entirely forgotten. This is made clear by an elderly person’s statement that the neighbouring town wants to give up the lottery (the implication, obviously, is that the lottery is a widespread if not universal phenomenon): Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. (L 215)

The lottery has become so inveterate that it has given rise to an axiom. This axiom, “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon”, suggests that the original purpose of the lottery was as a fertility rite, something akin to what Thomas Tryon described at the conclusion of Harvest Home (1973); but the need for bountiful crops must have long passed, and yet the lottery continues, much as we might say “Bless you” when someone sneezes, even though we have entirely forgotten and perhaps would no longer even believe in what the expression really means (one must be blessed lest one expel one’s soul while sneezing). It is “ritual gone to seed”. And it is the young people of the neighbouring town who wish to give up the lottery: they are less under the sway of mindless convention than the old people. Indeed, when Old Man Warner remarks at the end, “It’s not the way it used to be . . . People ain’t the way they used to be” (L 218), he means that now some people are actually taking pity on the victim or, at least, are not taking pride in having the victim chosen from one’s own family (the remark previous to his is: “A girl whispered, ‘I hope it’s not Nancy’” [L 218]). The artistry of “The Lottery” is indeed remarkable, although there is some justice to some readers’ complaints of authorial deceit. One reader wrote to The New Yorker, “I resent being tricked into reading perverted stories like ‘The Lottery’” (C 231); however naive and conventional this response may be, it underscores the fact that Jackson goes out of her way to conceal the climax

by a narrative tone that at the outset is placid, benign, and innocuous almost to excess. Subtle little points throughout the narrative cause unease, however, in particular the matter of why the family that has apparently won the first part of the lottery (the family from whom the person is to be killed is chosen first, then the individual from that family) seems unhappy about being chosen. If they have won a lottery, shouldn’t they be pleased? And it is only one more of Jackson’s perversions of domestic bliss that the children of the town take the greatest glee in stoning the victim to death. I have stated that “The Lottery” is nonsupernatural, and of course the actual events are indeed so; but in a strange way this tale may be weird without being supernatural, by merely postulating the existence of the lottery in this town and in at least several others. There are, of course, no lotteries of this sort and never have been. In this sense the story embodies in the most literal way a trait I have described in the weird tale: the refashioning of reality. “The Lottery” is clearly set in the present day and in a world we are all seemingly familiar with; but the mere existence of the lottery, and the clear implication that it has been in practice for decades or centuries, depict Lovecraft’s “violation of natural law” in the simple sense of portraying the real world as other than we know it in this one regard. I think that the central theme of The Haunting of Hill House is also individual loneliness, although it could be studied from a number of other perspectives. The focus of this rich, complex, poignant, and atmospheric work—at once the greatest of Jackson’s novels and her greatest contribution to weird fiction—is Eleanor Vance, perhaps Jackson’s most delicately etched portrait of the weak-willed, love-starved woman. Eleanor has been chosen—along with Luke Sanderson and Theodora (she claims to have no last name)—by Dr John Montague, an avowed investigator of “supernatural phenomena” (HH 5), to explore Hill House because of her apparent sensitivity to the weird or occult: when younger she had evidently experienced some poltergeist phenomena. Her previous life (she is thirty-two) has been wretched: up to a few months before coming to Hill House she had to take care of her sick mother, and she now suffers guilt because she thinks she may have contributed to her death by being negligent; she does not get along with her married sister (indeed, it is stated at the outset that she “hated” [HH 7] her) and is forced covertly to take the car they

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own lives” (O 131). Even this I am not inclined to accept wholly, and in fact Jackson’s best commentary on her story may be a stray remark in Hangsaman: “Another instance . . . of ritual gone to seed” (H 62).

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Suddenly, without reason, laughter trembled inside Eleanor; she wanted to run to the head of the table and hug the doctor, she wanted to reel, chanting, across the stretches of the lawn, she wanted to sing and to shout and to fling her arms and move in great, emphatic, possessing circles around the rooms of Hill House; I am here, I am here, she thought. She shut her eyes quickly in delight and then said demurely to the doctor, “And what do we do today?” (HH 100-101)

What this passage also suggests is her growing identification with Hill House—she is possessing it or it is possessing her. Early on the doctor says: “‘Hill House has a reputation for insistent hospitality; it seemingly dislikes letting its guests get away’” (HH 48-49). Eleanor ominously echoes this idea when she says, “‘I don’t think we could leave now if we wanted to’” (HH 54).

Friedrich von Schiller, 1759-1805.

jointly own when the sister refuses to allow her to use it to drive to Hill House. I am at the moment not interested in many of the supernatural phenomena recounted in the novel; I here wish to clarify not merely Eleanor’s loneliness (she admits this herself: “‘I am always afraid of being alone’” [HH 113]) but her low estimation of herself: Eleanor found herself unexpectedly admiring her own feet. Theodora dreamed over the fire just beyond the tips of her toes, and Eleanor thought with deep satisfaction that her feet were handsome in their red sandals; what a complete and separate thing I am, she thought, going from my red toes to the top of my head, individually an I, possessed of attributes belonging only to me. I have red shoes, she thought—that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons. I am holding a brandy glass which is mine because I am here and I am using it and I will have a place in this room. I have red shoes and tomorrow I will wake up and I will still be here. (HH 59)

This is all a little harried: she is seizing upon anything she can find to validate her existence. Has Eleanor only really begun to live—to lead a full, emotionally satisfying life—since coming to Hill House? Such is surely the implication of the following:

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The Shakespearean tag “Journeys end in lovers meeting” glides through this novel like an elusive ritornello, but what is its true implication? If it is Eleanor’s journey that is at an end here (and this is clearly the case, as at the beginning we experience the long trip to Hill House through her eyes), who is her lover? Is it Theodora, with whom she becomes very close—to the point that Theodora must wear Eleanor’s clothes when her own are found covered with red paint like blood? Is it Luke, who seems to be dallying with both women? Or is it the house itself? Perhaps it is all three. Toward the end it becomes clear that Luke, finding Eleanor’s behaviour increasingly odd, prefers the company of Theodora. Is Eleanor jealous of Theodora? Why else is she suddenly filled with an “uncontrollable loathing” (HH 112) of her? It is here that some of the supernatural manifestations gain their importance. At one point the guests find some crude writing on the wall: “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME” (HH 103). The wording is significant: it is not “Help Eleanor go home” or “get home”; the implication is that Eleanor is already home or on the way home (at Hill House), and that some sort of spiritual transition must take place so that she feels at home here. Other weird events also seem to single out Eleanor, until finally she appears to begin cracking under the strain. One night she leaves her bedroom to meander through the house; her absence is noted by the others and they look for her, but she refuses to reveal her whereabouts: “Eleanor clung to the door and laughed until tears came into her eyes; what fools they are, she thought; we trick them so easily” (HH 163). Who is the “we” but she and Hill House? Journeys end in lovers meeting. When

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At this point it is worth studying the general supernaturalism of the novel. In a lecture written a year prior to the publication of the novel, “Experience and Fiction” (C), Jackson discusses the research and composition of the novel at length. I am not sure that this essay is of any genuine help in elucidating the work, although it contains some wry features, as when Jackson comes down to her study one morning and finds the words “DEAD DEAD” in her own handwriting (C 213), which she takes as a sign that she was destined to write a ghost story. In any case, we learn both from this essay and from the facts of her biography that Jackson had always had an interest in the supernatural, and indeed both she herself and her children made no secret of the fact that she actually believed in the supernatural (O 37, 125). She had an extensive collection of books on witchcraft, and in preparation for her novel she read much about hauntings, including papers by the Society for Psychic Research. And yet, I am forced to admit that the supernatural manifestations in The Haunting of Hill House in many cases seem random, unmotivated, and unexplained. What is the significance of the cold spot in the hallway? of the knocking heard intermittently at night on people’s doors? of “some animal like a dog” (HH 95) seen by Dr Montague? It is all very well for the doctor to say that “‘psychic phenomena are subject to laws of a very particular sort’” (HH 48), but those laws are never specified nor are the psychic events actually experienced at Hill House ever plausibly accounted for or harmonised within the overall scheme of the novel. It appears that they are meant merely to enhance the atmosphere of weirdness as a backdrop to the story of Eleanor Vance. I also think it was a mistake for Jackson to introduce Montague’s obnoxious and overbearing wife and her pompous and bumbling assistant toward the end; considerable cheap satire is had at their expense, but the atmosphere of the novel is close to being shattered by their obtrusive presence. Nevertheless, The Haunting of Hill House remains a masterwork in the field, if only for exhibiting some of the most meticulous character

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER (1759-1805)

One of the preeminent German authors of the nineteenth century, Schiller is esteemed as an adept lyricist and theoretician whose works are informed by his conviction that the writer should strive not only to entertain, but also to instruct and improve his audience. He was an immensely popular poet during his life, but is best remembered for his dramas. Of these, his early plays reflect his affinity with the Sturm und Drang movement, which championed the passionate expression of emotional and spiritual struggle, and emphasize both his idealism and his concern for human freedom; his later plays are characterized by more realistic, moral, and Classical subjects and forms. Schiller’s impact upon the Gothic and Romantic traditions was the immense popularity and influence of his drama Die Räuber (1781; The Robbers) and his novel fragment Der Geisterseher (1789; The Ghost-Seer; or, The Apparitionist) upon such writers as Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. Schiller completed The Robbers in 1781. The play is an imaginative and often violent glorification of a rebel who, along with a band of thieves, attempts to overthrow a corrupt political order. Unable to find a publisher, Schiller printed the play anonymously at his own expense, and it soon attracted the attention of Wolfgang von Dalberg, director of the Mannheim National Theater, who staged it that same year. The Robbers was both popular and controversial. Reviewers debated the morality of its characters, and Schiller, jailed for two weeks, was forbidden to publish further due to the revolutionary fervor the play allegedly inspired.

portrayal in weird fiction and for its overwhelming sense of inevitable doom. A final contribution to the individual loneliness theme is Jackson’s last published story, “The Possibility of Evil” (1965). This story of an aristo-

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the others persuade her to leave, she cries defiantly, “Hill House belongs to me” (HH 173), and as she leaves the driveway she turns abruptly and smashes her car into a tree, echoing the fate of the last occupant of Hill House eighteen years before, whose “horse bolted and crushed him against the big tree” (HH 49). What life would Eleanor have had if she had left? “‘It’s the only time anything’s ever happened to me’” (HH 171).

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cratic old woman who writes anonymous poison pen letters to other citizens so as to keep her town “clean and sweet” is a trifle obvious, but is redeemed by its unrelenting viciousness. In the end she is detected and someone repays her in kind by destroying her cherished rose garden and writing an anonymous note: “LOOK OUT AT WHAT USED TO BE YOUR ROSES.” Jackson’s biographer Judy Oppenheimer believes, incredibly, that Jackson identified with the old woman: “Shirley wanted to see herself . . . as a proper lady, sure of her place, who sent forth her terrible messages to the world yet remained anonymously secure” (O 272). But surely we are meant to loathe the old woman for her spitefulness and her injustice: “Miss Strangeworth never concerned herself with facts; her letters all dealt with the more negotiable stuff of suspicion.” And the irony is a little heavyhanded: She had been writing her letters . . . for the past year. She never got any answers, of course, because she never signed her name. If she had been asked, she would have said that her name, Adela Strangeworth, a name honored in the town for so many years, did not belong on such trash. The town where she lived had to be kept clean and sweet, but people everywhere were lustful and evil and degraded, and needed to be watched; the world was so large, and there was only one Miss Strangeworth left in it.

Jackson’s incomplete novel, Come Along with Me (1965; C), is the most forthright example of a character leaving the past behind. A middle-aged woman whose husband has died decides to unburden herself of all the impedimenta of her prior existence and start afresh:

The Bird’s Nest might be studied here, even though I fear it is the least successful of Jackson’s novels. This work might have been a powerful vehicle for the study of loneliness and the concomitant desire to refashion oneself—for who can be lonelier than a person with multiple personalities?—but the execution is severely flawed. This story of Elizabeth Richmond, who is diagnosed as having four separate personalities—Elizabeth (timid and colourless), Beth (sweet but fragile), Betsy (childishly petulant and potentially violent), and Bess (the most evil of all, a frightening megalomaniac)—is marred by structural clumsiness, poor writing, and a feeble conclusion. Jackson makes several mistakes of judgment. Each of the five long chapters is narrated from a different point of view: the first chapter is omniscient, the second and fourth from the perspective of the psychiatrist brought in to treat Elizabeth, the third (most interestingly) through Betsy’s eyes, and the fifth from the point of view of Elizabeth’s Aunt Morgen. The psychiatrist’s narrative tone—flippant, pretentious, cheaply ironic—seriously impedes the progress of the novel, which in any case (as with all Jackson’s novels save the last two) tends to meander and digress. In chapter 2 the

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reproduction of the psychiatrist’s transcript of a discussion with Elizabeth and her various personalities sounds excessively clinical, robbing the scene of the emotive power it might have had if it had been presented more novelistically. And the lame conclusion, in which Elizabeth is magically cured and her personalities integrated, is a woeful anticlimax. Indeed, toward the end the atmosphere changes almost in spite of Jackson’s wishes from grim intensity to farce as we watch Elizabeth’s four personalities successively assert themselves and take four baths consecutively (B 33537). Eventually we are led to understand the origin of the entire personality split: Elizabeth, jealous of her mother’s lover (who hates her [B 236]), has caused her mother’s death in an altercation and is now suppressing the memory. Jackson may have erred here also on the side of vagueness, as the background is sketched hazily and fragmentarily, so that the connexion between Elizabeth’s relationship with her mother and her split personality is never adequately clarified.

So that was how I started out. I’d thought about it for a long time of course—not that I positively expected I was going to have to bury Hughie, but he had a good life—and everything went the way I used to figure it would. I sold the house, I auctioned off the furniture, I put all the paintings and boxes in the barn, I erased my old name and took my initials off everything, and I got on the train and left. (C 12)

She takes up a new name, Angela Motorman, almost at random, and, in response to her landlady’s query as to her occupation, she remarks: “‘I dabble in the supernatural’” (C 18). What this means, apparently, is that from the age of twelve she has heard voices from the dead (C 24-26). The fragment ends after Angela gives a rather inconclusive and unsatisfying séance. I have no idea where this novel was going to go—even what we have seems a little disjointed and unfocused—or whether the supernatural would actually have come into play; but this novel might for once have portrayed a strong, self-controlled figure rather than the birdlike victims so characteristic of Jackson’s other work. The tales that focus on the loneliness or isolation of a family within a community do not differ appreciably in tone from those involving indi-

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Consider “The Renegade”. The horror of this story lies not merely in the implication that an entire community has, with gleeful vindictiveness, turned against a household because of its supposed chicken-killing dog, but that the family is now being destroyed from within as the children embrace the prospect of killing the dog: Mrs. Walpole looked at them, at her two children with their hard hands and their sunburned faces laughing together, their dog with blood still on her legs laughing with them. She went to the kitchen doorway to look outside at the cool green hills, the motion of the apple tree in the soft afternoon breeze. “Cut your head right off,” Jack was saying. (L 65)

“Strangers in Town” (1959) is Jackson’s vendetta against the townsfolk who ostracised her when she accused a favourite grade-school teacher of beating her children (see O 213-15). This crude and obvious story is fueled by nothing but hatred, to the point that Jackson’s artistry completely forsakes her. Told from the point of view of smallminded neighbours who cannot tolerate a strange family’s unconventional ways (they don’t seem to do any cooking; they dance the night away), this story is simply void of subtlety: “Foreign ways!” I said. “You’re heathen, wicked people, with your dancing and your maid, and the sooner you leave this town, the better it’s going to be for you. Because I might as well tell you”—and I shook my finger right at her—“that certain people in this town aren’t going to put up with your fancy ways much longer, and you would be well advised—very well advised, I say—to pack up your furniture and your curtains and your maid and cat and get out of our town before we put you out.”

“‘All She Said Was “Yes”’” (1962) is much superior, speaking poignantly of a curious young

girl whose parents have been killed in an auto accident. It bears relationships to “The Intoxicated” in that it suggests that the girl is clairvoyant; and like that story, it is told from the point of view of an individual who fails to perceive the girl’s powers. This tale is also a little obvious (there is no ambiguity, as in “The Intoxicated”, whether the girl really can see into the future or not), and a predictable ending does not help matters: the girl tells her neighbour repeatedly not to go on a boat, but the neighbour pays no attention and the story concludes: “we’re all going to go on a cruise.” But the delicate portrayal of the central figure—an unattractive, tight-lipped, morose girl who knew that her parents would die and is accordingly not shocked but merely saddened and stupefied, and now totally alone in the world—makes this one of Jackson’s later triumphs. The Sundial may be mentioned here, although I wish to study it more extensively elsewhere. This mad and disturbing tale of a large and wealthy family convinced that the external world will shortly come to an end, with only its house preserved, displays at once the Halloran family’s isolation from the world and the internal dissensions that cause it to be a microcosm of the unruly outside world they are purportedly leaving behind. The Hallorans’ withdrawal from the world, even before they take up their insane view of the world’s imminent destruction, is entirely selfgenerated: The character of the house is perhaps of interest. It stood upon a small rise in ground, and all the land it surveyed belonged to the Halloran family. The Halloran land was distinguished from the rest of the world by a stone wall, which went completely around the estate, so that all inside the wall was Halloran, all outside was not. The first Mr. Halloran . . . was a man who, in the astonishment of finding himself suddenly extremely wealthy, could think of nothing better to do with his money than set up his own world. His belief about the house . . . was that it should contain everything. The other world, the one the Hallorans were leaving behind, was to be plundered ruthlessly for objects of beauty to go in and around Mr. Halloran’s house; infinite were the delights to be prepared for its inhabitants. (S 11)

But this isolation fails to weed out the disharmonies of the world, as we shall see elsewhere. Much of the effectiveness of this book lies in how Jackson totally ignores the outside world, as if it has already ceased to exist. Everything is focused on the house and its occupants; even when some of those occupants have come from that outside world, it is completely forgotten once they enter

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vidual loneliness. It might be thought that these tales would be tempered somewhat with hope, in the sense that the family members at least have themselves even if the rest of the world rejects them, whereas the lonely individuals have no one to turn to in their isolation; but in fact these tales can be even grimmer than the others, and several of them represent Jackson’s most pungent excursions into satire and misanthropy. This is either because the family unit cannot provide any significant comfort to its members in the face of the overwhelming hostility of the outside world, or because the family itself is torn by tragedy and in-fighting, so that individuals may feel an added layer of loneliness—both within the family and without.

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the house. Background information on the characters is deliberately lacking, as if they had no prior existence before coming to the house. And in the one instance where a character—Maryjane, the daughter-in-law of the domineering Mrs Halloran—attempts to escape the house, the scene is depicted in so bizarre a manner that we are uncertain of its reality—and Maryjane, bootlessly trying to flee to the nearby town on foot, finds that she has unwittingly returned to the very house she sought to leave. It is needless to remark that Jackson wisely ends the novel without resolving the issue of whether the world will in fact end. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is, of course, Jackson’s grimmest and nastiest portrayal of family isolation. The Blackwood family has been shattered by tragedy: all but three members of the household died by poisoning six years prior to the novel’s opening, and one of the survivors, Constance Blackwood, is blamed by the townspeople for the murders even though she was tried and found innocent. She now lives in her spectral house with her younger cousin Mary Katherine (called Merricat) and her uncle Julian, himself crippled from the effects of the poison. Next to the Hallorans in The Sundial, this is Jackson’s weirdest family. Merricat is the focus of the tale: she alone ventures to the town for groceries and other household needs, enduring the taunts of the townsfolk but in turn hating and despising them. It is clear that we are meant to sympathise wholeheartedly with the Blackwoods and to hate the townspeople as they hate them, and as they are hated in turn by them. But what are we to make of the family’s snobbishness? Anyone who came to see us, properly invited, came up the main drive which led straight from the gateposts on the highway up to our front door. When I was small I used to lie in my bedroom at the back of the house and imagine the driveway and the path as a crossroad meeting before our front door, and up and down the driveway went the good people, the clean and rich ones dressed in satin and lace, who came rightfully to visit, and back and forth along the path, sneaking and weaving and sidestepping servilely, went the people from the village. (W 27-28)

The novel does not end here, however. In what is both a horrific and a heart-rending twist of Jackson’s domestic fiction, the two cousins (Julian has now died) continue in their quiet defiance of the townsfolk by trying to resume their lives even when most of their property—furniture, clothes, utensils, food, even much of the house itself—is devastated. When Constance, successfully locating two teacups with their handles intact, remarks, “We will take our meals like ladies . . . using cups with handles” (W 144), we are evidently to regard this as a reaffirmation of the “good breeding” the women have received, a wholly admirable attempt to preserve one’s dignity in the face of disaster. There is, of course, nothing supernatural about We Have Always Lived in the Castle; if anything, it is a mystery story, although the mystery is not very cleverly executed and is by no means the focus of the novel. By any normal criteria it cannot be considered a weird tale, even though it manipulates after a fashion the topos of the haunted house, doing so from the unique perspective of the inhabitants of the house rather than of outsiders seeking to penetrate its mysteries. There is, however, a rather odd way in which perhaps the weird does enter into this novel, and it is this which I now wish to consider.

Misanthropy

One might be inclined to say that Jackson is introducing a significant ambiguity to suggest that the Blackwoods and the townspeople are both blameworthy for the ostracism they inflict upon each other; but I do not believe this to be the case. We have already seen that Jackson herself looked down upon the townsfolk of Bennington, and her views are identical to Merricat’s; she is clearly portraying the attitude here as entirely admirable

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(it in fact connects with what happens later in the novel), and it is simply unfortunate that Jackson could not predict the disapproval that later generations would have of this sort of snobbishness. In any case, the rest of the novel compels us to find the townspeople wholly responsible for the events that follow, in particular when the townspeople, in a fit of irrational anger, destroy much of the house while putting out a fire that has started inside it. It is at this point that we learn a truth that scarcely any reader could have failed to guess, although Jackson evidently intends it as a stunning surprise: Merricat was the poisoner of her family.

“Nothing has the power to hurt which doesn’t have the power to frighten” (O 42): this single utterance by Shirley Jackson may be all the justification we need to consider some of her darkest and most vicious work, otherwise wholly nonsupernatural, as anomalous contributions to the weird tale. Maurice Lévy remarked of Ambrose Bierce that “One is almost tempted to believe that one day he decided to instill fear into his contemporaries by hatred, to gain revenge on them”,5 and Jackson seems very frequently inspired by the

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It is interesting that The Sundial seems to have been singled out by reviewers for its misanthropy. Harvey Swados snorted: “While Miss Jackson is an intelligent and clever writer, there rises from her pages the cold fishy gleam of a calculated and carefully expressed contempt for the human race” (O 218). There are two problems with this utterance: one, the whole of Jackson’s work is refreshingly misanthropic; two, the assumption here (as I have noted in connexion with Bierce) is that there is something necessarily wrong with misanthropy. I do not know that Jackson anywhere offers an explicit philosophical defence of misanthropy, but perhaps she need not have done so: her work makes it obvious that she had little patience for the stupid, the arrogant, the pompous, the complacently bourgeois, the narrowminded, and the spiteful—in other words, she hates all those people whom there is every good reason to hate. Since, therefore, I do not acknowledge any prejudice against misanthropy, I can only relish the exquisite nastiness with which Jackson ordinarily displays it. Such a tale as “Strangers in Town” is to be criticised not because it is misanthropic but because in this instance Jackson’s blind hatred has resulted in a failure of that artistry and subtlety uniformly evident in the rest of her work. The celebrated (but uncollected) “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” is worth discussing in this context. This spectacularly nasty story has, in its quiet way, some stupendous implications. A man leaves home in the morning and seems intent on accomplishing nothing but good: he keeps an eye on a boy while his mother runs an errand; he advises a man looking for an apartment as to the availability of one he has just seen; he actually gives a cab driver money and advice for betting on horses. Most remarkably of all, he intentionally stops a young man and a young woman on the street, introduces them to each other, and gives them money to take the day off and have a good time. He is benevolence itself. He comes home, meets his wife, and tells her how his day went. She tells him about hers:

“I had a little nap this afternoon, took it easy most of the day. Went into a department store this morning and accused the woman next to me of shoplifting, and had the store detective pick her up. Sent three dogs to the pound—you know, the usual thing.”

They plan the next day: “Fine,” said Mr. Johnson. “But you do look tired. Want to change over tomorrow?” “I would like to,” she said. “I could do with a change.” “Right,” said Mr. Johnson.

With such ease can people be sadistically mean and superhumanly philanthropic in turn! The one seems as good a way of passing the time as the other. But the true message of the story, beyond the implication that misanthropy and benevolence can be sloughed off and put on like a cloak, is the idea of manipulation: both misanthropy and benevolence involve a fascistic manipulation of human beings as if they were puppets; and perhaps Jackson’s real misanthropy is directed here not at the couple but at the spineless and stupid people who allow the couple to do their dirty or good work with such insouciance. Manipulation of this sort is what Mrs Orianna Halloran attempts in The Sundial. There may perhaps be some justification in singling out this novel for its misanthropy, since here there are no admirable or likeable characters at all, and each of them is portrayed in the most vitriolic manner: Mrs Halloran, domineering, arrogant, and possibly the murderer of her own son so that no one can stand in the way of her control of the household; Mr Halloran, her husband, broken, feebleminded, lost in dreams of the past; Aunt Fanny, flighty and confused but startlingly bucking Orianna’s authority at unexpected moments; Maryjane, an airhead who only wants control of the house and property for herself; Miss Ogilvie, an utterly ineffectual longtime family retainer; Essex, a sycophant who seeks only to forward his own cause; Augusta Willow, a blowsy matron who wants nothing more than to marry off her two sullen daughters, Julia and Arabella; Gloria, a possibly disturbed young woman with apparently precognitive powers; even little Fancy, Maryjane’s young daughter, whose sweet exterior hides a lust for power and control scarcely less intense than that of Mrs Halloran. This is the eccentric crowd Jackson gathers for her pseudo-apocalyptic tale; and it can scarcely be doubted that, if nothing else, it represents the most extreme contrast possible with the love,

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same motivation. Indeed, from this perspective it is possible to consider a very wide array of works— from Juvenal (notably the fifteenth satire, on cannibalism in Egypt) to Swift6 to Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934)7 —as quasi-weird, because they are all driven by such daemonic misanthropy that they not only hurt but frighten. Perhaps it is this feature that will allow us to sneak in We Have Always Lived in the Castle through the back door of the weird.

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warmth, and unity of Jackson’s own family as recorded (with perhaps no little exaggeration) in her domestic fiction. The ease with which everyone is convinced—or claims to be convinced—of Aunt Fanny’s notion that the world will end (she claims to have heard it from the spirit of her dead father) is certainly meant is a testament to human stupidity. It is conceivable, however, that Mrs Halloran only goes along with the idea as a means of maintaining control of the household, since she immediately begins laying down orders on preparing for the disaster and makes it abundantly clear that she will be the queen of the new civilisation that the family will have to found once all the other people in the world are eliminated. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Jackson’s most unrestrainedly misanthropic work. Here hatred is everywhere: “The people of the village have always hated us” (W 11); “I wished they were dead” (W 15); “our father said they [the villagers] were trash” (W 17). Let us hear what Merricat feels for the townsfolk: I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. Constance said, “Never let them see that you care,” and “If you pay any attention they’ll only get worse,” and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true. “It’s wrong to hate them,” Constance said, “it only weakens you,” but I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place. (W 15-16)

That last sentence rather reminds me of Lucretius’ celebrated utterance against the argument from design: Quidve mali fuerat nobis non esse creatis? (“What harm would it have been had we never been created?”) (De Rerum Natura 5.174). In any case, I actually believe we are meant to agree with Merricat’s sentiments here, outrageous as they seem: note that when Constance chides her for hating the townsfolk, it is not because such a hatred is abstractly immoral but that “it only weakens you”. Constance is recommending a sort of bland indifference as an even purer form of misanthropy than active hatred. The whole novel, in any event, asks us to sympathise with the Blackwoods and not the townsfolk.

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Houses Anyone who has written works with such titles as “The Lovely House”, “The House”, “Louisa, Please Come Home”, “The Little House”, “Home”, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle must find great inspiration from dwellings. These tales by no means exhaust the catalogue of “house” stories in Jackson’s work, and we must add at least The Sundial and, indeed, both volumes of domestic fiction to the list. Those domestic volumes are again the logical starting-point for the analysis of the house theme in Jackson. It is not simply that the house functions benignly in these books whereas it is sinister, evil, confining, and inhibiting in her other work; the relation is again more complex than that. Recall our discussion of “The House” (1952), the quasi-supernatural tale whose first section alone was included at the very beginning of Life among the Savages. It is no surprise that the supernatural component of the story would be excised in its new setting; but the mere context has robbed the house in the story of its subtly evil character. The narrative of moving into this imposing but ramshackle house takes on a seriocomic quality, as in the book Jackson’s children play a greater role, dispersing the potentially chilling atmosphere with their boisterous high spirits. The message is clear: in the domestic fiction a house is not in itself a cheering and heartwarming environment, but becomes so through the love and closeness of the family occupying it. It is exactly these emotions that are lacking in Jackson’s other work, whether it be in such a non-supernatural satire as The Road through the Wall or in a quasisupernatural one as The Sundial. In both these instances the house becomes cold and unwelcoming only because the inhabitants themselves exhibit these same feelings toward each other. Even in those stories in which the house itself remains relatively passive, the hostility of its occupants or of the outside community render the house something akin to a prison. Neither “The Summer People” nor “The Little House” focuses upon the house as such; but in both tales it takes on foreboding qualities. In the former the elderly couple’s summer house becomes a virtual tomb when the couple decides to extend its stay beyond Labor Day. In the latter, the spitefulness of eldery neighbours causes a perfectly innocuous house to appear a death-trap to its new owner, who flees in terror. And yet, to Jackson’s mind—at once conditioned to the domestic pieties of the 1950s and

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Movie still from The Haunting, the 1963 film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

rebelling against them—the house is an unavoidable fixture regardless of what dire qualities it takes on. Even at the beginning of We Have Always Lived in the Castle Constance is afraid of leaving the house (W 29), although it has become, for all practical purposes, a grave for her. Her life after the poisoning of her family has been reduced to its walls—with, perhaps, fleeting moments on the grounds—but she regards it at least as a haven against the scorn of the townspeople. And even after much of the house is burned and rendered uninhabitable, Constance and Merricat choose to remain there, calmly and even whimsically reshaping their lives to within an even smaller compass. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Jackson’s most searing parody of domesticity: all the things that made the domestic stories so wholesome and touching—love between the family members; the antics of children; the comical excess of furniture, toys, and food; the sense of belonging to a community—have here been perverted. And yet, Constance and Merricat seem strangely content with their impoverished circumstances; and indeed, is it really so bad? They at least have each other.

In The Sundial even this comfort is lacking. Each member of this lunatic household clings, like Constance and Merricat, to the belief that the house alone will represent safety and sanctuary even when the rest of the world is destroyed; but amongst the occupants themselves there is no harmony, only struggles for supremacy, covert affairs, and bungled attempts to escape. Because the outside world so rarely figures in this novel, the house itself becomes the world—it is as if there really is nothing beyond it. Is Jackson saying that the rest of the world functions as the Halloran household does? Is there no harmony or love to be found anywhere? The Haunting of Hill House is, of course, Jackson’s most profound and searching treatment of the house theme; its opening paragraph sets the tone, and I cannot resist quoting it in spite of its celebrity: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream: Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.

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Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (HH 5)

I confess, however, to an uncertainty as to what this is exactly supposed to mean. It is interesting that here insanity is linked to the perception of “absolute reality”: I am not so much concerned with quoting T. S. Eliot (“Human kind cannot bear very much reality”) as with ascertaining the precise applicability of the remark. Hill House is a place where the superficial masks and deceptions of life are stripped off: it is where Eleanor comes to terms with the wretchedness of her prior life, sees through the sham of Luke’s and Theodora’s arch lightheartedness, and realises that she belongs here—because, in fact, she belongs nowhere. A later passage might shed further light on this enigmatic opening: This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed. (HH 26)

Curiously, the remark that the house “was not a fit place for . . . love” is perhaps contradicted by the denouement, for in its twisted way Hill House does love Eleanor—it wants her, it won’t let her leave, it perhaps kills her when she tries to go away. But if whatever walks in Hill House walks alone, are we not to see in this Jackson’s ultimate metaphor for loneliness? A house should represent safety, comfort, welcome; but in this house, as Dr Montague notes, “‘the intention is, somehow, to separate us’” (HH 96)—to render each person alone and lonely. If Jackson sees togetherness as the natural and desirable state for human beings, then Hill House, which causes loneliness, is an abomination and even a paradox; if it makes no “concession to humanity”, then it has defied the very beings who have created it and inverts the purposes for which it was built.

Notes 1. Jackson’s year of birth is usually given as 1919, a date she herself gave in later years; but her biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, has determined that Jackson was actually born on December 14, 1916, and that 1919 was given as the year of her birth so that she could seem to be younger than her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman (see O 11, 88). 2. An excellent and comprehensive bibliography of Jackson’s short work can be found in Joan Wylie Hall’s recent volume, Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction (1993). In my bibliography I include only important uncollected items. For books, asterisks indicate the edition cited in the text. 3. “The House”, Woman’s Day 15, No. 8 (May 1952): 116.

Conclusion What do we make of Shirley Jackson? Is she a weird writer even in part? That second question I am still unable to answer in any definitive way,

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save to note the obvious supernaturalism in a fairly representative core of her work. If The Haunting of Hill House is one of the greatest haunted house novels ever written, if “The Lottery” is among the cruellest non-supernatural horror stories ever written, what do we do with something so nebulous as The Sundial or “The Lovely House”? I hope, at any rate, to have suggested the tightly knit unity of Jackson’s work, its constant reworking of the interlocking themes of domesticity and loneliness, love and hate, madness and sanity, society and the individual; and I hope we can now see how each of these threads is pursued successively in tales that, from the point of view of genre, might be termed supernatural, nonsupernatural, mainstream, or autobiographical. It is true that Jackson, even in her avowedly supernatural work, presents no coherent metaphysics: her supernatural manifestations fail to suggest any putative reordering of the cosmos. But if she lacks the cosmic perspective of a Lovecraft, a Blackwood, or a Dunsany (or, indeed, of a Ramsey Campbell or T. E. D. Klein), if her focus is solely on human characters and human relationships, with even the supernatural phenomena subservient to or symbols for these relationships, then she at least distinguishes herself by the intensity, accuracy, and subtlety of her portrayal of human concerns; as with Bierce, her pitiless and sardonic exposing of human weakness makes her a horrific satirist who does not require the supernatural to arouse fear and horror. Her icy prose, clinical detachment, and utterly refreshing glee at the exhibition of human greed, misery, and evil ought to give her a high rank in general literature; that she chose to devote even a part of her talents to the weird is something for which we ought all to be grateful.

4. Ibid., p. 118. 5. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, tr. S. T. Joshi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 14.

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7. A chapter from this novel, “Du côté de chez Todd”, has frequently been included in horror anthologies under the title “The Man Who Liked Dickens”. It is one of the nastiest contes cruels ever written.

“Home.” Ladies’ Home Journal 82, No. 8 (August 1965): 6465, 116, 118. “Journey with a Lady.” Harper’s 205, No. 1 (July 1952): 7681. Rpt. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine 31, No. 6 (June 1958) (as “This Is the Life”). “Karen’s Complaint.” Good Housekeeping 149, No. 5 (November 1959): 38, 40, 42, 46.

Bibliography

“The Lost Kingdom of Oz.” Reporter 21, No. 10 (10 December 1959): 42-43.

A. Primary

“The Lovely Night.” Collier’s 125, No. 14 (8 April 1950): 15, 66-68.

I. BOOKS

“The Missing Girl.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 13, No. 6 (December 1957): 42-52.

The Bird’s Nest. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1954. Rpt. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, pp. 147-380. [B]

“The Omen.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 14, No. 3 (March 1958): 118-30.

Come Along with Me. Ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Viking, 1968. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, n.d. [C]

“On Being a Faculty Wife.” Mademoiselle 44, No. 2 (December 1956): 116-17, 135-36. In RD (in part).

Hangsaman. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1951. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, 1976. [H]

“One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 8, No. 1 (January 1955): 53-61. Rpt. The Best American Short Stories 1956, ed. Martha Foley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956, pp. 195-204.

The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Viking, 1959. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, 1977. [HH] Life among the Savages. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1953. Rpt. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, pp. 383-530. [LS] The Lottery. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, n.d. [L] Raising Demons. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1957. Rpt. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, pp. 531-753. [RD] The Road through the Wall. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. The Sundial. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1958. Rpt. New York: Ace, n.d. [S] We Have Always Lived in the Castle. New York: Viking, 1962. Rpt. New York: Popular Library, n.d. [W]

II. UNCOLLECTED SHORT STORIES AND ARTICLES “‘All She Said Was “Yes.”’” Vogue 140, No. 8 (1 November 1962): 142-43, 169, 171, 174-75.

“The Possibility of Evil.” Saturday Evening Post 238, No. 25 (18 December 1965): 61-64, 68-69. “Root of Evil.” Fantastic 2, No. 2 (March-April 1953): 12429, 162. Rpt. Fantastic 18, No. 5 (June 1969): 123-27, 140. “The Strangers.” Collier’s 129, No. 19 (10 May 1952): 24, 6871. “Strangers in Town.” Saturday Evening Post 231, No. 48 (30 May 1959): 18, 76-77, 79. “The Wishing Dime.” Good Housekeeping 129, No. 3 (September 1949): 35, 223-28.

B. Secondary Egan, James. “Sanctuary: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic and Fantastic Parables.” Studies in Weird Fiction No. 6 (Fall 1989): 15-24. Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Hall, Joan Wylie. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993.

“Behold the Child among His Newborn Blisses.” In CrossSection: A Collection of New American Writing, ed. Edwin Seaver. New York: L. B. Fisher, 1944, pp. 292-98.

Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam’s, 1988. [O]

“The Birthday Party.” Vogue 141, No. 1 (1 January 1963): 118, 145-46, 149, 154. (Rev. version of “Pajama Party”.)

Parks, John G. “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s Use of the Gothic.” Twentieth Century Literature 30 (1984): 15-29.

“Bulletin.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 6, No. 3 (March 1953): 46-48. Rpt. The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fourth Series, ed. Anthony Boucher. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955, pp. 182-85. “Daughter, Come Home.” Charm 60, No. 3 (May 1944): 75, 94-95. “Fame.” The Writer 61, No. 8 (August 1948): 265-66. “Family Magician.” Woman’s Home Companion, September 1949, pp. 23, 92-93, 98, 100. “A Great Voice Stilled.” Playboy 7, No. 3 (March 1960): 5758, 91.

DAVID A. OAKES (ESSAY DATE WINTER 1999) SOURCE: Oakes, David A. “Ghosts in the Machines: The Haunted Castle in the Works of Stephen King and Clive Barker.” Studies in Weird Fiction 24 (winter 1999): 25-33. In the following essay, Oakes highlights the modernization and transformation of the traditional Gothic setting of the haunted castle in works by Stephen King and Clive Barker.

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6. See Dale J. Nelson, “Arthur Jermyn Was a Yahoo: Swift and Modern Horror Fiction”, Studies in Weird Fiction No. 7 (Spring 1990): 3-7.

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Imagine, for a moment, that you are sitting down to read Stephen King’s disturbing short novel, The Mist. However, instead of being a frightening tale of a group of people trapped in a grocery store by a sinister mist that hides fantastic creatures, you find the novel to be a mildly amusing diversion because it tells how the mist engulfs and traps David Drayton and his friends in a castle. Envision how strange King’s “Trucks” would be if the truck stop being besieged by the vehicles was a large castle. What if Clive Barker’s “The Hellbound Heart” did not require the use of a puzzle box to summon the Cenobites, but, rather, demanded that the characters travel to the ruins of an ancient fortress to summon these strange entities? Or suppose that Arnie Cunningham, in King’s Christine, purchased and decided to repair a castle possessed by a ghost rather than the cursed red-and-white Plymouth Fury? Although the haunted castle was a crucial, even indispensable, element of early works of Gothic literature, the use of it in an unchanged form in contemporary settings can considerably lessen the impact of the tale or the fear generated by the events of the story. Thus, in order for Gothic fiction to remain an effective genre, the haunted castle needs to evolve and change to continue to be relevant to readers in different times and societies. The genre of Gothic fiction is a literature of destabilization in that it inspires its readers to ask questions about themselves, their society, and the cosmos surrounding them. Further, it serves as a cultural artifact, reflecting the concerns and fears not only of the time in which it is written, but also of the time in which it is read. Gothic literature is defined not only by what effects it has on readers, but also by a series of elements that appear time and again in works of this genre. The most prominent and common element of Gothic literature is the haunted castle and its later derivations. The haunted castle often serves as the center of supernatural activity, acts as a symbol of the past, and functions as the main source of danger and suspense within a work of Gothic fiction. In his 1927 study, The Haunted Castle, Eino Railo notes that the castle serves as a “scene of innumerable horrors, capable of touching the imagination each time we see it” (7). He believes that the haunted castle plays an exceedingly important part in [Gothic fiction]; so important, indeed, that were it eliminated the whole fabric of romance would be bereft of its foundation and would lose its predominant atmosphere. (7)

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The importance of this element comes, in part, from the connection of the term “Gothic” with architecture in the eighteenth century. Many of the earliest works of Gothic literature, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, are set in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, and therefore utilize a castle as the setting for the events of the story. As cultural artifacts, many works of Gothic fiction change the way in which the haunted castle is presented in order to remain relevant to their time and setting. Even in the earliest works of Gothic literature, the haunted castle undergoes changes and appears in different manifestations. For example, Eino Railo notes that Clara Reeve in The Old English Baron is the writer who, “for the first time,” makes “deliberate use of an empty suite of rooms [that is] supposed to be haunted” (8). Another manifestation of the haunted castle appears in the form of “the old abbey and monastery” as can be seen in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk. Similarly, Charles Brockden Brown, the first American Gothic writer, transforms the haunted castle into a wilderness, a realm of spirits and fantastic events, as he adapts the Gothic form to an American setting. Other writers of the nineteenth century, such as J. Sheridan LeFanu and Ambrose Bierce, change the haunted castle into a haunted house, in part, so their tales could be placed in contemporary settings. Furthermore, as Railo notes, as time passes the haunted room becomes the laboratory of workers of magic, of alchemists, the secret research room of a modern scientist—becomes, in general, the mysterious hidden chamber where the terrifying element is housed. Each age fashions this centre of suspense to conform with its own new experiences and inventions, but for the reader aware of its history it is an easy task to strip off the modern equipment, when it stands confessed as merely a new rendering of the old picture of the haunted castle. (171)

Thus, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the haunted castle becomes the laboratory of an ambitious scientist. This particular manifestation again appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”. Further, the process continues in the twentieth century with the haunted house of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 tale, The Haunting of Hill House, and the merging of the haunted house and laboratory in Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel, Hell House. It manifests itself as a lost city in H. P. Lovecraft’s 1931 novel, At the Mountains of Madness. Although its forms appear vastly different from those in the eighteenth century, the haunted castle continues

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Although the haunted castle has proven to be a very adaptable element in the works of various Gothic writers, it has often been limited in one way—it remains at a fixed location, necessitating the bringing of the characters to that particular site. However, Stephen King removes this limitation in Christine by presenting the haunted castle in the form of a car. Indeed, the use of the Plymouth Fury is particularly effective because it invokes a cultural artifact by calling upon the fascination many teenagers, especially males, feel for cars: Engines. That’s something else about being a teenager. There are all these engines, and somehow you end up with the ignition keys to some of them and you start them up but you don’t know what . . . they are or what they’re supposed to do. There are clues, but that’s all. . . . They give you the keys and some clues and they say, Start it up, see what it will do, and sometimes what it does is pull you along into a life that’s really good and fulfilling, and sometimes what it does is pull you right down the highway to hell and leave you mangled and bleeding by the roadside. (62)

Tony Magistrale observes in Landscape of Fear that the car acts as “a great mirror of America itself”, representing “prosperity” and “an infatuation with . . . speed” (46). There are, however, disturbing aspects to this fascination because this haunted car also illustrates how this captivation with an object can lead to disaster if it comes to dominate a person’s life as it does the young Arnie Cunningham. Further, Christine functions as a symbol of the past because the vehicle was first made in the 1950s, a time within American mythology that is

often viewed as a golden age of prosperity when things were simpler and less complicated. Indeed, the car plays upon desires to return to a simpler time, and demonstrates their dangers. It can transport the people within its confines back to the 1950s. Dennis Guilder experiences such a trip on a ride with Arnie: Arnie stopped at intersections where we should have had the right-of-way; at others, where traffic lights glowed red, he cruised Christine mildly through without even slowing. On Main Street I saw Shipstad’s Jewelry Store and the Strand Theater, both of them torn down in 1972 to make way for the new Pennsylvania Merchants Bank. The cars parked along the street—gathered here and there in clumps where New Year’s Eve parties were going on—all seemed to be pre-60s . . . or pre-1958. Long portholed Buicks. A DeSoto Firelite station wagon with a body-long blue inset that looked like a check-mark. . . . Ramblers, Packards, a few bullet-nosed Studebakers, and once, fantastical and new, an Edsel. (417)

Roland D. LeBay views the 1950s as a golden age, a time when he finds happiness in a new car that fulfills his dreams. Passengers see visions of the era LeBay loves, but it is one that has vanished forever. The visions within Christine are illusions, real only for Christine and LeBay. The haunted car is a trap for Arnie, drawing him back to a time that no longer exists, and removing him from the present to live in an illusory world, one that will not allow him to grow as a person and one that essentially dooms him to destruction. One of the most important aspects of Christine is its mobility. The Plymouth Fury becomes the home of the ghost of its first owner, Roland D. LeBay, after his death. It serves as the central locus of the supernatural activity within the novel, and this car also opens some unusual possibilities in using the fantastic. An automobile is not limited to one location, magnifying Christine’s threat because it can attack people in remote locations instead of waiting for individuals to enter its domain like the ghost of Emeric Belasco in Matheson’s Hell House. The car’s mobility proves to be particularly disturbing, for it means that there are no safe havens into which people can retreat to escape the influence of the fantastic. In the case where the haunted castle’s manifestation is at a fixed location, the vast majority of the people usually enjoy a degree of safety if they do not venture to that place. Yet, in Christine’s case, the car may seek people out in their homes or in locations that would ordinarily be considered secure. Moreover, the vehicle’s ability to regenerate itself means that it can take a tremendous amount of damage and

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to serve as crucial tool in the process of destabilization. Indeed, this element of Gothic fiction can continue to be found in the works of such late twentieth-century Gothic writers as Stephen King and Clive Barker. The haunted castle appears in a vast array of forms in King’s fiction: a red-andwhite 1958 Plymouth Fury in Christine, a grocery store in The Mist, and a flying saucer in The Tommyknockers. Clive Barker presents the haunted castle as a man’s private hell in “Down, Satan!”, a puzzle box in “The Hellbound Heart”, and as an ancient wizard in The Damnation Game. These manifestations play a vital role in laying the foundation for creating fear in each tale. Moreover, they not only demonstrate the genius of King and Barker in adapting this element for a twentiethcentury setting, but also illustrate why Gothic literature continues to exist as a unique and identifiable genre.

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still continue to run, allowing it to penetrate areas, such as a brick house, that may seem inaccessible. Another destabilizing aspect of Christine’s mobility and regenerative abilities comes at the end of the novel. King concludes with hints that Christine appears to restore herself again after being smashed to pieces by a truck. Dennis Guilder speculates that the haunted car has returned: Of course it’s impossible, but it was all impossible to start with. I keep thinking of George LeBay in Ohio. His sister in Colorado. Leigh in New Mexico. What if it’s started again? What if it’s working its way east, finishing the job? Saving me for last? [LeBay’s] single-minded purpose. His unending fury. (503)

In these lines, King not only suggests that the supernatural power of this haunted car cannot be dispelled, but also, unlike a haunted castle or house, this force can seek out and hunt down new victims, meaning that there may be no escape from Christine. Stephen King’s The Mist presents another variation on the haunted castle in that he presents two different candidates for the manifestation of this element within the tale. The creation of the mist itself and its subsequent engulfing of towns and cities transforms civilized areas into wilderness. Any area within the confines of the mist basically becomes a haunted wilderness, filled with the unknown and danger. King demonstrates this fact through the dire fates of those, such as Brent Norton and The Flat-Earth Society, who refuse to accept the reality of the mist and the creature within it and foolishly choose to venture forth into its confines: And from out of the mist there came a high, wavering scream. It was impossible to tell the sex of the screamer. . . . The howl was abruptly cut off. There was no sound at all for what seemed to be forever. Then the old lady cried out—this time there could be no doubt about who it was. “Git it offa me!” she screamed. “Oh my Lord my Lord get it—“Then her voice was cut off, too. (101)

The dangerous creatures lurking within the mist’s confines make venturing forth into its confines an extremely dangerous proposition,

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especially given the fact that humans are deprived of their primary source of protection from danger—their vision. Yet, although King surrounds the survivors who are trapped in the grocery store with what amounts to a haunted wilderness, he also makes the supermarket into a haunted castle. When confronted by the dangers within the mist, a large number of people decide to wait within the confines of the store because it provides the food and drink they need to survive. This method of survival, waiting for the danger to pass, while not as foolhardy as the one chosen by Brent Norton, is still presented as a hazardous choice. The people trapped in the mist do not simply deal with small creatures; they also face gargantuan beasts such as the one David Drayton and his companions see as they attempt to escape the confines of the mist: It was six-legged, I know that . . . and clinging to it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish “bugs” with the stalk-eyes. I don’t how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said later she could not see the underside ofits body, although she craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight. (151)

Given the size of this creature and others like it in the mist, the supermarket is only a temporary safe haven. The novel rejects inaction; the people who stay in the grocery store accept a new reality, but still hide from the world rather than trying to escape it. A refusal to struggle against the unknown is a capitulation to fear. The people who stay leave themselves at the mercy of the unknown instead of taking control of their destiny, and also almost turn themselves into living ghosts, figments of a vanished society who will simply wait to die. Indeed, as David Drayton and his friends depart in his “Scout”, he drives past the supermarket and sees “at each loophole there were two or three pales face, staring out at us” (147). There is good reason these faces are “pale” for, in all probability, it will only be a matter of time before they actually die, ending the living death to which they have consigned themselves. Within The Mist, the best option for surviving the haunted castle and wilderness is to simply escape them. The people in the grocery store live in a haunted castle, becoming living ghosts who desperately yearn to return to their familiar, lost world. The mist transforms civilized areas into a wilderness full of threatening predators. The only hope for restoration is for individuals to confront

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Like H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” and Richard Matheson’s Hell House, King’s The Tommyknockers is a variation on the haunted house tale. King also follows their lead by linking science, technology, and the supernatural in presenting his haunted house as a flying saucer. However, whereas Lovecraft and Matheson use science to explain the supernatural, King does not; he simply uses a scientific and technological environment as a setting for the supernatural. The flying saucer has been buried near Haven for millions of years, and the aliens are dead: They’re dead, Gard! Your Tommyknockers were real enough, but they were mortal, and this ship has been here for at least fifty million years. The glacier broke around it! It covered it but it couldn’t move it. Not even all those tons of ice could move it. . . . They’re dead, Gard. (191)

However, the ghosts of the aliens linger in their vessel, waiting to possess new bodies. Jim Gardener actually calls the ship “a haunted house whose demons might still walk between the walls and in the hollow places” (500). This flying saucer represents the past because it is millions of years old; but King reinforces the idea by establishing a series of similarities between the aliens and humanity. The parallels between the races make the aliens a mirror of the worst aspects of human civilization. One parallel emerges from the capacity of both species for violence. Many people, like Jim and Bobbi Anderson, assume an intelligent race of aliens will be benevolent, but this idea soon falls apart: Remember how we always assumed a technologically advanced race of beings would be, if one made contact with us? We thought they’d be smart like Mr. Wizard and wise like Robert Young on Father Knows Best. Well, here’s the truth, Bobbi. The ship crashed because they were having a fight. . . . Look, Bobbi. See how dark the claws are. That’s blood, or whatever they had inside them. It’s on the claws because they did most of the damage. The place sure as shit didn’t look like the bridge of the starship Enterprise before it crashed. Just before it hit, it probably looked more like a free-for-all cock-fight out behind some redneck’s barn. This is progress, Bobbi? (616-17)

The discovery of these corpses reveals a race as capable of extreme violence as humanity. King presents a disillusioning vision that intelligent races may not leave behind dark traits as they become more advanced. Indeed, this alien society shares one of humanity’s most abhorrent and despicable institutions—slavery. One room in the flying saucer is “full of hammocks suspended in metal frames” which contain the dead bodies of aliens “CHAINED” inside them (619). The aliens keep members of their own race as “galley slaves” to be the “ship’s drive” (619). The novel reinforces the bond between the aliens and humans by showing how the people of Haven do not hesitate to use slaves as well: He [Jim] was unable to take his eyes from the leftrear corner of the shed, where Ev Hillman, Anne Anderson, and Bobbi’s good old beagle Peter had somehow been hung up on posts in two old galvanized steel shower cabinets with their doors removed. They hung there like slabs of beef on meathooks. But they were alive . . . A thick black cord which looked like a highvoltage line or a very big coaxial cable ran out of the center of Anne Anderson’s forehead. A similar cable ran out of the old man’s right eye. And the entire top of the dog’s skull had been peeled away; dozens of smaller cords ran out of Peter’s exposed and pulsing brain. (569)

Ev, Anne, and Peter are “living batteries” (575). The use of slaves by the aliens and humanity is disturbing because supposedly civilized and advanced societies use this barbaric institution, raising one of the most troubling and tragic periods of the past. Furthermore, the flying saucer also poses a threat to the future because if the aliens succeed in completing their takeover of Haven, the excavation of their ship, and, perhaps, the conquest of the Earth, human society will change into a civilization that is a reflection of the darkest aspects of its past and present. The haunted castle takes on many different forms, such as a car or flying saucer, in Stephen King’s works of Gothic fiction, but it takes on some of its strangest and most imaginative manifestations in the works of Clive Barker. Barker presents one unusual variation in his short story, “Down, Satan!”, where he depicts a man who constructs his own private hell. An important aspect of Gregorius’ New Hell is the fact that it does not appear to have a long history because it is a new creation. Yet this building does come to be endowed with a far longer history than many of the haunted castles that appear in other works

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their fears and journey into that wilderness in the hope that they may somehow escape it. David Drayton and his friends are the only ones who are brave enough to make an effort to find the limits of the mist. Indeed, even if they do not ultimately escape the confines of the mist, a possibility which each reader must determine since King makes the ending ambiguous, they are still the only ones who have a chance to survive.

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of Gothic fiction. The New Hell is based on one of the oldest legends created by humanity. Many ancient cultures, including the Greek and Roman civilizations, have their own versions of Hell where those who commit evil deeds are punished for their sins. Indeed, in constructing his Hell, Gregorius consults “the great libraries of the world . . . for descriptions of hells both secular and metaphysical” along with “museum vaults . . . for forbidden images of martyrdom” (186). Moreover, “no stone was left unturned if it was suspected something perverse was concealed beneath” (186-87). Gregorius’ New Hell, although a product of human technology and twisted ingenuity, embodies a long tradition of infernal images and tortures. Furthermore, Gregorius specifically desires to build a “modern inferno” that is “so monstrous that the Tempter would be tempted, and come to roost there like a cuckoo in a usurped nest” (186). The New Hell also comes to be embodied with a sense of antiquity because it has been designed to attract the oldest source of evil within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. However, a far more disturbing possibility emerges from the story than the New Hell serving as the haunted castle, and attracting Satan to establish a new, terrifying dominion on Earth. Barker suggests that the true haunted castle may be the twisted mind of Gregorius who envisions this New Hell, and becomes its overlord after its completion. After he has been left alone in New Hell, Gregorius believes that he detects the presence of Satan in “noises” he hears “from the lower depths” (188). Although he believes he hears these sounds, he never discovers Satan, and Barker presents the references to these noises in the context of their being heard by Gregorius, raising the possibility that he may be imagining it. Indeed, when he is arrested, Gregorius himself, along with a “few disciples whom he’d mustered over the years”, is the actual master of New Hell, seeing to it that “there was not a torture device in the building they had not made thorough and merciless use of” (190). Barker raises the disturbing notion, as other writers of Gothic fiction such as Edgar Allan Poe have done before, that the ultimate haunted castle lies within the human mind. The possibility exists that all the suffering and evil that takes place in New Hell do not come from Satan, but from the twisted mind of one wealthy individual who possesses the wherewithal to make his dark visions into a reality. Indeed, perhaps the most frightening idea to emerge from “Down, Satan!” is that humans no longer need

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the Devil because we have become as efficient and as creative in the production of evil and suffering as Lucifer himself. One important aspect of the haunted car in King’s Christine comes from mobility. Clive Barker also presents two variations of the haunted castle that can move from place to place in “The Hellbound Heart” and The Damnation Game. A small puzzle box known as the Lemarchand Configuration serves as the locus of supernatural activity within “The Hellbound Heart”. One important aspect of the Lemarchand Configuration is its mobility, as it can be easily transported from one user to another as well as to different locations, enabling the Cenobites and the Order of the Gash to claim new voyagers into the greater realms of pleasure and pain. Indeed, just as Gregorius creates his own haunted castle, those who choose to use the puzzle box often do so of their own free will. For example, Frank undergoes extensive preparation in summoning the Cenobites, including having “a jug of his urine—the product of seven days’ collection” on hand “should they require some spontaneous gesture of selfdefilement” (187). Such preparations indicate that Frank chooses to follow this path, leading to his own destruction and eternal suffering for his spirit. Thus, the Lemarchand Configuration not only gives Barker the opportunity to present strange entities from another realm, but also allows him to comment again on the darkness that lurks within human beings. The Lemarchand Configuration, by virtue of its mobility and its ability to summon the Cenobites, also transforms the location where it is opened into a manifestation of the haunted castle. It changes the room and the house where Frank summons them into the world into a haunted realm filled with the horrors created by a group of ancient entities who dwell in another dimension. In fact, even after the Cenobites depart Frank’s room, the taint of the ritual remains to bring renewed suffering to others in the right circumstances. Barker describes such an occurrence after Frank restores himself to a semblance of life when his brother, Rory, bleeds in the room where the summoner had been dragged to damnation: He [Frank] had been lucky. Some prisoners had departed from the world without leaving sufficient sign of themselves from which, given an adequate collision of circumstances, their bodies might be remade. He had. Almost his last act, bar the shouting, had been to empty his testicles onto the floor. Dead sperm was a meager keepsake of his essential self, but enough. When dear brother Rory (sweet butter-fingered Rory) had let his chisel slip, there

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Summoners of the Cenobites, such as Frank, condemn themselves to eternal suffering, but if they manage to break free of this other dimension, they can bring pain and misery to innocent people. After Frank returns, his lover, Julia, seeks out victims for him to feast on in order to restore his body. Rory becomes a unwitting victim, and Frank’s niece, Kirsty, also almost becomes consumed by her uncle’s efforts at restoration. Thus, although summoners of the Cenobites may deserve their fate because they freely chose their destiny, the potential is there for the taint of this darkness to expand and claim innocent victims, suggesting that seekers of new experiences must be careful lest they bring harm to those who do not deserve it. The embodiment of the haunted castle in Barker’s The Damnation Game, a centuries-old wizard known as Mamoulian, shares many similarities with the Lemarchand Configuration in terms of those who seek him out. Those individuals who seek out Mamoulian, like those who summon the Cenobites, often do so of their own free will, whether that emerge from a desire to explore new areas of life or to engage in the ultimate game of chance. Joseph Whitehead, the man who serves as the focus of Mamoulian’s wrath within the novel, seeks the wizard out for the ultimate game of chance after the thief hears rumors about an individual who “never lost a game, and who came and went in this deceitful city like a creature who was not, perhaps, even real” (6). And since Mamoulian is a living entity, it is easier for him to bring harm to innocents who happen to get in his way in his quest for vengeance on Whitehead than those who accidently stumble upon the Cenobites. Mamoulian, like the Lemarchand Configuration, can also taint and transform the areas where he dwells or travels, making them into centers of supernatural power. Barker makes an important observation when he notes that “most of” the “miracles” caused by the immense powers of the Last European “were slipped with such cunning behind the facade of ordinary life that only the sharpest-sighted, or those in search of the unlikely, caught a glimpse of the Apocalypse showing its splendors to a sun-bleached city” (277). He illustrates the changes Mamoulian can make in an environment when he describes Whitehead’s

estate. Barker makes the house seem like a throwback to the Middle Ages because the menace of Mamoulian drives Whitehead to adopt a siege mentality and to protect himself with guard dogs, video monitors, and electric fences “topped by sharpened steel struts” and “crowned with spirals of barbed wire” (65-66). In effect, even though Mamoulian may not be physically present at Whitehead’s estate, his threat haunts Whitehead to such a degree that he changes what should be a comfortable, palatial estate into a fortress where he cowers behind multiple defenses, hiding from the specter of his past. Barker puts another interesting twist into the character of Mamoulian: not only can the Last European warp areas by virtue of his presence, but he also serves as a location unto himself, as he can bring individuals into a realm located within him: Finally, the thief understood. This place, which he’d glimpsed in the sauna at the Sanctuary, existed within the European. These ghosts were creatures he’d devoured. Evangeline! Even she. They waited, the tattered remains of them, in this no-man’s-land between flesh and death, until Mamoulian sickened of existence and lay down and perished. Then they too, presumably, would have their liberty. Until then their faces would make that soundless O at him, a melancholy appeal. (406)

Mamoulian possesses the power to create a world within himself where he can trap human souls, reinforcing his role as the manifestation of the haunted castle within the novel and the center of the supernatural power and suspense in the tale. Stephen King and Clive Barker have both made use of manifestations of the haunted castle within their fiction. Their use of this element of Gothic demonstrates the genre’s ability to adapt itself to contemporary settings. Instead of an ancient mouldering fortress, the haunted castle appears as a car, a flying saucer, a puzzle box, and even a human wizard. However, the importance of the haunted castle does not simply emerge from its versatility. It also comes from the important role it can play in developing the overall themes of a particular work of Gothic fiction. Stephen King and Clive Barker make the haunted castle far more than the locus of supernatural events or a symbol of the past. King, for example, uses Christine, the haunted car, to comment on the obsession people can develop for cars and the dangers of becoming fixated with the past. In The Tommyknockers, the flying saucer serves as a reflection of

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was something of Frank to profit from the pain. He had found a fingerhold for himself, and a glimpse of strength with which he might haul himself to safety. (220-21)

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the dark side of human society, and of the dangers human society may face in the future if it should follow this same path. Clive Barker’s New Hell in “Down, Satan!” makes the disturbing suggestion that the evil that lurks within humans may be greater than the darkness of Satan. Similarly, the Lemarchand Configuration of “The Hellbound Heart” exposes the dangers to innocents that may arise from those who recklessly seek to explore the limits of human knowledge and endurance. The appearance of the haunted castle within the fiction of Stephen King and Clive Barker in a multiplicity of different forms is a reflection of the ability of writers of the Gothic genre to mould and shape its elements to suit a constantly changing world. Indeed, this mutability demonstrates that Gothic literature will continue to be a vibrant and effective genre in the future.

Bibliography Barker, Clive. The Damnation Game. New York: Charter, 1988. ———. “Down, Satan!” In The Inhuman Condition. New York: Pocket, 1987. 183-91. ———. “The Hellbound Heart.” In Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart. New York: Berkley, 1988. Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. London: Constable & Company, Ltd, 1921. Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 1996. Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen, 1984. King, Stephen. Christine. New York: Signet, 1983. ———. The Mist. In Skeleton Crew. New York: Signet, 1986. ———. The Tommyknockers. New York: Signet, 1988. MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Magistrale, Tony. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927. Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame. London: Arthur Barker, 1957.

ROBERT MIGHALL (ESSAY DATE 1999) SOURCE: Mighall, Robert. “Haunted Houses I and II.” In A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares, pp. 78-129. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. In the following excerpt, Mighall studies how the “theme of the ancestral curse was adapted by the Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century” to explore the manifestation of hereditary disease—a new topic in scientific literature of the time—using the device of the haunted house.

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Those who have quitted the world, and those who are not arrived at it, are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive: What possible obligation, then, can exist between them; what rule or principle can be laid down, that of two non-entities, the one out of existence, and the other not in, and who can never meet in this world, the one should control the other to the end of time? (Thomas Paine, Rights of Man) ‘Oh, Bertram-Haugh! how came you by those lofty walls? Which of my ancestors had begirt me with an impassable barrier in this horrible straight?’ (J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, 1864)

The previous chapter examined the emergence of an Urban Gothic in the first half of the nineteenth century, showing how many of the properties, effects, and rhetorical positions identified in the eighteenth-century tradition were transported and adapted to the representation of modern urban spaces. This suggests continuity as well as divergence, demonstrating the mobility of the Gothic fictional mode. The present chapter will continue with this emphasis on mobility, development, and ‘transportation’, by exploring how something that was largely excluded from both the Radcliffian and the Reynoldsian traditions, a Gothic located in the world inhabited by the reader, was realized in works from the midVictorian period. What these works have in common is their use of the idea of a family curse, an explicit or implicit adherence to the moral employed by Horace Walpole in the first Gothic novel, that the sins of the father will be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation. According to David Punter, this became ‘perhaps the most prevalent theme of Gothic fiction’.1 How the theme of the ancestral curse was adapted by the Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century is the subject of this chapter, which explores the various media—supernatural, pathological, and legalistic—that are used to convey unwelcome legacies in Victorian Gothic fiction. . . . The [excerpted portion of this chapter from A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction] will identify the key features of curse narratives and legatory fictions, and show how these are adapted by writers around the mid-century to explore new domains for malevolent legacy—principally in the diseased bodies of descendants. It will show how in works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Jane Hooper, and Wilkie Collins, the supernatural mechanisms and devices of earlier tales of family curses are refigured through a materialist emphasis on pathological function. In Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hooper’s The

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Haunted Houses I: Legends and Legacies A cursed family inherits an unwelcome legacy. History moves on, progress is made, enlightenment replaces barbarism and superstition, but still the curse—initiated by sacrilege, usurpation, or some unspecified dark deed—inexorably visits its punishment on successive generations. Curse narratives show how crimes belonging to the ancestral past can blight both the present and the future. They often adapt the theme of generational conflict which is central to early Gothic romances such as Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Both novels, which have a common source in Diderot’s La Religieuse (1770, English translation 1797), feature aristocratic parents attempting to expiate their own sins by dedicating their innocent offspring to religious houses. The experiences of Lewis’s Agnes and Maturin’s Monçada extend the parental persecution plot of the Gothic, by using a legalistic mechanism to bind the lives of the present generation to the misguided customs of the past. Once this mechanism is established, the parents need not actively torment their children further (sadistic Superiors are more than happy to act in loco parentis in this respect), and need not even live beyond this binding contract to blight their children’s happiness. Curse narratives develop this legatory plot by locating the source of disorder in the more distant past. Here it is often the great-grandfather or a more distant ancestor still who torments his innocent descendants, ‘haunting’ the present with the consequences of his crimes. The individual’s immediate parents may be as enlightened and affectionate as the reader would wish, but are as much victims of the ancestral past as their own children. ‘Family Portraits’ (1812) by Jean Baptiste Benoit Eyries is a typical curse narrative, and which helps to identify the key properties that are developed and adapted in the hands of Victorian writers. Its plot is extremely tangled, involving complex wills and curses which determine the fortunes of two ancient families, the Meltheims and the Wartbourgs. Whilst its immediate setting is the end of the eighteenth century, the fortunes

ON THE SUBJECT OFѧ URSULA K. LE GUIN (1929-)

Acclaimed for her contributions to fantasy, science fiction, and children’s literature, Le Guin is a highly respected author often credited with expanding the scope of the fantasy genre by combining conventional elements of science fiction with more traditional literary techniques. She is known for creating fictional worlds in works that express her conviction that humans must live in balance and harmony both with one another and with their environment. Central to all of Le Guin’s writing is the importance of individual moral responsibility, played out by her characters as they face difficult choices and navigate conflicting demands that directly impact the state of balance—or imbalance—in their world. Le Guin’s works are noted for their mythic creativity, elegant prose style, complex characterization, vibrant imagery, and for their feminist themes and concerns. Recipient of numerous literary awards, including multiple Nebula and Hugo awards, Le Guin is best known for her novels, including The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and her Earthsea cycle—A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), and Tehanu (1990). LeGuin’s short stories, including those collected in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002) have been noted by critics as evocative of the Gothic tradition because of their use of the supernatural and fantastic, their preoccupation with death, and their revolutionary spirit.

of the present generation are rigidly determined by the legacies of tenth-century progenitors. The tale opens with a familiar situation. ‘Ferdinand . . . the last branch of the ancient family of Meltheim’ is encouraged by his mother to marry Clothilde de Hainthal.2 However, Ferdinand, who ‘never thought of this union but with regret’, has fallen in love with Emily, daughter of Count Wartbourg and the sister of a schoolfriend; but inevitably,

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House of Raby (1855), and Collins’s ‘Mad Monkton’ (1855), hereditary disease is the ghost that haunts the present descendants of a House, an emphasis that indicates the contemporaneity of these works, appearing at a time when medical science was just beginning to look to hereditary etiologies to explain moral dysfunction. . . .

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revealed in Ditmar’s will), but he also inherits the Wartbourg estate on the death of the male heir.

His mother refused to consent to his marriage with Emily: her husband having, she said, on his death-bed, insisted on his wedding the baron of Hainthal’s daughter, and that she should refuse her consent to any other marriage. He had discovered a family secret, which forced him peremptorily to press this point, on which depended his son’s welfare, and the happiness of his family; she had given her promise, and was obliged to maintain it, although much afflicted at being compelled to act contrary to her son’s inclinations. (40-1)

Thus despite the tale being set in the near present, a tenth-century ‘family secret’ effects a dramatic crux similar to those narratives situated on the Gothic ‘cusp’—the ‘family’ threatens to drag youth back into the past, into an arranged marriage founded on the perpetuation of lineal interests and decrees. A curse can bring the tenth to the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The family secret which imperils Ferdinand’s romantic hopes turns out to be an elaborate curse associated with portraits that have hung in the ancestral gallery for generations. One dates from the tenth century and has supernatural powers, causing the death of Ferdinand’s sister by falling on her. Behind the portrait is discovered a parchment which identifies the subject as Bertha de Hainthal, the distant ancestor of the young woman Ferdinand’s parents wish him to marry. Juliana’s death (like Walpole’s Conrad’s who expired by similar means) is in fulfilment of part of Bertha’s curse in expiation for her sins. These involved her betrayal of her lover Ditmar de Wartbourg (an ancestor of Emily), by marrying Bruno de Hainthal. To complicate matters further, Ditmar has hatched a few curses of his own and has a similarly troublesome portrait which is instrumental in causing the death of all male members bar one of his own family in each generation. Ditmar’s curse is in expiation for his murder of Bertha’s husband and their male child. He walled the former up in a tower on his estate. Ditmar’s malevolent legacy involves not only the lineal pruning of the ‘branches of his house, without being able to annihilate the trunk’ (38-9), but stipulates that should the tower in which he walled Bruno be pulled down then the male trunk will also perish. This occurs when Emily’s brother, who has learned of the curse, ‘sacrif[iced] himself to release his house from the malediction that hung over it’ (39). This event brings about the opening of an old trunk containing the deeds of the Wartbourg family. A number of old parchments are read, and the outcome is that Ferdinand is not only entitled to marry Emily (according to the circumstances relating to his ancestry as

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Despite its baffling complexities and contrivances, ‘Family Portraits’ is worth considering as it assembles a number of conventions central to curse narratives. Because they are aided by supernatural means, the edicts of an ancestral curse are generally inflexible and rigidly deterministic.3 Departing from the Radcliffian plot, the thought of disobeying the family over the choice of spouse is not considered. Happiness is secured only because the children’s desires happen to comply with the conditions of the will/curse. These curses, in expiation for sins, involve generations of casualties, and are only curtailed by the noble sacrifice of the male heir who pulls down the ancestral edifice symbolizing centuries of misery. The curse formula involving ancestral iniquity generally absolves the living protagonists from agency or blame. One further important convention of curse narratives found in ‘Family Portraits’ is the ancestral portrait. The portrait of Ditmar enables Ferdinand to identify the ghost which he witnesses carrying out the conditions of the curse, bestowing a fatal kiss on the Count de Wartbourg’s youngest sons. Thus when the source of disorder is from the distant past a means of recognition is necessary. The portrait of Bertha also serves to identify the malevolent agent of the Meltheim’s ancestral legacy, and the absurdly literal-minded fulfilment of her prophecy—the portrait doing the deed itself—implies the importance of this means to identification. The portrait ‘represents’ Bertha both in the mimetic and the legal sense. When it is no longer the immediate parents who wield the dead hand of the past, such devices serve to remind by whose agency the past haunts the present.4 A particularly striking and effective use of this motif is found in what is perhaps the most famous story of an ancestral curse, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Hawthorne’s novel plays a key role in bringing the curse narrative up to date and into the middle of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, its North American setting helps draw attention to the mobility of the Gothic mode, and the significant adaptations this key Gothic theme of the ancestral curse underwent in the nineteenth century (the significance of the North American context will be discussed shortly). The House of the Seven Gables is haunted by the past, by the dark deed upon which it was

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If the Seven-Gabled mansion is not actually a haunted house, it is a building haunted by its ‘House’, by its lineage. The House of the Seven Gables is also the Pyncheon ‘House’—the lineage which extends from the Old Colonel to the Pyncheon of Today and his son, who reputedly gather to haunt the house at midnight. According to Lawrence Stone, ‘it was the relation of the individual to his lineage which provided a man of the upper classes in a traditional society with his identity’. Stone defines lineage as ‘relations by blood or marriage, dead, living, and yet to be born, which collectively form a “house”’.8 A ‘House’ was therefore both the ancestral seat, and the family associated with it who took and preserved its identity from its ancestors. An ancestral portrait gallery makes this conflation between architectural fabric and ‘blood’ visible. Its portraits function rather like genealogical ‘growth rings’ for

the mansion itself, testimony to the antiquity of the house (building) and of the House (family). Hawthorne’s tale of the ‘aristocratic’ Pyncheons is partly a demystification of this relationship, which it explores from a number of angles. The Pyncheon mansion is often personified. The narrator compares its front to ‘a human countenance, bearing the traces of . . . the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes, that have passed within’ (5), and suggests that the house itself was ‘like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminiscences’ (27). Both similes are encouraged by an awareness of the building’s antiquity, that generations have been born, lived, and died there: ‘the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart’ (27). In Clifford’s view, this architectural absorption is far from beneficial; as he exclaims: ‘There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one’s defunct forefathers and relatives!’ (261). As these remarks suggest, the ‘unwholesome’ exchange between house and lineage is reciprocal. Thus the narrator remarks how Hepzibah ‘had dwelt too much alone—too long in the Pyncheon-house— until her very brain was impregnated with the dryrot of its timbers’ (59). If buildings can ‘ooze’ with human memories it is only fair that long-dwelling inhabitants should acquire architectural maladies. The metaphorical conflation between building and lineage is explored further in an extended conceit which compares Judge Jaffrey’s character with ‘a tall and stately edifice’: Behold, therefore, a palace! Its splendid halls and suites of spacious apartments are floored with a mosaic-work of costly marbles [etc] . . . With what fairer and nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character? Ah; but in some low and obscure nook—some narrow closet on the ground floor, shut, locked, and bolted, and the key flung away—or beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant water-puddle, with the richest pattern of mosaic-work above—may lie a corpse, half-decayed, and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the palace! (229-30)

This is the corollary to the anthropomorphic depiction of the Pyncheon house ‘oozing’ with its inhabitants’ lineage. As this image indicates, the Pyncheon House is founded on a crime; as Jaffrey inherits his character from his ancestor so he inherits the ‘death-scent’ of the Colonel’s original crime. In other words, if Judge Jaffrey is a house, he is a haunted one, haunted by the curse which he perpetuates by his actions. As ‘the Pyncheon of Today’ his body provides the site for the past to

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founded. Legend records how in the seventeenth century Colonel Pyncheon’s acquisition of Matthew Maule’s land, upon which he built his dynastic edifice, was not unconnected with the latter’s execution for witchcraft. At his death Maule uttered a curse that God, in retribution for his crimes, ‘will give [Pyncheon] blood to drink!’5 This is one of the few incidents in the legend which is supported by ‘history, as well as fireside tradition’ (8), and appears to have been fulfilled when the old Colonel dies with a bloody mouth on the very day the mansion is open to view. Subsequent events appear to confirm that this retribution has become hereditary—at least two descendants die in identical circumstances. These ancestral repetitions appear to endorse the ‘fireside’ traditions which keep the legend of Maule’s curse alive.6 They also correspond with the moral of the tale which is established in the author’s ‘preface’ (which recalls Walpole’s own from the Castle of Otranto): ‘the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones . . . [and] becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief’ (2).7 However, the supernatural phenomena associated with this legend are handled with extreme cautiousness. Almost all references to the curse or to events which appear to confirm its agency are qualified by being designated ‘tradition’, ‘gossip’, ‘the popular imagination’, ‘wild, chimney-corner legend[s]’, or ‘ancient superstitions’ (7, 20, 21, 197, 124). Even these traditions and rumours are pronounced ‘doubtful’, ‘absurdities’, or ‘ridiculous’ (238, 189, 279). And yet despite this narratorial ‘distancing’ these legends are apparently confirmed by events.

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haunt the present. Once more, an ancestral portrait serves an important function in this respect. The portrait of the old Puritan Pyncheon, which has hung in the room in which he died for two centuries, is literally the focal point of the tale. It conceals the lost deeds which encourage the ‘Pyncheon of today’ in every generation to reenact his ancestor’s course of greed, treachery, and single-minded ambition. The portrait of the old Puritan allows successive generations to identify the Pyncheon of Today. This physical recognition enables the perpetuation of the legend of the ‘moral’ resemblance and the repetition of ancestral crime. When Hepzibah is confronted by Judge Jaffrey who seeks to wrest from Clifford the secret of ‘untold wealth’, the narrator remarks: ‘Never did a man show stronger proof of the lineage attributed to him, than Judge Pyncheon, at this crisis, by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner room’ (232). Without the portrait to allow for physical recognition such ‘genealogical’ memories would probably die out. Moral patterns are suggested by the recurrence of physical traits. The body and its reproduction in descent thus enables the perpetuation of the legend of the curse. Judge Pyncheon’s body provides the site for the crimes and consequences of the ancestral past to visit the present. Hawthorne thus focuses on the relationship between House and house to suggest a new site for ancestral haunting. A haunted body is a diseased body, a house haunted by its lineage is similarly diseased. 9 This is confirmed in the conclusion when Holgrave diagnoses the ‘curse’ as hereditary apoplexy, observing how ‘This mode of death has been an idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past . . . Old Maule’s prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical predisposition in the Pyncheon race’ (304). What looked like ‘witchcraft’ was really a shrewd insight into an hereditary predisposition to a pathological trait. This focus provides a materialist alternative to the ‘wild, chimneycorner legends’ which attribute the ancestral repetitions to supernatural agents. Although the present study is largely concerned with British fiction, Hawthorne’s tale is included here to demonstrate the mobility of the Gothic, its ability to be transported from one geopolitical environment to another. It can serve as a test case for the historical and political determinants informing the shift from an exotic to a domestic Gothic fictional mode. Hawthorne himself was acutely aware of the importance of setting for Gothic fiction, or at least Gothic occurrences. As he asserts in the Preface to his later

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novel The Marble Faun (1861), which is set in the traditional Gothic locality of Italy, ‘Romance and poetry, like ivy, lichens and wall-flowers, need Ruin to make them grow.’ And, as his readers knew, there were no castle ruins, ‘no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong’, in the ‘broad and simple daylight’ of America.1 0 And yet Hawthorne’s own works belie this (self-consciously ironic) statement. For shadows, (relative) antiquity, and picturesque and gloomy wrongs do cloud the broad daylight of the New England location of the seven-gabled mansion. The Pyncheon ‘House’ (lineage) carries this heavy Gothic burden through the medium of reproduction and pathology. When the body serves as the locus for ancestral guilt, and when the supernatural curse is adapted to more material circumstances, then geopolitical and historical context are potentially immaterial. The historical and ideological determinants of this transportation, that which enabled a middle class ‘domestic’ Gothic, will now be considered. One of the ways Hawthorne achieves this transportation of the Gothic, from gloomy Europe to sunny America, is his representation of the Pyncheons’ ‘aristocratic’ pretensions, and the way this is associated with the morbidity which really distinguishes their lineage. For example, Hepzibah’s pride in her family’s ‘aristocratic’ impracticability, which she considers an ‘hereditary trait’, is described by the narrator as ‘a morbid one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the surface of society’ (77-8). Even the ‘aristocratic’ chickens which resemble their owners so much, are a race in decline: ‘All of them were pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an heirloom in the Pyncheon family . . . the hens . . . had a queer, rusty, withered aspect, and a gouty kind of movement . . . It was evident that the race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure’ (88-9). This passage underlines the theme of inheritance which is central to the narrative, but it does this by reducing it to a biological function. The hens are anthropomorphized by the references to their ‘aristocratic lineage’ (90); but this also serves as a reminder that aristocrats are animals and their claims to distinction are as much biological as ideological. ‘Blue Blood’ is a fiction which is nonetheless premissed upon a function of reproduction (reproducing ancestral honour).1 1 The example of the hens is extended to ‘many a noble race besides’, further endorsing the association between aristocratic ‘heirlooms’, nobility and

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Hawthorne’s representations concur with contemporary comment on the problems of heredity. For example, George Man Burrows’s Commentaries on Insanity (1828) remarks how ‘Among the highest ranks, hereditary insanity is more common than among the lower; for the former most frequently contract marriage with their own rank, or even with their own family’.1 2 An exclusive concern with caste inevitably involves degrees of endogamy, and therefore, for many observers, degeneration. The pride which characterizes the villains of Gothic romance, and which impels them to pursue their disastrous dynastic campaigns, here points to a physiological, or, what would later be termed, a ‘eugenic’ lesson. As Henry Belinaye observed in 1832: ‘The marriages arranged among the higher classes, from motives of convenience or family interest, are seldom so prolific as those founded on mutual choice.’1 3 The reason for this circumstance? For Belinaye, successful reproduction requires mutual affection. To demonstrate this he observes how ‘In vain the hated tyrants of Florence, the latter Medici, had recourse to every method to perpetuate their line; they have bequeathed to the world nothing but a warning, and the remembrance of a name’ (67). Like the Gothic novelist, the physiologist turns to the historical past for a dramatic incident of domestic disorder. He equates the lack of affection in marriage (a consequence of politic alliances) with tyrannies worthy of Walpole’s Manfred, and draws a ‘biological’ lesson from this stock theme of the fall of a House. In this case it is reproductive rather than poetic or divine retribution which effects this decline. Whilst Gothic novelists stigmatize arranged marriages based on aristocratic pride as unfeeling and unnatural, and dramatize their effects on sensitive protagonists, physicians are more concerned with the disastrous biological consequences of such unions. When medicine rediscovered heredity towards the middle of the nineteenth century, it found in the practices of the nobility conspicuous examples of familial practices which institutionalized a regard for lineage, transmission, and entailment. Add to this the understanding that the mysteries of

hereditary transmission are easier to detect in their dysfunctional and pathological forms (pathology serving a similar function to the ancestral portrait in this respect), and the parallels between Gothic and physiological discourse occurring here are easier to account for.1 4 A family curse or ancestral taint is the dark underside of the principle of inheritance, both depict versions of what Michel Foucault terms ‘alliance gone bad’. Foucault’s work can help explain this historical concurrence. Foucault’s La Volonté de savoir (1976) famously charts what he calls the deployment of sexuality, an historical circumstance which he attributes to a bourgeois project to define its own ‘class body’, in contradistinction to the practices of the nobility.1 5 This, as Robert Miles has suggested, can illuminate aspects of Gothic fiction, principally its focus on family dynamics and generational conflicts. According to Miles, ‘there is a neat fit between The History of Sexuality’s clash between the deployments of “alliance” and “sexuality” and Gothic writing’s typical conflict between the father’s dynastic ambitions and the children’s romantic love’.1 6 As seen in earlier examples, Gothic fiction often dramatizes this conflict by depicting what could be termed inverted ‘family romances’, where children born to aristocratic parents struggle to establish their domestic arrangements on more democratic models, based on ‘affection’ and natural relations. In Foucauldian terms, this figures a conflict between the older claims of ‘alliance’ and the interests of an emergent concept which he identifies as ‘sexuality’. The fundamental difference between the older, aristocratic model of ‘alliance’ (characterized by primogeniture, arranged marriages, and the entailment of property) and the model of sexuality (with its emphasis on romantic love, choice, and familial affection), is that the former looked to the past for validation, while the latter staked its hopes on the future. The foundation of the aristocratic model of alliance was the family. Through the practice of primogeniture, the ancestry, status, and name of the family or ‘House’ was perpetuated. According to Foucault, it was also in and around the family that ‘sexuality’ first became problematic. For him, ‘the family, the keystone of alliance, was the germ of all the misfortunes of sex’ (Foucault, III). Through the problematics of familial relations, and by means of what Foucault characterizes as a ‘reflux movement’ (39), ‘normal’ sexuality was defined. By recognizing the dangers inherent within sexuality (the dangers of consanguinity, of debilitating practices, and misdirected passions) a

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disease, which the text uses to shift the scene of haunting from the supernatural to the somatic sphere. However, whilst its principal function is to comment on the decline of the Pyncheons, it implies that their condition is not unusual, but is actually a consequence of their caste mentality. Through such emphases, Hawthorne makes a political point, using physiology and pathology to stigmatize the caste politics of the ‘nobility’.

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stable and well-regulated and productive sexuality was imagined. As S. G. Howe remarked when he surveyed the products of ancestral guilt in the asylums of Massachusetts in 1848: The moral to be drawn from the prevalent existence of idiocy in society, is, that a very large class of persons ignore the conditions upon which alone health and reason are given to men, and consequently they sin in various ways . . . they overlook the hereditary transmission of certain morbid tendencies, or they pervert the natural appetites of the body into lusts of divers kinds,—the natural emotions of the mind into fearful passions, and thus bring down the awful consequences of their own ignorance and sin upon the heads of their unoffending children.1 7

Howe’s concern is with the correct deployment of sexuality, with the appropriate regulation of the body’s ‘natural’ impulses. In the violation of these laws is witnessed the ‘perverted’ and degenerate form of the idiot, the outcome of dysfunctional inheritance. Bourgeois sexuality challenges aristocratic ‘alliance’, by appropriating the themes and obsessions of the latter to identify the morbid and dysfunctional operations of its own concerns. In the individual failures of the bourgeoisie’s (expansive) project are found its opposites: bodies tied to the past and doomed to extinction. The perverse or diseased bourgeois was figured as an example of ‘alliance gone bad’ (Foucault, 109). These dynamics can be identified in Gothic curse narratives, which show the ‘House’ of the aristocracy in ruins. What was implicit, metaphorical, or merely suggested in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables—that hereditary illness can be used as a modern version of the supernatural curse—is made explicit in Jane Margaret Hooper’s The House of Raby; Or, Our Lady of Darkness, published in 1854. The narrative of Hooper’s novel is dynastic and ‘generational’, following the fortunes of two families across four generations. The title refers to the Raby family, rather than its ancestral seat which is called Carleton Castle. This intense familial focus is reinforced in the titles given to each book: Introductory; Marriage and Birth; Parents and Children; The Last Generation of a Noble House. As these titles suggest, the narrative follows the decline of the House of Raby, while the theme of heredity provides its structure, dramatic, and moral conflict, and its suspense. The tale is narrated in the present by Frank Hastings, but incorporates epistolary material and anecdotes from the late eighteenth century. The lives of members of the noble Rabys and the solidly middle-class Hastings are bound together through at least three generations. Henry Hast-

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ings, Frank’s grandfather was a schoolfriend of Frederick, sixth earl of Carleton and later became Rector on his friend’s estate. The earl falls in love with Henry’s sister Margaret, but a parental interdiction prevents the marriage. A familiar situation. However, in this case it is Margaret’s father, the Reverend Hastings who opposes the match: Against the young man himself they had nothing to say; they believed him to be noble, amiable, truthful, every way worthy to be Henry’s friend; but against his marriage with one of their daughters they had two reasons to urge. First, they knew a great deal of the viscount’s father, and firmly believed him to be insane. His disease, they expected, would show itself sooner or later in his son; or, passing over him, would reappear in his children.—Secondly, they believed that a marriage in her own rank of life would be a happier one for their daughter.1 8

Here we find a novel twist to the familiar theme of domestic happiness thwarted by parental prohibition. It is now the middleclass parent who raises objections which implicitly equate class identity with pathology. This reverses the earlier pattern, implying that social ascent would mean biological decline. Ancestry and family pride are no longer the issue, it is the health of future progeny which dictates bourgeois domestic policy. This situation also adapts the situation of the curse plot to new and overtly physiological uses. Frederick’s father, like many a Gothic ancestor, has left a malevolent legacy for his descendants. His ‘madness’, like Maule’s curse, is almost exclusively the preserve of rumour, gossip, or folk memory. It is largely a consequence of his behaviour, which followed a suitably Gothic pattern: Francis, fifth Earl of Carleton, was what all the world called a very strange man—an oddity. Some few who knew a little of his private life, said he was the victim of an uncontrolled temper, a domestic tyrant, a misanthrope, a miser . . . and a few of the plain-speaking kind had been heard to say, that the Earl of Carleton was madder than many a man in Bedlam. He had had a gentle wife whom he killed with terror; and he had often frightened his child into fits . . . It would be a useless and revolting task to give any further particulars of the earl’s domestic conduct . . . [At the death of his wife, he] shut up Carleton Castle and went abroad, where he was occasionally heard of by English travellers, as the hero of stories that made their hair stand on end. (i. 142-3)

The earl is cast in the Gothic mould of a Manfred or Mazzini, ‘killing’ his wife, tyrannizing and terrifying his household, and indulging in unspecified dark or immoral deeds: in short, exemplifying a ‘Gothic’ antithesis of a well-regulated

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Margaret regretfully abides by her father’s decision, and the text endorses her act of renunciation. It is applauded as a noble and necessary sacrifice for the greater good. Like curse narratives which depict supernatural agents, The House of Raby is somewhat pessimistic in its outlook. Ancestral crimes demand expiation, and this means innocent victims—those who inherit the taint, and those who renounce domestic happiness from a sense of duty. In a generational narrative this pattern can repeat itself with relentless determination.1 9 Margaret remains unmarried, while Frederick eventually seeks solace in a marriage of convenience with his cousin. This is effected by his aunt Lady Morton, who deliberately ignores the rumours of insanity to secure for her daughter ‘an earldom and forty thousand a year’ (i. 221). Aristocrats are less scrupulous than their bourgeois counterparts about what would later be termed ‘eugenic’ considerations. Practices associated with the nobility, what Foucault terms ‘alliance’, are thus implicitly associated with the pathological mechanism which serves the function of a curse in this tale. The rumours of his father’s insanity (combining Gothic cruelty with the stereotypical aristocratic rakishness) compelled the sensible bourgeois to prohibit a union with the son. An aristocrat faced with the same situation pursues the traditional policies of her class and thus perpetuates the curse of the past. By transforming the Gothic curse into a pathological function, The House of Raby, like the medical discourse contemporary with it, depicts ‘alliance gone bad’. Male twins are born of this union and towards the end of his first year Arundel, the second son, exhibits symptoms of the mental illness with which he is ‘cursed’ for the rest of his life. Margaret Hastings, having renounced domestic happiness, devotes her time to the study of insanity, and spends her life looking after the brilliant but unstable Arundel, the son of her former lover. She reads up in Pinel and the German alienists, and helps out at a local asylum. Her responsible and useful work stands in marked contrast to the selfish motives of the noble family which her

own family supports through each generation. The years pass and another Margaret Hastings is born. She grows up in her aunt’s company, and imbibes her namesake’s sense of duty, industry and skill in caring for the afflicted. And like her aunt she falls in love with a Raby, developing an ill-fated passion for Arundel, who, notwithstanding his taint, is a noble and progressive landowner who devotes his energy and money to improving the lot of the people on his estates. Like her namesake, young Margaret suppresses her love and devotes her life to a similar course of dutiful renunciation. The love turns out to be reciprocal, but both renounce its physical consummation, and spend their days in a Platonic union. As Arundel declares: I shall be the last of the Rabys. The old name had better die. It stands for something that has passed out of existence . . . If nobility obliges a man to do anything—it obliges me to sacrifice my individual feelings and affections for the good of the community—and to accept the sacrifice . . . We will have no child to ask us, ‘Why was I born to this accursed inheritance? . . . Father! mother! I do not thank you for a life like this! . . . I know not what dreadful deeds I may commit when the demon takes possession of me! Life like this is a disgrace to earth! (iii. 320-1)

With a pathological ‘curse’ the sacrifice demanded no longer involves the pulling down of an ancestral tower and the release of a soul in torment (‘Family Portraits’), the ‘House’ which is pulled down is the tainted lineage of the Raby family itself. Like the tenth-century tower associated with the supernatural curse of the Wartbourgs, the ‘House’ of Raby ‘stands for something that has passed out of existence’—the customs and domestic policies of the aristocracy. As Arundel tells young Margaret: ‘In reality, my nature is inferior to yours. I am precocious, irregular, incomplete,—diseased. You are neither before nor behind your age—regular, complete—normal.—This is the will of God!’ (iii. 22, original emphasis). Arundel inherits the curse of ancestral crime, but is free from the ideological principles from which such a curse originates. His democratic and progressive inclinations instil in him a sense of responsibility, and thus he ends the curse. It is the body which carries the curse, and therefore ‘exorcism’ is achieved through reproductive renunciation. The occasion for the above speech is Arundel’s resolution to adopt Frank Hastings, the narrator, as the heir to the Raby estate. His decision to let the name die is a self-consciously political one, found-

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domestic ideal. Whatever the truth of the situation, the wicked earl’s behaviour has left a legacy of rumour and scandal which blights the happiness of his son. However, what earlier took the form of a supernatural curse is refigured in wholly material terms: in this scientific and rational age, the legacies of ancestral crime are carried in the bodies of descendants. The curse haunting the House of Raby is hereditary insanity.

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ing a progressive dynasty free from the legacy of the past. As Arundel declares, with the lapse of the earldom: The wealth of the Rabys will enrich other houses, and there will be no more of our race . . . God’s will be done . . . I look to you, my boy to found a new race—better fitted to these later times than our old one. . . . May the house of Hastings excel in all honourable things the house of Raby;—then will its last son have succeeded in converting the evil of his own lot into a blessing for the rest of the world. (iii. 323-4)

The (biological) fall of one House means the rise of ‘a new race—better fitted to these later times’. The responsible, industrious, and healthy Hastings are thus rewarded for their self-sacrificing sense of duty. Twice the Hastings are tested and twice they renounce immediate gratification of desire for the greater good. If this is read in Foucauldian terms, it displays a recognition of ‘the menaces of heredity’, and the conversion of the evil of a racism ‘organized for basically conservative ends’, to a ‘dynamic racism, a racism of expansion’ (Foucault, 124, 125). In the fourth generation a Hastings joins the Raby family, but does so by overcoming ‘birth’, the problematic of the narrative. The House of Raby presents a familiar Gothic scenario of ancestral crime, expiation, and renunciation. However, it uses this to focus upon a (predominantly realist) drama of domestic conflict which centres around issues of sexuality (the basis of the two Margarets’ and Arundel’s sacrifices), and shows how the legacies of the past (‘alliance’ and ancestral pride), can survive to blight the happiness of the present generation. ‘Sexuality’ is thus menaced by the spectre of its antithesis, which survives in corrupted form as a pathological pedigree. As in The House of the Seven Gables, the ‘Gothic’ and supernatural aspects of the narrative are lightly handled and largely figurative. They operate on the level of metaphor or analogy. For example, Carleton Castle is twice compared to Udolpho (i. 19; iii. 71), while Arundel’s taint is invariably referred to as his ‘curse’. There is also talk of a haunted east wing. Its ‘ghost’ is reputedly Arundel’s grandmother, the wife of the wicked earl who was imprisoned there for attempting to escape his domestic tyranny. Her ghost haunts the window from which she attempted to make her escape. The events of this legend (which resembles that of the ‘Ghost’s Walk’ in Dickens’s Bleak House), are recounted by a suitably Gothic housekeeper, Old Cuthbert who was in the old earl’s service. The narration occurs when this wing is

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opened up for the first time since the poor woman’s death. Arundel’s mother and the younger Margaret Hastings aged 10, explore the apartments just as twilight descends. Unbeknown to them at the outset, it is the anniversary of the countess’s ill-fated attempt to escape. As Cuthbert narrates the legend in the gathering gloom, Gothic expectations are established. They are fulfilled when a ghostly face appears at that very window. It turns out to be Arundel who manifests his first major outbreak of insanity in this incident. His pale vacant face, which resembles his grandmother’s, staring in at that window on that night understandably encourages the witnesses to imagine it is the apparition. Until they discover their mistake the narrative momentarily admits the possibility of the supernatural. This conflation of the supernatural with the pathological is significant. It shows that the ‘curse’ which follows the wicked deeds of the Gothic grandfather and which give rise to the ghostly legend, now resides in the body of his descendant which is ‘haunted’ by its legacy in a pathological form. In this way, the pathological appropriates the supernatural mechanism of cursed inheritance, while paying a tribute to its earlier discursive provenance in its allusions to Gothic conventions. The situation of the pathological being inserted into the space established by a supernatural mechanism is a common feature of curse narratives from the mid-nineteenth century. It is central to Wilkie Collins’s tale ‘Mad Monkton’, first published in 1855 as ‘The Monktons of Wincot Abbey’. ‘Monkton’ involves both an ancient legend about an old family, and a modern rational discourse on the strain of madness which also haunts the Monkton race. These two interpretations or authorities compete for hermeneutic supremacy in the narrative. But whilst the modern rational explanation appears to be triumphant, the reader is perhaps left with some doubts. It is commonly believed that Alfred Monkton, the last of a great Catholic family, has inherited the taint of insanity which had been in his family for generations; the consequence of some ‘crime committed in past times by two of the Monktons, near relatives’.2 0 Monkton wishes to marry Miss Elmslie, but her guardian refuses his consent on the grounds of the Monkton family taint. When the guardian dies, the lovers prepare for their nuptials. Arrangements for the wedding are suspended, however, by what appears to be an outbreak of the Monkton madness. This takes a most peculiar form, and is reported by the narrator, Monkton’s only friend who is also the son of

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Therefore, whilst it is no longer his ‘madness’ which acts as a bar to matrimony, the prophecy which invokes another form of ancestral curse works to the same effect. If its warnings are ignored it will mean the end of the Monkton race. A by now familiar situation: the present and (reproductive) future is menaced by ancestral legacies which imperil its domestic happiness. However in this case there is an alternative cause or agent of this legacy. The supernatural and psychiatric are conjoined; it is the narrator’s task to separate them. He is responsible for transforming the supernatural into the pathological, Gothic into Realism, and a legend into a ‘case’. As he reasons It was plain that the real hallucination in the case now before me, lay in Monkton’s conviction of the truth of the old prophecy, and in his idea that the fancied apparition was a supernatural warning to him to evade its denunciations. And it was equally clear that both delusions had been produced, in the first instance, by the lonely life he had led, acting on a naturally excitable temperament, which was rendered further liable to moral disease by an hereditary taint of insanity. (71, my emphasis)

In this way a pathological discourse on hereditary insanity helps to explain why a ‘case’ believes in an ancestral prophecy. It is this belief which informs the narrator’s ‘diagnosis’ of Monkton. Monkton’s belief in the legend which threatens the end of his race, and thus his domestic happiness, is used as evidence for, or a ‘symptom’ of, hereditary insanity. Thus a supernatural curse enables, but is at the same time conquered or invalidated by, a clinical discourse which shares its emphasis on ancestry, entailment, and the effects on future generations. But only one version can be allowed authority in the text, as both cannot be true. The two versions of the curse mechanism face each other in epistemological combat.

The outcome depends entirely on discursive or generic criteria. Or, in other words, whether the narrative is to function as a legend or a ‘case’. A further complication is the narrator’s rash promise to help Monkton find his uncle’s corpse. This troubles the narrator, who is very much his father’s son, sharing his sense of (eugenic) responsibility: ‘Supposing that with my help he found Mr Monkton’s body, and took it back with him to England, was it right in me thus to lend myself to promoting the marriage which would most likely follow these events—a marriage which it might be the duty of everyone to prevent at all hazards?’ (71). By going along with one form of ancestral curse—the supernatural one—he is compelled to ignore the claims of another—the belief that Monkton’s acts are the consequence of his inherited insanity. Thus whilst he supports the interests of the latter—the now familiar duty of preventing a union which would perpetuate this taint—he finds himself furthering the cause of its antagonist—the project which validates the supernatural, but which serves to confirm for the narrator the tradition that the Monkton race is mad. At first, the supernatural appears to be in the ascendant. They discover the unburied corpse of Stephen Monkton, and the prophecy appears to be authenticated. Clearly troubled by these occurrences, the narrator refers to these ‘striking coincidences which [appear] to attest’ the truth of the prophecy (100). But fate is against the Monktons, and the ship taking the uncle’s remains to his ancestral vault goes down in a storm. Monkton immediately contracts what is diagnosed as ‘brain fever’, and settles into a decline. A physician who attends him states that ‘He may get the better of the fever, but he has a fixed idea, which never leaves him night or day, which has unsettled his reason, and which will end in killing him . . .’ (101). The supernatural prophecy thus becomes an idée fixe, a concept so popular with nineteenthcentury alienists. Monkton’s fever proves fatal, appearing to confirm the prophecy. But the narrative is reluctant to accept this interpretation, and strives to allow the pathological explanation precedence. Therefore, in the last stage of his illness Monkton loses all memory of the prophecy and of the events in Italy. Pathology thus makes a final bid for dominance over superstition, as Monkton dies of a ‘fever’ rather than a ‘curse’. As Monkton is the only person who believed in the prophecy, his loss of memory enables this suppression. This textual forgetting of the Gothic ‘ancestry’ of the medical model thus allows the

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Miss Elmslie’s guardian. Monkton confides to the narrator that he cannot marry until he has buried his rakish uncle who died in a duel, but whose body lies unburied somewhere near Rome. Monkton is haunted by the ‘phantom’ of this uncle, which reminds him of his duty and never leaves his side. This duty actually conforms to an ancient prophecy or curse associated with the Monktons, that if one of their line remains unburied, then the Monktons will die out with that generation. Monkton believes in the prophecy and its ghostly harbinger, and sets out to restore his uncle’s body to its place in the Monkton’s ancestral vault. He will not marry until he has accomplished this.

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latter to gain epistemological supremacy in the narrative. The rationalistic explanation can only function if the cultural memory of an ancestral curse is wiped from the protagonist’s consciousness and from the text. The tale ends with a visit to the ancestral vault and its ominous empty space: a troubling reminder of the ancient prophecy which the modern discourse on pathological taint has superseded only by appropriating its logic and its consequences. Both Hooper’s and Collins’s texts were mentioned in an article entitled ‘Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human’ appearing in the Westminster Review in 1856. The article, which was republished the following year in the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, was by George Henry Lewes, and took stock of the recent interest in the question of heredity, while reviewing important monographs on this subject. Lewes also observed how the theme of ‘hereditary taint’ had been recently handled in prose fiction. Among the books he mentions are The House of Raby, Constance Herbert, by Geraldine Jewsbury (1855)2 1 and Collins’s ‘Monkton’. But Lewes takes these writers to task, complaining that: ‘artists are not bound to be physiologists, and are assuredly bad law givers in such cases. As artists, they employ their permitted licence in simplifying the problem of insanity to suit their stories . . .’. By implying that ‘the transmission of the malady is inevitable [they] teach questionable doctrine, because they teach it by means of fallacious facts’.2 2 For Lewes finds many reasons to deny that an hereditary taint is ‘certain’ to be transmitted. This was the view of most commentators on the question up until the mid-century, who still stressed the ameliorative benefits of a sound regimen to combat an hereditary taint. Within a few years, however, the trend in mental pathology would move towards a more deterministic model, one which comes closer to the novelist’s more dramatic emphasis. Indeed, the same number of the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology (1857), in which Lewes’s article was reprinted includes Forbes Winslow’s abridgement of B. A. Morel’s Traite des Dégénérescences (1857), the most influential work in establishing a more pessimistic view of transmission and decline.2 3 The following year, S. G. Howe’s On the Causes of Idiocy appeared in a British imprint. And in 1860 Henry Maudsley published his first major article on hereditary insanity, appropriately enough on Edgar Allan Poe, where he expounds for the first time the (scientific) lesson that he would preach for the next forty years: that ‘the sins of the fathers [are]

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visited on the children unto the third and fourth generation’.2 4 These influential writers, to varying degrees, stress the accumulative effects of ancestral vice or disease, and the stern law of their entailment. If the Gothic fictions of Hooper, Jewsbury, and Collins ‘transcend[ed] the limits of art’ (Lewes, 400) they also anticipated the current of medical thought.

Notes 1. Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1980), 52. 2. Eyries, Tales of the Dead: The Ghost Stories of the Villa Diodati, trans. Terry Hale (Chislehurst: Gothic Society, 1992), 20. 3. I have encountered only two tales of family curses in which the conditions of the curse are not met to the letter, Stephen Cullen’s The Castle of Inchvally (1796) and Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and in both the supposed portents turn out to be hoaxes. 4. For the reasons enumerated, ancestral portraits often appear in tales involving family curses. In The Castle of Otranto Manfred is haunted by the resemblance between Theodore and his ancestor Alfonso; in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853-4), which includes the curse of the ‘Ghost’s Walk’, Guppy detects the resemblance between Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson when he encounters her portrait. Ancestral portraits also feature in late 19th-cent. works featuring family curses, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Ollala’ (1885), Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), chs. 34 and 35, and Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). How writers developed this theme in late-Victorian Gothic will be discussed in the next chapter. On the motif of the ‘haunted portrait’ see Theodore Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); see also Maria M. Tartat, ‘The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny’, Comparative Literature, 33 (1981), 167-82. 5. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Milton R. Stern (New York: Penguin, 1986), 8. 6. On Hawthorne’s Gothic ‘repetitions’ in this text see Eugenia C. Delamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 113-14. 7. On how Hawthorne’s text compares with, and departs from Otranto see Ronald T. Curran, ‘“Yankee Gothic”: Hawthorne’s “Castle of Pyncheon”’, Studies in the Novel, 8 (1976), 69-80; on Hawthorne and the Gothic tradition see Jane Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Tradition of Gothic Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946). 8. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 15001800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 29, 28-9. See also Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (1976; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1-33. 9. On Hawthorne’s combination of the Gothic and the scientific in his depiction of the ‘atmosphere’ of the House of the Seven Gables see Jonathan Arac, Com-

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Ph.D. thesis (University of California at San Francisco, 1973); Ian Dowbiggin, ‘Degeneration and Hereditarianism in French Medicine 1840-90: Psychiatric Theory as Ideological Adaption’, in William F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness, vol. i (London: Routledge, 1988), 185-229; Otis, Organic Memory, 49-53. For the best survey of degenerationist thought see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For developments in Victorian psychiatry and the emergence of ‘positivist’ and hereditarian emphases, see Vieda Skultans, Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975); Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

10. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (New York: Penguin, 1990), 3. 11. On this and other aspects of ‘Aristocratic Ideology’, its tensions and erosion, and its relationship to the emergence of the novel, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1988), 131-75. 12. Burrows, Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Treatment, Moral and Medical of Insanity (London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1828), 104. 13. Belinaye, The Sources of Health and Disease in Communities; or, Elementary Views of Hygiene (London: Treuttel & Würtz & Richter, 1832), 66. 14. On how ‘Degeneration makes heredity visible’ see Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 60. 15. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley originally as The History of Sexuality: An Introduction as vol i of his proposed four part study (1979; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 124. 16. Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy (London: Routledge, 1993), 15. 17. Howe, ‘Supplement to Report on Idiocy’, Report Made to the Legislature of Massachusetts, Upon Idiocy (Boston: Collidge & Wiley, 1848), 56-7; republished as On the Causes of Idiocy (Edinburgh: Maclachlan & Stewart, 1858). 18. [Hooper], The House of Raby: Or, Our Lady of Darkness, 3 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1854), i. 145. The novel was published anonymously, and reissued in 1874 in a slightly revised form in one volume under Mrs Hooper’s name.

24. Maudsley, ‘Edgar Allan Poe’, Journal of Mental Science, 6 (1859-60), 328-69, 340. Maudsley’s article offers intriguing possibilities for exploring the relationship between fictional and medical discourses with regard to the theme of hereditary taint. It is self-consciously ‘literary’, and evokes the authority of Nathaniel Hawthorne on how ‘The weaknesses and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases which lead to crime, are handed down from one generation to another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been able to establish’, ibid. 341. However, Hawthorne’s narrator from Seven Gables had only ‘implied’ this, whilst for Maudsley it had become a fact.

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19. Compare with Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1848), and Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (1892), other ‘generational’ narratives. On fiction as repetition in these and other texts see J. Hillis Miller’s Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982).

SOURCE: Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny, by Sigmund Freud, translated by David McLintock, pp. 123-62. New York: Penguin, 2003. In the following excerpt from an essay first published in Imago in 1919 as “Das Unheimlich” and considered the quintessential work on the subject of the uncanny, Freud defines the uncanny, provides examples of how it is exemplified in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman,” and explains how the uncanny functions within the context of human psychology.

20. Collins, ‘Mad Monkton’, in Mad Monkton and Other Tales, ed. Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 39. On Collins and psychiatry see Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of the Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988). 21. Jewsbury’s novel shares similarities with both Hooper’s and Collins’s. Like Raby it is ‘generational’, showing how the ‘eugenic’ mistakes of one generation live on into the next; like ‘Monkton’, an hereditary taint of insanity is complicated by a pre-existing curse for sacrilege. Geraldine Jewsbury, Constance Herbert, 3 vols. (London: Hirst & Blackett, 1855). 22. Lewes, ‘Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 10 (1857), 384-402, 400. 23. On the importance of Morel’s work see Ruth Friedlander, ‘Benedict-Augustin Morel and the Development of the Theory of Dégénérescence (the Introduction of Anthropology into Psychology)’, unpublished

II If we now go on to review the persons and things, the impressions, processes and situations that can arouse an especially strong and distinct sense of the uncanny in us, we must clearly choose an appropriate example to start with. E. Jentsch singles out, as an excellent case, ‘doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate’. In this connection he refers to the impressions made on us by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls

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missioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville and Hawthorne (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 97-103.

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and automata. To these he adds the uncanny effect produced by epileptic fits and the manifestations of insanity, because these arouse in the onlooker vague notions of automatic—mechanical—processes that may lie hidden behind the familiar image of a living person. Now, while not wholly convinced by the author’s arguments, we will take them as a starting point for our own investigation, because he goes on to remind us of one writer who was more successful than any other at creating uncanny effects.

deny that any such person existed, except as a figure of speech, but a nursemaid was able to give him more tangible information: ‘He is a bad man who comes to children when they won’t go to bed and throws a handful of sand in their eyes, so that their eyes jump out of their heads, all bleeding. He then throws their eyes in his bag and takes them off to the half-moon as food for his children. These children sit up there in their nest; they have hooked beaks like owls, and use them to peck up the eyes of the naughty little boys and girls.’

‘One of the surest devices for producing slightly uncanny effects through story-telling,’ writes Jentsch, ‘is to leave the reader wondering whether a particular figure is a real person or an automaton, and to do so in such a way that his attention is not focused directly on the uncertainty, lest he should be prompted to examine and settle the matter at once, for in this way, as we have said, the special emotional effect can easily be dissipated. E. T. A. Hoffmann often employed this psychological manoeuvre with success in his imaginative writings.’

Although little Nathaniel was old and sensible enough to dismiss such grisly details about the Sand-Man, fear of this figure took root even in him. He resolved to find out what the Sand-Man looked like, and one evening, when another visitation was due, he hid in his father’s study. He recognized the visitor as a lawyer named Coppelius, a repulsive person of whom the children were afraid when he occasionally came to lunch. He now identified Coppelius with the dreaded SandMan. In the remainder of this scene the author leaves us in doubt as to whether we are dealing with the initial delirium of the panic-stricken boy or an account of events that must be taken as real within the world represented in the tale. The boy’s father and the visitor busy themselves at a brazier that emits glowing flames. Hearing Coppelius shout ‘Eyes here! eyes here!’ the little eavesdropper lets out a scream and reveals his presence. Coppelius seizes him and is about to drop red-hot grains of coal in his eyes and then throw these into the brazier. The father begs him to spare his son’s eyes. This experience ends with the boy falling into a deep swoon, followed by a long illness. Whoever favours a rationalistic interpretation of the Sand-Man is bound to ascribe the child’s fantasy to the continuing influence of the nursemaid’s account. Instead of grains of sand, red-hot grains of coal are to be thrown into the child’s eyes, but in either case the purpose is to make them jump out of his head. A year later, during another visit by the Sand-Man, the father is killed by an explosion in his study, and the lawyer Coppelius disappears from the town without trace.

This observation, which is undoubtedly correct, refers in particular to Hoffmann’s story ‘The Sand-Man’, one of the ‘Night Pieces’ (vol. 3 of Hoffmann’s Gesammelte Werke in Grisebach’s edition), from which the doll Olimpia found her way into the first act of Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. I must say, however—and I hope that most readers of the story will agree with me—that the motif of the seemingly animate doll Olimpia is by no means the only one responsible for the incomparably uncanny effect of the story, or even the one to which it is principally due. Nor is this effect enhanced by the fact that the author himself gives the Olimpia episode a slightly satirical twist using it to make fun of the young man’s overvaluation of love. Rather, it is another motif that is central to the tale, the one that gives it its name and is repeatedly emphasized at crucial points—the motif of the Sand-Man, who tears out children’s eyes. A student named Nathaniel, with whose childhood memories this fantastic tale opens, is unable, for all his present happiness, to banish certain memories connected with the mysterious and terrifying death of his much-loved father. On certain evenings his mother would send the children to bed early with the warning ‘The SandMan is coming.’ And sure enough, on each such occasion the boy would hear the heavy tread of a visitor, with whom his father would then spend the whole evening. It is true that, when asked about the Sand-Man, the boy’s mother would

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Later, as a student, Nathaniel thinks he recognizes this fearful figure from his childhood in the person of Giuseppe Coppola, an itinerant Italian optician who hawks weather-glasses in the university town. When Nathaniel declines to buy one, Coppola says, ‘So, no weather-glass, no weatherglass! I’ve got lovely eyes too, lovely eyes.’ Nathaniel is at first terrified, but his terror is allayed when the eyes he is offered turn out to be harmless spectacles. He buys a pocket spyglass

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Having recovered from a long, serious illness, Nathaniel at last seems to be cured. He finds his fiancée again and plans to marry her. One day they are out walking in the town with her brother. The tall tower of the town hall casts a huge shadow over the market-place. Clara suggests that they go up the tower together while her brother remains below. At the top, her attention is drawn to the curious sight of something moving along the street. Nathaniel examines this through Coppola’s spyglass, which he finds in his pocket. Again he is seized by madness and, uttering the words ‘Wooden doll, spin round’, he tries to cast the girl down from the tower. Her brother, hearing her screams, comes to her rescue and quickly escorts her to the ground. Up above, the madman runs around shouting out ‘Ring of fire, spin round’—words whose origin is already familiar to us. Conspicuous among the people gathering below is the lawyer Coppelius, who has suddenly reappeared. We may assume that it was the sight of his approach that brought on Nathaniel’s fit of madness. Some of the crowd want to go up the tower and overpower the madman, but Coppelius says laughingly: ‘Just wait. He’ll come down by himself.’ Nathaniel suddenly stands still, catches sight of Coppelius and, with a cry of ‘Yes! Lovely eyes—lovely eyes’, throws himself over the parapet. Moments later he is lying on the pavement, his head shattered, and the Sand-Man has vanished in the milling crowd.

This brief summary will probably make it clear beyond doubt that in Hoffmann’s tale the sense of the uncanny attaches directly to the figure of the Sand-Man, and therefore to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes—and that intellectual uncertainty, as Jentsch understands it, has nothing to do with this effect. Uncertainty as to whether an object is animate or inanimate, which we were bound to acknowledge in the case of the doll Olimpia, is quite irrelevant in the case of this more potent example of the uncanny. It is true that the author initially creates a kind of uncertainty by preventing us—certainly not unintentionally— from guessing whether he is going to take us into the real world or into some fantastic world of his own choosing. He is of course entitled to do either, and if he chooses, for instance, to set the action in a world in which spirits, demons and ghosts play a part, as Shakespeare does in Hamlet, Macbeth and Julius Caesar and, rather differently, in